I would now like to discuss the past week.

Six days ago, we moved house. I was twenty-four hours off my latest counselling session and therefore riding high on enlightenment and well-being, or at least as close as they come for me when wisdom and peace are showered upon me from a trusted outside source. The Husband was, unusually for him, stressed and freaking and I was all Monica on Friends about it, breezy as f*ck, but really I’d just gotten to the point where I had nothing left to give and therefore no energy to expend on such luxuries as caring.

Besides, I had to get The Kid to school, Little Brother to sports camp and school readiness, and myself to TK’s awards presentation. There was no time to breathe, let alone freak out, and when people remarked about how calm I looked, I fought against laughing myself into convulsions and insanity in front of their faces because of how ridiculous it all was, is, our fifth house in three years, Christmas in summer, a cross-world trip, ALL OF THE THINGS ALL AT THE SAME TIME. What kind of assholes are we to keep doing this to ourselves?

Well, for one thing, we are the kind of assholes who are held by a grace that brings incredible people into our lives. People who fill our buckets, and glasses, and bookshelves. People who show up with a playmate for LB and a mini-Christmas tree for us, because who has time to put up a tree in the middle of a move? (TH does, but more on that later.) People who overserve me rosé at the end-of-year class picnic and give me a literal shoulder to rest my head on. People who cry when they tell me about how TH was looking at TK during the assembly; who cry when telling me how much he’s changed as he reads to LB, into truly the big brother he was made to be. People who hoot along with me during the pause when we were told not to applaud (so I YELLED, dammit) as TK made his way onstage to collect his award–for increased independence and a growth mindset. It’s not the award I got as a child, the one I had probably aspired to on his behalf before I met him–the standard excellence awards. It was a new one, designed specifically for him by a teacher who knows him, who knows what matters to him and what makes him…well, him. And it was pretty damn perfect, that moment, as he bolted to the stage and stood amongst his friends and grinned impossibly huge and I sweated and shook and felt it all, all the feelings, at the same time.

That morning, the kids had sung us to school in the car as we passed the moving van en route to our house as though there were nothing at all to obsess and stress over. Afterward, I had taken LB to his sports camp and watched, drained of energy, with nothing to do but relax and enjoy him. The day before, I had kept my hair appointment as packers boxed up our belongings as though I had time for that kind of nonsense. My roots had time, though, and as they sat covered in foil, I finished the book loaned by a friend, the one that I had almost given up on multiple times because it had enraged me, this main character’s BS, and then suddenly: a shift in perspective, an enlightening , some wisdom from outside, and I found myself affirmed like in my best counselling sessions–it wasn’t crazy to have felt that way!–and I read as it told me about dark matter, this thing that is everywhere yet unseen. This thing about which so little is known, and yet it binds so much of everything together, it pulls objects into rhythm with each other, and we know about it because we can see the objects, but not the dark matter itself. It is a mystery upon which everything depends.

Something we can’t even see…but its existence known by what it does, this invisible connective tissue that holds us all, that, as I write this while LB asks me one million questions and I get irritated then apologise and when I ask for his forgiveness, he looks up and nods, smiling. That, when I’m at the end of myself because TK is crying on the way to school because so much is going on and, once we arrive, his beautiful friend steps up and asks if he wants a hug. That sends TH home early once again because he’s been the one making this a home as I look around, no longer breezy but stunned and overwhelmed and shutting down, and he sends me to the cinema where I gorge on popcorn and White Christmas and learn to breathe again. Because sometimes you need Jesus, and sometimes you need your counsellor, and sometimes you need Bing Crosby in drag, and sometimes you get all of them all at once along with everything else, AT THE SAME TIME.