I am currently awaiting the results of my dental exam while filling out an application for a PhD program in linguistics. Does this make sense? Not on its face, no. I’m forty-five; I should know who I am and where I should be by now, right?

Turns out there’s a lot I don’t know and a lot I’m still figuring out. For example: the sun is rising later and setting earlier and these bookends of the day compressing as we round out the first month of (a very hot) autumn means that I delivered my annual autism talk to The Kid’s class last week. It was the sixth time I’ve done it; many of them were anticipating each slide before it appeared onscreen. (How wonderful to be known like this!) This year, I finally had the bright idea to do the same talk for Little Brother’s class. And since I know him–or so I thought–I surmised that it just wouldn’t do to make the whole thing about TK; I should also throw some LB into the talk too. When I asked him, though, he gave me a hard pass on including any photos of him.

What he didn’t do, though, was say no videos. So I pasted two in from when he was a baby, and when I got to that slide yesterday, expecting an appreciative grin, I instead got a stone-cold glare. Afterward, he said, “You know, Mom, there are SOME things we don’t have to SHARE.“

Which, now that I think about it, probably negates debunks the right I think I have to even tell this story. Or have this blog…

When I talked to both boys’ classes about TK and his halo experience, I compared the healing of his atlas bone post-surgery to the healing of a broken arm or leg, and that while those bones can be protected by a cast, you can’t wear a cast on your neck. I talked about the healing of a bone: how the doctor has to first reset, then immobilise, the bone. And I’ve been thinking about how, sometimes, grace does the same thing to us: we require resetting from what we were before, or where we were headed, before we can grow the way we’re actually meant to. I think about my dislocations, which were actually relocations, to New York and Sydney. Into autism and out of dentistry and now, either back into it or into something else, TBD. From landlocked to coastal, northern hemisphere to southern, churchgoing to on a break until she can get her shit at least marginally together on behalf of the disabled and abused.

TK said the other day, apropos of nothing except what was going on inside his head (which is to say, everything), “a flower’s worst nightmare is the beach.” And I had to take a moment right there as I was sliding into the driver’s seat, because between the two of my kids I have been taught some lessons this week. Trying to grow where we’re not meant to be, which is really just trying to be who we’re not meant to be, is not just fruitless–it is a nightmare. I would know.

And yet there is that moment when you’re disjointed, prior to the Doctor resetting you, when you just don’t have the whole story yet about how the pieces will fit together to make a whole. In his genius book, which is actually just (?) a conversation, Nick Cave calls this the before knowing: “you write a line that requires the future to reveal its meaning.”

Giving ourselves the space to find out all we don’t know (which is, in itself, an admission that we don’t know all), and then growing in this space? This is grace.