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I am not okay. I am not okay.

That thought bounded around my brain on repeat once I’d climbed back into the car last week after a gruelling shopping run. And by gruelling, I mean just a shopping run, but these days that includes QR check ins, masks, and many more people than usual stocking up on necessities like flour, toilet paper, and wine. I deep-breathed my way through the shop and to the car and sat there, reasoning that this is a pandemic and another lockdown and of course it’s all overwhelming. I tried to show myself grace.

I received more grace, a couple of days later, when I realised that on that shopping trip I’d unwittingly been on my third day of cold-turkey Lexapro withdrawals. I’d done five days in total, which more than explained the struggles I’d been experiencing: anxiety expressed emotionally as anger and physically as piercing, permeating currents throughout my body, leaving me breathless and panicked.

I had thought it shouldn’t be this hard. But then, sometimes? It is?

We just had four weeks added on to our already month-long lockdown, and texts with friends have gone from consisting solely of funny memes to now running down plans to divorce, run away, and/or drink ourselves into comas. The humour is present, but fraught. The tension is palpable. We are all on the edge and it’s hard for one of us to pull the others back when we’re in the same spot. It sucks, hard, and I want to deeply and profoundly acknowledge that.

It’s just that sometimes, inconveniently, the best stuff comes paired up or tied into the worst stuff, and I hate this but management is not open to my suggestions on the matter. So I find that along with the beautiful weather come obligatory trips to the playground, a locale I’ve always been avoidant of because…well, there are people there. And not only are there people there, but my children want to (gasp) talk to those people while I stand creepily nearby, breaking into hives.

And then something happens. The Kid practices his conversational skills and his self-advocacy in one fell swoop: “I’m autistic and have speech issues.” Little Brother finishes off the one-two punch with his own form of advocacy, gently telling another kid that he should treat his sister properly. We leave having made new acquaintances, if not friends, and often having other people’s stories now to carry along with our own. (Except for yesterday, which was an emotional bloodbath because of a game of hide and seek gone awry, but you can’t win them all, right? GLUG GLUG.)

So we head home, fresh from what I’ve heard referred to as an AFGO (another fucking growth opportunity), and the only thing that provides relief is a full lie-down on the floor by the fire and the thought of a glass of red wine to pair with it. Thoughts about their well-being, whether they’re keeping up, whether they’ll get a job one day, whether I’m doing enough, whether everything is just totally going to shit skitter across my mind, and then: a louder yet gentler one breaks through. A thought that is also a voice: What if it’s not about what you haven’t done? What if this is the most important work, what you’re doing already? And images sweep my brain: their laughter. Our talks. The time on the couch as a family, watching The Mysterious Benedict Society. The hallowed ground of the dog park that we walk together.

Les Mis voiced it in typical melodramatic fashion, this idea that what happens naturally is, in the end, weighed down with more import than we ever imagined: “To love another person is to see the face of God.” What if we often get it wrong, and the things we give the most thought, actually deserve it the least? And the things we call “little” add up to being…everything?