“Maybe you should stop…just stop trying. It’s exhausting.”

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They say that if you want to develop a new habit, you should start saying things to yourself about it. So I’ve been repeating mantras like, “I am a person who wakes before sunrise to exercise.” “I am a person who does one open-water swim a week.” (Also, hopefully: “I am a person who does not get eaten by sharks.”)

But life, and grace, have chosen some identities already for me, identities I’d never planned and certainly didn’t repeat mantras for. “I am the one in the waiting room waiting to hear how her son’s spinal surgery went.” “I am a resident of Australia.” “I am the mother of one child who learns differently and one who learns typically.” “I am the woman standing at the shore watching her that kid surf with a foundation for kids on the spectrum.”

These identities barrelled into my life uninvited. Had I been given the choice (okay, with Australia we technically were given the choice, but it didn’t feel like it when all signs were practically yanking us onto the plane), who knows what I would have said? I do, actually. I would have said, “I am the person who takes the easiest road. I will take the path of least resistance, thanks.”

Oh, what I would have missed.

Everything. I would have missed everything.

On Sunday, we skipped church. No, actually, we had church–in a different location. We went to Manly Beach for the second year in a row and joined up with Surfers Healing, a foundation that takes kids on the spectrum out with professional surfers for a ride (or three) on the waves. This year was a bit different.

This year, The Kid was not afraid or hesitant at all. After checking to make sure that he’d get another medal this time around, he shrugged into his life vest and grabbed the hands of his newest surfing buddies and headed to sea. After the final ride of three, he trudged back to us, dripping and covered in sand. “That second one was gnarly! I totally wiped out!”

Yes, he said that.

So I am a person whose child is a surfer. He’s also in the band at school, playing the baritone, or as he refers to it, his “sweet, sweet beauty.” I am a band mom.

I’m a Little Brother mom–which somehow means I’m a person whose kid is the first one to stand up and volunteer, who is a ham, who is super-social and talkative and loves attention. Who is the owner of a huge heart.

How did that happen?

I think about all the effort I spent, in a former life, to become a certain kind of person–all the thought I put into creating children who were certain kinds of people–and how none of it turned out how I planned. How fucking glorious that is.

After the surf–once TK had, indeed, received his medal (I told him that, since now he has two, he can share one with his brother–he passed on that)–we went with our group across the street to a restaurant for lunch. And when I say group I mean not just the four of us. I mean, because of a “lucky” turn of events, not only TK’s Aussie therapist and her fiancé, but his Atlanta therapist and her wife–who happened to be in the country, in the city, on this beach, this of all weekends.

Our group sat at a table, friends on one side and family on the other, though it’s hard to tell the difference between those two groups these days. And as we ate, and talked, and just were, I thought about all the choices I never made that put me–us–right where we belong, without even trying. Just by being. Because grace, unlike karma, doesn’t honour choices or reward efforts, it gives gifts. It puts us where we were meant to be: at home.