I took Little Brother to a birthday party over the weekend, and at the start of it I found myself telling a friend, “I miss lockdown.”
I don’t, really, but also, I do. I miss it when there are birthday parties, because I don’t like most birthday parties–only the ones that are Our People, that don’t involve heaps of Other People and seizure-inducing noise and lights and a noticeable absence of alcohol. So I bribed LB with some candy and popcorn and told him that I was going to get his dad, who desperately wanted to watch him jump on trampolines and it wasn’t really fair to make him miss this, and I skidded out of that parking lot and back home and handed off the keys to The Husband.
A few days later I found myself at another post-lockdown, “normal life” event, this one a weekly gathering of a church women’s group, and beforehand I did the thing I always used to do before these meetings, the thing that gets me through an hour of being around a group of people: I walked across the Harbour Bridge and back. And after, as I sat in my chair and mostly listened, I felt the rawness, the new vulnerability that we’re all experiencing upon reentry. It felt like softness, and generosity. And I wondered maybe, as we’re finding our way back to the places we used to inhabit, if we might end up finding better-fitting places than before.
Every morning I seem to wake up like Mia Wallace in that scene of Pulp Fiction when she’s just received her adrenaline shot: a frantic grabbing for my phone to find out what time it is, a frantic search through my brain of what’s on today. Anxiety is my alarm clock. But the thing is that I know this now, better than ever before, and so franticness is supplanted (or at least diluted) by breathing, and other tricks like prayer, and before I’m upright I’ve given myself a mini-therapy session.
We’ve gotten to know each other, and ourselves, during lockdown. There is less fighting, and more recognition.
On the walk from the car to school, the boys and I have a discussion on swear words: which ones are the worst, what they all mean. They say the words out loud, and I imagine what would have happened if I’d done the same as a kid. There’s more room here, where we are right now, and grace has gone before us to make it that way. When The Kid says, as he daily does (while Little Brother scampers off to his classroom) that he doesn’t want to go, he tells me it’s because I won’t be around “to express his feelings to,” and I think about all the failures and therapy and grace that I’ve gone through so that he can even articulate that, and I feel profound gratitude alongside the anxiety and sadness and every other feeling that fills our morning.
That afternoon, while TK is at speech, LB and I walk to the cupcake shop and as we eat outside, I talk to him about what it means when we say TK has autism, and how that shows up in our life. And he nods, thoughtfully, over his cookies and cream, and then says he can’t wait for Christmas, and I think about all the times I used to avoid hard conversations because that was what people did, and how We Don’t Do That Here because of everything that happened on the way here.
When I was younger and our phones stayed at home plugged into the wall, I wondered how my parents knew how to get everywhere. We would just jump in the car and somehow, three hours later, end up at the beach. How did they know?
Now, where we are, it takes less time to get to the beach. But for longer distances, my kids see me with a map: they see me apologise, acknowledge my mistakes, ask for directions, request space, talk about feelings and other hard stuff. There is more room to move around here, to fall down and get back up (or, more likely, be picked back up). Every time we’re lost, we’re then found, and in the finding, we look around and see what is new, and what was there all along. We see the grace, and we see that it means that here, we belong.