What does it take to feel this alive?
Just past the halfway point on my morning run is a spot from which I can see six beaches at once. Six beaches. This is wild–beyond what I imagined back in my single, childless days of hoping to one day live near some water. Now, I’m surrounded by it.
Took awhile to get there, though. First, there was the little matter of landing The Husband and the kids; then there was the minor issue of being shipped to Australia against my will. Then, a sweaty, stress-and-Covid-filled house hunt, and only then did I start to explore the world outside our new front door. Months after that I finally built up my mileage to the point that I reached this point, turned around, and gasped at the view.
We were watching The Grinch the other day as part of my mandated Christmas-movie-every-day-of-Advent schedule, and Little Brother announced at a crucial point: “Here it comes! His heart is about to explode!” I don’t always pay attention during these viewings but I definitely did not remember that. Then I watched as The Grinch’s heart grew a few sizes, which was what LB had meant: this explosion into new dimensions. This taking up of more space and the changes that come with it.
It may as well be an explosion, because it’s usually disturbing and painful, this kind of growth. The proliferation of capillaries and expansion of lung tissue to add distance, the annexing of rooms onto the heart that didn’t exist before to include the kind of love that can only be accommodated by spaces deemed accessible. Accessibility, diversity, disability–these words that were never on my radar before and are now part of my daily parlance. Language, it changes with heart changes. And the world, it’s suddenly bigger.
We went as a family to the Entertainment Quarter this weekend, and a traffic and parking nightmare gave way to a sea of people, the likes of which we hadn’t encountered since before lockdown (the first one? the second one? I can’t even remember). By the time the boys and I left The Husband to hunt for a park and we got to the movie tent, tensions were high. The Kid put his foot down.
“It’s too loud. I’m not going in there.”
Cut to some pleading and promising and a girl who definitely didn’t want to be working on a Sunday, and finally we claimed our seats among the friends who were waiting for us. LB sat between me and his friend, gasping at the view; TK sat on top of me, his hands over his ears and mine over his. I felt the girl at the entrance watching us. When the show was over, she approached us and said some kind things and I accepted them because that had been one of my better moments (luckily she wasn’t there for the birthday party a few days before from which we had barely escaped alive, #blessed).
Then the group of us passed a booth selling balloons and while we waited for the boys’ to be filled, the lady filling them looked at TK and asked if he’s autistic. When she learned we speak the same language, she told me about her similar son. “He’s gorgeous,” she said, echoing the earlier girl.
A few days later, LB emerged from the school gate with an award in hand. Citizenship, which is basically, as a friend told me, “for being a great person,” and in my younger years of academic achievement I’d never gotten one of those, but now? I couldn’t imagine a better gift than having a kid who is known for his kindness, and having people around him who see that.
Sometimes I think about all it took us to get here–all the invisible workings of love and the brutal and beautiful and unceasing hand of grace–here to this view that you have to be taken aside to see, pushed and prodded and pulled and held to turn around and, in your better moments, gasp to behold.