I don’t want to sound like an asshole but I am crushing life lately: I’ve cut back on my meds, have completed a week of intermittent fasting, am decreasing my phone usage and being more present with my kids, and have started meditating every day!

Get this: last week I only broke one bowl in a fit of anger over The Kid demanding more apple sauce (and it was a shitty plastic PJ Masks one, whatevs)! I tweaked through a Sunday of no internet like an addict in need of a fix and, that evening, devoured people.com as though it was my job and the rent was due, like, then. I set the timer on my phone for my shavasana pose on my bed and worry my way through it (fun side note: did you know that shavasana means corpse? You’d think I’d be good at that! #tired)! Being present with my kids means laughing at Captain Underpants jokes in front of the TV at the same time! Long blacks are not as good as cappuccinos! AND I’M HUNGRY!!!

And the meds…

Last week I was embracing the return of tears to my life. This week, I’m battling the eruption of anxiety. There is somewhere between overmedicated and undermedicated and I’m in the distance between them right now, using CBT techniques to tell myself that it is very unlikely that Little Brother and I will be hit by a bus while standing a metre back from this kerb (and so help me God if you correct me, that is the way AUSTRALIANS SPELL IT). The stimuli that Lexapro dimmed for me–alongside the intensity of feelings that it also dimmed–now feel more like assaults I have to manage if I want to stay at this dosage, in this space between 10 and 20 mg, between then and now. The difference this time around the 10 mg block is that I recognise the assaults for what they are. I am better equipped. I am more aware.

But they’re still assaults.

Last week The Husband pulled his vagina, sorry his NECK, and as he hobbled around with a heating pad encircling him like a scarf, I congratulated myself on taking him to the doctor and being decent to him and not killing him while considering, in my own twisty mind, the ways I’m hobbled, the ways we all are, even Bran the Broken (WTF with that ending tho), legs and necks and minds struggling to function properly as we inhabit the gap between how things are and how they should be.

“He was so popular today,” Little Brother’s preschool teacher told me one afternoon last week, and my mind jumped ahead to the potential angst of his teenage years, this one with the people-pleasing trait that I’ve passed on, to the blessing and curse that social awareness and proficiency can be. And then his brother, revealing his innocence when he recounts a playground drama at school and asks me: “Why are people mean sometimes?” The gap between between popularity and insecurity, between innocence and being hurt, not being very big. The gap between their insightful questions and my insufficient answers feeling like an ocean. I am not enough.

And I don’t have to be. Because there are the gap-fillers that show up, the agents of grace that can supersede even meds and food: the friends who show up for TK when his therapist calls in sick at the last minute, rubbing his back and enfolding him in their circle. There is LB asking from the backseat: “Are you sure there’s enough space for God and Jesus in my heart?” and I, trembling under anxiety and the responsibility of being in the front seat–maybe even because of that–answering, “Ya damn right there is.” There is LB singing his favourite lines from the song I taught him and casting me a knowing grin. There is the hand cream that TK bought from his school’s Mother’s Day stall for me, that is pomegranate-scented but somehow smells like Christmas in this Southern-Hemisphere winter without one. All of these gaps between what I am and what I’m not, between faith and certainty, between now and not yet, somehow always filling.

I lace up my shoes for my new routine, this exit from the house in the space between my waking and everyone else’s. I am not crushing life, but I am showing up for it, and somehow this current gap, between darkness and sunrise, it feels like home.