The children persist in getting less little every day.

Little Brother just celebrated his 8th, and The Kid is shucking teeth left and right, and they both have become wise to the truth about Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, et al this year. LB and I sat together for a spell the other night and watched videos of him as a baby. When those very videos and photos pop up as memories on social media, I’m reminded of how tiny and arguably cute they used to be.

But this stage, with their growing awareness and independence and involvement? This stage I prefer, mostly: the way they get involved when I’m planning presents and activities for The Husband’s birthday (even if the candy they pick is just the kind they want–and demand–him to share with them). They’re easier to talk to when they aren’t spewing out both ends of their bodies (usually); easier to see them as allies when I’m not bashing my head in trying to figure out what it is they want. (Of course, now is the time when we have to teach them how to articulate it.)

There is loss, but there is so much gain. Like losing the middle (wo)man and haggling directly with each other over how much a tooth is worth.

Life moves in one direction–the direction of grey hairs, sore hamstrings, TH on the phone making a dinner reservation for six and me screaming from inside that that’s too late; MAKE IT FIVE-THIRTY! But it’s not always linear.

A friend just returned from visiting her family and hometown overseas, and I asked if she was glad to be back. “Yes,” she began, “I was ready to be back…but it’s sort of sad, isn’t it? You always feel split between two places.”

I sort of don’t trust anyone who doesn’t. Whether it’s a matter of geography or chronology or circumstances, who can’t know ambivalence in this life? Anyone who’s perfectly settled is to me, as the kids would say, SUSS.

I’ve been working on an online application to get my dental license here in Australia and the process is offensive for so many reasons, primarily because it’s not what I most want to be doing anyway, and I find myself revisiting choices I made when I barely knew myself and was way too young to know the direction my life would take, much less how I should spend each day of the next few decades. I’m suspended between the then and now and even yet of it all, wondering if there’s a place, a role, that fits who I currently am, rather than spending time and effort trying to fit into old shoes that are too small but pay well.

And then there’s the looking ahead, like when I asked TK if he wants to try to be a school leader next year, and he sits thoughtfully for a moment before saying, “Maybe. It would be cool to be the first autistic kid to do that.”

We are all suspended somewhere. For me, with my kids, it’s usually between exasperation and wonder.

I asked them the other day how we might work out a way for them to fight with each other less, and they both–as if trained for this moment–told me, “But Mom, it’s normal for brothers to fight.” And I realise that no matter where else they’ve heard this, it’s also been from me–from retellings of my own story, of how sisters can be so close that they fight constantly until one day, they don’t, they just talk constantly, and they rely on these narratives to know they’ll be okay too. They remind me of these stories I’ve lived and told, and they push me up against my own ambivalence, my own incompleteness, my own panic at things not being “okay” or “enough”, which is right where the more always shows up, where grace appears and scatters us in all the directions we were meant to go.