And so it was, that on the first day of homeschooling, I woke up with diarrhea.

(The Australians and British include an O in the word, which is apt, and which I will therefore be doing from now on.)

Anyway, this is a common theme for me in recent years, and by that I mean getting diarrhoea before important events. I’m not much of a public speaker except in recent years when I have been both as a Mockingbird contributor and as an advocate for my son to his classes, and half of the last four talks I’ve given at the Mockingbird New York conference were preceded–and engulfed–by stomach viruses that began the night before. Including the first talk I ever gave. So that means twice now I’ve either sat or stood onstage clenching my ass cheeks and praying for dear life not to shit my pants, all while delivering a thirty-minute speech.

The silver lining is that I didn’t need that Xanax I brought, because I had no room for self-consciousness.

So on the eve of the first day of homeschooling last week, I woke up in the middle of the night praying that the rumble in my stomach was due to an inexplicably spicy bowl of chicken soup I’d eaten earlier in the day. Reader, it was not. I hotfooted it to the toilet several times that night, and until about 2 the next afternoon. I spent half the morning in bed while The Husband kept the boys busy upstairs, then I painfully stepped into the shower and threw my body up the stairs to the kids. The school didn’t have their Google classrooms set up yet, so I honestly can’t tell you what we did or how I survived to the end of the day. All I can tell you is that we got takeaway that night and I ate fries because I (literally) stopped giving a shit, and that this was–as it has always proven to be–a weird-ass gift.

I seem to need to keep being reminded that things go better when I start with acknowledging my own helplessness. I had a list ready to go of activities to do with the kids at home; websites and YouTube videos and virtual museums; and I may as well have used it as toilet paper because a fat lot of good it did me from my bed, lying as I did with chills and aches. Whenever grace, in the form of illness or whatever, makes me take my eyes off myself and just stop doing, magical things seem to happen. It reminds me of when my therapist told me about his and his wife’s third and final child and how she turned out so well because they parented her the least.

Quitting is so underrated.

That’s why we’ve been good at it for the past week of homeschooling. Our school mascot could be a shrugging woman, because that is what I am. Our school motto could be “Homeschool is Flexible” because that’s what I’ve repeated to the boys, telling them (in an echo of a couple of their teachers, thank God) that we don’t have to do everything and that if we don’t do everything, everything will still be okay. This has led to more moments discussing fractions over sandwiches and maths over cupcakes; teaching moments that are natural rather than forced, organic instead of rigid.

Which has led to me being more present in the moment instead of in my planner. Which has led to me seeing more.

Seeing that The Kid’s therapist, whom we would have never met were it not for grace’s crazy-ass gifts, still comes over daily and knows how he learns so that now I get to know that firsthand and quickly, instead of muddling through weeks to find out that he actually can spell the words he’s trying to get me to spell for him.

Seeing (smelling) the dinners that neighbours are cooking each night: the curries and the garlic and the other scents that waft between houses up to our deck enveloping me in the moment with the knowledge that we are all, somehow, doing life together even more than before.

Seeing (hearing) TK wake up beside me in the morning and tell me in his sleepy haze, “This is the best time.” Seeing (hearing) Little Brother pad into the room in the middle of the night, climb in bed beside me, fall back asleep, then start giggling at a funny dream.

This is magic, all of it. And it wouldn’t have happened any other way. I start with my own helplessness and then see it all around me, the help that I didn’t earn but that arrives as gift. As grace.