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How many times has the rug been pulled out from under you?

I’ve felt that kind of surprise so often that if it hasn’t happened recently, I start to actively worry that it will happen soon. See: thoughts like “I haven’t had a stomach virus in awhile;” googling “weird headaches and brain tumours;” researching “erratic periods: perimenopause or cancer?”; or, currently, meditations on how thankful we are to be settling into a house we love coupled with my anxiety over the other shoe dropping.

So it’s not a huge distance for me between being pleased that “this rug really ties the room together” and “what about that rug being pulled out from under me tho.” I kind of specialise in these preemptive mental strikes. I remember sitting in both boys’ nurseries before they were each born, belly swollen as I nested in our brown rocking chair, praying away any problems I could think of. And it must have worked? Because those things I prayed over, they didn’t happen.

But other things did.

No, I didn’t pray about tilted heads or laminectomies or neuroatypicality. What I see now about what I was praying for then was that it was for the road to open up ahead of us, smooth and flat and untroubled and easy. Because the thing about flat roads is that you can see far off into the distance, which precludes surprises and preserves a sense of control.

It’s also boring as hell.

Also filed under Things I Didn’t Pray About: being moved across the world. Spending holidays on airplanes and in hotels and in rentals. Feeling like nomads for much of the boys’ early childhood. Living in five houses within three-and-a-half years.

So now, now that we’re in Our Home Here, a place that meets so many of my hopes and dreams (gas fireplace! Wine fridge! Downstairs guest room! Upper level sanctuary that’s just for us with two bathtubs that no one outside our quartet ever has to use!), I’m wondering, of course, whether that new rug that really ties the room together will be pulled out from under me. What I can’t see that’s just around the bend. Because if we were kicked out of this house, or out of this country, right now, I would make. a. SCENE.

There is a walk nearby that includes a spot called Arabanoo Lookout. From it, you can turn one way and see the city skyline, and the other and see Manly, and in front of you lies the ocean, vast and blue, specked with headlands. It seems that you might see anything coming, from any direction. And standing there makes me think of a couple of things. I think of how I never would have known this view if we hadn’t come here. And I think about how the idea of “seeing everything coming” is not only an illusion, but also overrated.

The boys and I went on a bush walk there recently, during the homeschooling days, when I tried to lead them to some Aboriginal drawings but, it turned out, I didn’t know the way. They irritation–and mine–grew as we stumbled around, directionless, before giving up and heading back to the car– a spot from where we could see a rainbow. I’ve tried to rebrand “wanderings” to them as “adventure walks” and sometimes they buy it; sometimes not. There is something to be said for wandering aimlessly, but only when the one who’s leading you ultimately knows what the hell they’re doing.

Which I do, but also? I really don’t. I know techniques, and evidence-based research and its findings, and I have a weather app, and an alarm that goes off in my car if I’m backing up too closely to something. Otherwise, if I’m being honest with myself, I’m flying blind, and this has especially been revealed lately as the kids have gone back through the school gates without me; as The Kid has gone it alone, therapist-less, and I cannot rely on her thorough reports each day. (Although this morning, I did hang around to watch what the boys would do after they put their things down in their classrooms. I peered through a tree like a creeper as Little Brother emerged first, pacing around the playground until TK showed back up; then LB looked straight at me and pointed with a violated look on his face and I ran away like a small child.)

I get hints, glimmers really. We all do: SARS before COVID; The Husband’s call about Australia a year before being sent there; the clouds before the rain before the rainbow. I either miss those hints, or try to use them as scaffolding for a roadmap that allows no alterations or detours. And I do this time after time after time. Dead ends seem to be my love language.

But so are U-turns, and new starts. Surprises, which can often feel like attacks–like rug-pulls–until I remember that so much of “not being able to see” is about not being kept in the dark, but about being in the right place, with the right protection, to witness glory–the view we never would have known otherwise.