It is only from the bottom that I can look up.

This is my summation of grace, and also of parenting hungover, which is the worst kind of parenting: worse even than parenting with a stomach virus, or parenting through a painful amateur musical performance. (Maybe not worse than parenting through a spinal surgery, but it’s been awhile, so don’t quote me.)

Because I am drinking less these days but also drinking older, it’s often tough to tell if I’m actually hungover or just really, really tired. The math behind forty-two years, post-midnight arrival home, pre-dawn wakeup call from kids, and erratic sleep ends in the negative column no matter how the result is reached, which is where I found myself on Sunday morning after a birthday party the night before (and I’m not, for once, talking about the kid kind): in the negative column, on the couch, without any desire to leave it (the couch, that is).

The night before had been everything I’ve come to love about Sydney: a walk down the street to the home of people we’ve known practically since we arrived. A spectacular view over the water. Free-flowing champagne. Endless banter with comfortable friends. Spastic dancing. Guttural laughter. Heartfelt conversations and proclamations of love. All leading to knowing glances at school drop-off on Monday morning, and “Do you remember…?” recaps throughout the week.

But between Saturday night and Monday morning lies…Sunday. Full of empty hours (especially if you just CANNOT with church that week) and needy children. And when I finally made my way upstairs and to the couch, I found my family waiting, and coffee brewing.

I really wanted the coffee.

But in those next few minutes of haze before the caffeine kicked in, in those gauzy moments of semi-consciousness–the ones I used to spend on a different couch, in New York, with a roommate who marvelled at the strange alternate reality provided in the morning after when she was surprised we didn’t fall down more–I looked around at my family and realised afresh but not for the first time how often I see them, and life, as something to do--to get through, to serve, to complete as an obligation. I had no energy for obligation, for anything really, so the shackles seemed to fall off and I just…sat. And watched.

I watched the way The Kid sidled over to me, contact on his own terms but always swinging the pendulum between no touching and lying on top of me. I watched his sneaky grins and mirrored them back. I watched Little Brother grow visibly excited over the prospect of having us all, all four of us!, together, at his disposal, for an entire day, and he could barely decide between the games of Life and Clue and Snakes and Ladders and his exotic animal book so he brought them all over, stacking them in front of us and burrowing into my smelly side. I watched as The Husband did the most romantic thing possible: downloaded Uber Eats on his new phone so he could order us a grease-laden meal.

I watched them all, and I loved them.

Which is not so much a revelation, because obviously I love them and already I knew so, but in the moment and for the day there were no demands of that love beyond the immediate. I felt my place in the world, and it was right here, with these people. My people. And it felt not like an obligation but a gift.

I don’t always let it feel this way–let them in this way–but they became my refuge.

And they still are.