Australia is in the throes of some bitch named La Niña–there are leeches everywhere, my bath towel will not stay dry, the sun is a stranger. Ukraine is in the crosshairs of Russia–and the voice of Paddington has risen to deservedly heroic levels that make the phrase “but he’s a businessman” sound like the joke that it truly is. The world is a dumpster fire, and I still have to go to my kids’ swim carnival.
Life is in the ordinary, in the moments away from watching bombs explode on Twitter, away from news coverage of flooding to our immediate north, away from wondering if the rats will come back for a second season of Hellscape: Global Edition.
Life is in the commiserating with friends over high schools, over our kids’ shared and different struggles: identity issues, anxiety, diagnoses. It’s in the moments of meeting each others’ eyes and texts with mutual pain: no one told us it would be this hard. That to live in this world, to mother these children, to watch all the ordinary and extraordinary events of life unfold, means having your heart broken over and over and still having to get up and make lunches.
Life is watching a war unfold while folding laundry, watching the State of the Union from your car outside your kids’ school in the rain between sorting canteen lunches and delivering an ethics lesson. Life is a joke and deadly serious, ordinary and extraordinary, dark and light.
I find a leech on my phone as the Ukrainian president dodges assassination attempts. The boys’ shower has a leak–should we pay to have it fixed if we’re about to endure a nuclear winter?
Little Brother has been ushered into a gifted and talented extension class once a week. A learning support teacher tells me that in class the other day, she was leading the kids in Bingo and having them take turns reading out numbers, and The Kid was the only one who figured how to call out his own numbers and create a winning streak. These two people, each bright as hell in their own way, still asking me things like “when will the rain end?” while I’m on the toilet like I’m their personal crystal-ball-wielding meteorologist and if I did have all the answers they think I did I sure as hell would be outsourcing their laundry.
Russian convoys approach Ukraine, Queensland drowns in rainwater, and I drive to school with two boys in the backseat like I’m in a version of the Indy 500, giving a thumbs-up instead of middle finger and yelling jerk instead of dickless mother f*cker (PERSONAL GROWTH!) to the driver who doesn’t want to let me over into the turn lane while I’m wearing my period panties and passing an ice pack to LB because he opened the door into his eye like some kind of idiot (I did the same thing last week) , which happened right after the lot us tramped through the mud with the dog while I carried his warm shit in a bag in my hand and prayed we didn’t attract leeches, which was right before I showered while hearing “Mom? MOM? MOM!” followed by complaints about brotherly annoyances, and following that I told them to grab the sensory brushes I bought online that will fix everything.
We walk to the car, they with their backpacks and I with a computer in one hand and a dog treat in the other, and they ask me how many have died on each side so far in the war, all of it in the waning days (we hope) of a two-year-so-far pandemic.
And now it’s Lent and people are talking about giving up chocolate.
I need grace like I need air. I need not an instruction booklet or another list of obligations, but someone, something to carry me through, the way I carried LB across the flooded entrance to their school this morning, but less wearily. I need something extraordinary to meet my ordinary.
I wait for it, because the ordinary endures. But also–I find it. In each friendship, in electronically-delivered words and in-person glances. In the forgiveness that has to keep happening because the mistakes do. In the home that enfolds us. In the questions that surround us because the answers will meet us. In the not yet that will become the now. In all that I can’t see, but will, as surely as night becomes morning.