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Oh my, I didn’t know what it means to believe

But if I hold on tight, is it true?

Would you take care of all that I do?

Oh Lord, I’m getting ready to believe

–Michael Kiwanuka

Well, I just wrote a paragraph about The Kid, who read it and told me he didn’t want me to share it. You see, he’s home from school with a cold and he’s also eight, which means his awareness is growing and, in turn, limiting what I can make public. Dammit.

But also, great? Because this awareness is what we want. As is the fading-out of his therapist at school that has been achieved. As are so many of his accomplishments lately. In fact, the other night a friend texted to tell me her daughter said that TK is one of the smartest kids in the class. So excuse me while I dodge these rainbows and this lack of coronavirus from our new, much-loved home.

But still…I really want to tell you the story. So I’ll just say this much: the other night, there was tiredness and a tantrum and the proclamation of dreams not coming true. It was an Oscar-worthy performance, and totally sincere while also completely irrational. The end result, which I cannot fully explain because I’m no longer allowed to totally pimp out my kids on this blog, is the designation of “false dreams” to what are unmet (and, frankly, unreasonable) desires.

Which is incongruous to this period of our lives right now, because I feel like I could look out my back door right now and see a unicorn galloping by, so charmed have our last weeks been, and it’s leaving me convinced that Something Awful is just around the corner. Brené Brown, in her podcast, tells me this is called “foreboding joy,” and I’m just glad there’s a name for it because it means I’m not the only weirdo who’s found herself struck by it. Because on Sunday, after The Husband and I set about cleaning the house from top to bottom for the first time since moving in and I actually sort of enjoyed it, and then I heard the unmistakable strains of an ice cream truck passing by outside, I almost threw my hands up on that sixty-degrees-and-sunny winter’s day and screamed, “IT’S ALL TOO PERFECT!”

Of course, it isn’t. Perfect, I mean. But the downsides all feel very first-world: I have to say goodbye to our housecleaners. I stepped in a massive pile of dogshit and my cheap-ass Old Navy boots will not survive the attack. TK has that aforementioned cold which means he is home from school and monitoring my online output. And I wiped a crusted-over booger off his bedroom wall last night (ah…home).

And then there is the no-man-is-an-island version of suffering, the human-community of it all: a friend is facing a road of chemo and radiation; other friends are starting over in new places; entire populations of fellow humans are confronting their own marginalisation and not everyone is giving them grace for that; coronavirus is making a comeback stateside and masks have somehow become a political issue.

There is so much deep pain in the world, and because I am not personally in the thick of it at this moment, I worry that I will be, and soon–which itself is a narcissistic stance because why do I have to centre myself in the story?–and I wonder if this is because of my own false dreams, which took decades to be deconstructed through pain and struggle. And now that they’ve been so effectively dismantled, I’m left with their rubble cleared in favour of the better story their absence makes room for, able to see it for the first time and just breathe…and, of course, fret.

But Hamilton comes out this weekend on Disney+, and we have friends coming over to watch it, and there’s a new rainbow practically every day because apparently it’s rainbow season here, and I get to take baths again, and downstairs we have a room where TK and I will go soon (he keeps asking if I’m done) to watch some Pixar shorts, his favourite. And we’ll watch the one called Float, about a kid who is different and whose dad goes on a journey from ruing that difference to celebrating it, and I’ll watch TK’s face light up because he knows this story. Most of us do, in one way or another, whether we’re in a dogshit or rainbow part of the story, and so I’ll try and do the thing that I’ve failed at so many times, but why not give it another go: be here, at this part of the story, now. And live the thing I never dreamed, but that came true anyway.