We just returned from a viewing of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York in our hotel cinema and while the boys proclaimed it better than the original, I did not agree that there was a Godfather situation happening. That didn’t keep us all from laughing at the antics of Kevin, Harry, and Marv all over again, despite the formulaic predictability (The Kid: “He is about to throw something besides a camera down to them.”).

We’ve been to this hotel in the Blue Mountains before, twice actually. We’ve gone to dinner the first night and returned to “Christmas in July” presents for the kids, a tradition we’ll never be able to break now since they’ve got it marked on the diaries in their heads, along with the train rides and the cinema visits and the indoor pool swims and the arcade games.

“I don’t think Santa Claus visits hotels,” someone in the movie said, and they were wrong for the McCallisters and for us, since Santa has visited us in a few hotels over the last few years, in both July and December. He’s had to learn multiple addresses, actually, as have our family and friends back home. Back in our old home.

With dual citizenship as a possibility at the end of this year, our dual homes are ever-present on my mind, especially as I watch from ten thousand miles away as my home country seems to be engulfed in metaphorical (and, often, literal) flames. We feel sad to miss our annual Christmas trip back to America because we won’t see family whom we miss. But mostly? We also feel…lucky. Protected. Safe.

We feel at home.

This is due in no small part to our actual home, which seems made for us in a way that was solidified over this last weekend, when we celebrated the Fourth of July by grilling hamburgers on the back deck while a heat lamp warmed us and Hamilton played on the big screen downstairs, and we shared our space and our history with friends who came over for the first time to our new place. We gathered around its tables and countertops and said screen and settled in, a process that began here three and a half years ago but feels more real, more solid, now.

We have a place here. The boys each have a room, into which I venture each early evening and “get ready for the night:” closing blinds and turning on lamps, something I’ve longed to do with this level of familiarity ever since we left Atlanta. We have traditions. We have all our stuff: the wedding china we never use, the gravy boat I’m eyeing for a potential Thanksgiving celebration, TK’s surgery collage and halo shrine and his and Little Brother’s framed birth announcements.

We’ve been at home, with each other, everywhere we’ve gone–hotels and houses, ferries and planes–but now it feels official. And in true “us” fashion that feels completely antithetical to who The Husband and I are but somehow makes sense, we have no idea how long it will last, for what length of time it will look this way.

But right now? As I sit on this hotel bed with a glass of red next to me, the sun setting outside, and the boys on the other bed? Forever sounds pretty good.

Oh my, I didn’t know what it means to believe

But if I hold on tight, is it true?

Would you take care of all that I do?

Oh Lord, I’m getting ready to believe

–Michael Kiwanuka

Well, I just wrote a paragraph about The Kid, who read it and told me he didn’t want me to share it. You see, he’s home from school with a cold and he’s also eight, which means his awareness is growing and, in turn, limiting what I can make public. Dammit.

But also, great? Because this awareness is what we want. As is the fading-out of his therapist at school that has been achieved. As are so many of his accomplishments lately. In fact, the other night a friend texted to tell me her daughter said that TK is one of the smartest kids in the class. So excuse me while I dodge these rainbows and this lack of coronavirus from our new, much-loved home.

But still…I really want to tell you the story. So I’ll just say this much: the other night, there was tiredness and a tantrum and the proclamation of dreams not coming true. It was an Oscar-worthy performance, and totally sincere while also completely irrational. The end result, which I cannot fully explain because I’m no longer allowed to totally pimp out my kids on this blog, is the designation of “false dreams” to what are unmet (and, frankly, unreasonable) desires.

Which is incongruous to this period of our lives right now, because I feel like I could look out my back door right now and see a unicorn galloping by, so charmed have our last weeks been, and it’s leaving me convinced that Something Awful is just around the corner. Brené Brown, in her podcast, tells me this is called “foreboding joy,” and I’m just glad there’s a name for it because it means I’m not the only weirdo who’s found herself struck by it. Because on Sunday, after The Husband and I set about cleaning the house from top to bottom for the first time since moving in and I actually sort of enjoyed it, and then I heard the unmistakable strains of an ice cream truck passing by outside, I almost threw my hands up on that sixty-degrees-and-sunny winter’s day and screamed, “IT’S ALL TOO PERFECT!”

Of course, it isn’t. Perfect, I mean. But the downsides all feel very first-world: I have to say goodbye to our housecleaners. I stepped in a massive pile of dogshit and my cheap-ass Old Navy boots will not survive the attack. TK has that aforementioned cold which means he is home from school and monitoring my online output. And I wiped a crusted-over booger off his bedroom wall last night (ah…home).

And then there is the no-man-is-an-island version of suffering, the human-community of it all: a friend is facing a road of chemo and radiation; other friends are starting over in new places; entire populations of fellow humans are confronting their own marginalisation and not everyone is giving them grace for that; coronavirus is making a comeback stateside and masks have somehow become a political issue.

There is so much deep pain in the world, and because I am not personally in the thick of it at this moment, I worry that I will be, and soon–which itself is a narcissistic stance because why do I have to centre myself in the story?–and I wonder if this is because of my own false dreams, which took decades to be deconstructed through pain and struggle. And now that they’ve been so effectively dismantled, I’m left with their rubble cleared in favour of the better story their absence makes room for, able to see it for the first time and just breathe…and, of course, fret.

But Hamilton comes out this weekend on Disney+, and we have friends coming over to watch it, and there’s a new rainbow practically every day because apparently it’s rainbow season here, and I get to take baths again, and downstairs we have a room where TK and I will go soon (he keeps asking if I’m done) to watch some Pixar shorts, his favourite. And we’ll watch the one called Float, about a kid who is different and whose dad goes on a journey from ruing that difference to celebrating it, and I’ll watch TK’s face light up because he knows this story. Most of us do, in one way or another, whether we’re in a dogshit or rainbow part of the story, and so I’ll try and do the thing that I’ve failed at so many times, but why not give it another go: be here, at this part of the story, now. And live the thing I never dreamed, but that came true anyway.

How many times has the rug been pulled out from under you?

I’ve felt that kind of surprise so often that if it hasn’t happened recently, I start to actively worry that it will happen soon. See: thoughts like “I haven’t had a stomach virus in awhile;” googling “weird headaches and brain tumours;” researching “erratic periods: perimenopause or cancer?”; or, currently, meditations on how thankful we are to be settling into a house we love coupled with my anxiety over the other shoe dropping.

So it’s not a huge distance for me between being pleased that “this rug really ties the room together” and “what about that rug being pulled out from under me tho.” I kind of specialise in these preemptive mental strikes. I remember sitting in both boys’ nurseries before they were each born, belly swollen as I nested in our brown rocking chair, praying away any problems I could think of. And it must have worked? Because those things I prayed over, they didn’t happen.

But other things did.

No, I didn’t pray about tilted heads or laminectomies or neuroatypicality. What I see now about what I was praying for then was that it was for the road to open up ahead of us, smooth and flat and untroubled and easy. Because the thing about flat roads is that you can see far off into the distance, which precludes surprises and preserves a sense of control.

It’s also boring as hell.

Also filed under Things I Didn’t Pray About: being moved across the world. Spending holidays on airplanes and in hotels and in rentals. Feeling like nomads for much of the boys’ early childhood. Living in five houses within three-and-a-half years.

So now, now that we’re in Our Home Here, a place that meets so many of my hopes and dreams (gas fireplace! Wine fridge! Downstairs guest room! Upper level sanctuary that’s just for us with two bathtubs that no one outside our quartet ever has to use!), I’m wondering, of course, whether that new rug that really ties the room together will be pulled out from under me. What I can’t see that’s just around the bend. Because if we were kicked out of this house, or out of this country, right now, I would make. a. SCENE.

There is a walk nearby that includes a spot called Arabanoo Lookout. From it, you can turn one way and see the city skyline, and the other and see Manly, and in front of you lies the ocean, vast and blue, specked with headlands. It seems that you might see anything coming, from any direction. And standing there makes me think of a couple of things. I think of how I never would have known this view if we hadn’t come here. And I think about how the idea of “seeing everything coming” is not only an illusion, but also overrated.

The boys and I went on a bush walk there recently, during the homeschooling days, when I tried to lead them to some Aboriginal drawings but, it turned out, I didn’t know the way. They irritation–and mine–grew as we stumbled around, directionless, before giving up and heading back to the car– a spot from where we could see a rainbow. I’ve tried to rebrand “wanderings” to them as “adventure walks” and sometimes they buy it; sometimes not. There is something to be said for wandering aimlessly, but only when the one who’s leading you ultimately knows what the hell they’re doing.

Which I do, but also? I really don’t. I know techniques, and evidence-based research and its findings, and I have a weather app, and an alarm that goes off in my car if I’m backing up too closely to something. Otherwise, if I’m being honest with myself, I’m flying blind, and this has especially been revealed lately as the kids have gone back through the school gates without me; as The Kid has gone it alone, therapist-less, and I cannot rely on her thorough reports each day. (Although this morning, I did hang around to watch what the boys would do after they put their things down in their classrooms. I peered through a tree like a creeper as Little Brother emerged first, pacing around the playground until TK showed back up; then LB looked straight at me and pointed with a violated look on his face and I ran away like a small child.)

I get hints, glimmers really. We all do: SARS before COVID; The Husband’s call about Australia a year before being sent there; the clouds before the rain before the rainbow. I either miss those hints, or try to use them as scaffolding for a roadmap that allows no alterations or detours. And I do this time after time after time. Dead ends seem to be my love language.

But so are U-turns, and new starts. Surprises, which can often feel like attacks–like rug-pulls–until I remember that so much of “not being able to see” is about not being kept in the dark, but about being in the right place, with the right protection, to witness glory–the view we never would have known otherwise.

Our family owns a sign that I bought for The Husband one Christmas from one of those overpriced catalogue companies who do specialty art that makes your life feel…unique. I love that shit, so I’ve bought from them several times over the years. We are also the proud owners, for example, of a twee little wall-hanging that has our names on it alongside maps of Alabama and California, our home states. It’s so overly precious and it’s my JAM.

This particular sign has our last name on it above the coordinates of our first home in Sydney: the latitude and longitude of where we lived four houses ago, seven minutes away from where we are now so not all that different. It felt important at the time to acknowledge our new position in time and space, different as it was from our previous spot in Atlanta, much like a dog marks his territory (or my sons mark theirs, with bush wees all over those coordinates). The other night, TH went back to our last rental to do a sweep of anything we might have missed. The next morning, I noticed that sign next to our front door, planted firmly in the soil there. “We almost forgot it,” he told me.

But he didn’t.

And so it’s planted anew, and so are we, in a home we’ve bought in a land far from where we started, which is strange but so wonderful. From the moment we walked in last week, moving boxes in hand (and so many more being loaded onto a truck at the rental), this felt like home. That breath I’ve been holding for three years–first, holding until we returned back to the US and, quickly, holding in hopes of staying–has been released and re-released endlessly over the last few days as we’ve found a place for everything and everything has found its place. This spot seems made for us: the deck overlooking the trees, the egg-shaped bathtub to which I return nightly, the colours that are exactly what we would have chosen.

Then there are the nearby walks along cliffs and beaches, the expansive park ten minutes away where we envision runs with the dog we’ll be getting, the coffee shop next to the park where TH loads up on caffeine, the grocery stores that are bigger and newer than what we knew, the sandwich shop that has filled a need I’ve been feeling since we moved to Sydney.

If I say everything feels right, will that jinx it? I write that in texts to friends and feel it as anxiety creeping in when I realise I’m just so happy, so relieved to be right where we are. When I look around with a goofy grin at this spot that is ours. When I see our photos arranged around the mantel where, in a few months, Christmas stockings will sit stuffed because we will not be in a hotel this year. As TH and I have said to each other multiple times over the past few days, it all feels too good to be true. We’re waiting for someone to come kick us out.

And it is to good to be true, if I’m expecting this house to change everything: expecting it to fix every problem I’ve ever had, or to be a place to hide permanently from the ups and downs that life will bring. I was standing next to our beautiful new oven the other night, swearing at it because I couldn’t figure out how to turn the damn thing on, and I realised that PMS and anxiety and ingratitude will visit me here too, because I am here. And I’m still me. How annoying.

But the sense of relief makes space for a new view, not just the one from a different vantage point over the bridge, but a view provided by a soft landing–a view of the gifts I did not earn, but am free to now enjoy with tears in my eyes: the runs along the water at sunrise, pink and purple giving way to blue as I slowly conquer new hills. The secret beaches I find on hikes and can’t wait to tell the boys about. The car rides, rather than walks, to school that are a bit longer but also give us space to talk when we’re not hoofing it uphill.

I got an email from The Kid’s teacher last night. He and Little Brother have been champions throughout all the upheaval of the last few weeks: coronavirus, homeschool, the move. (They’ve also been assholes, to be sure, but champions nonetheless.) TK has the added weight of his therapist being faded out completely, rather than gradually, because of COVID, so now he goes it alone daily in what I can only see as a feat of invincibility. I yearn for any updates the teacher can give while walking the delicate line of not wanting to harass her, so yesterday’s note, when it arrived as I was settling in to bed, was the most incredible gift.

“James had a fantastic day today!” she began, going on to describe how Mondays can be tough but he gave everything a go and “completed the activities to a really high standard.” She went on, “He melted my heart when he said, ‘I am proud of me today.'”

Well shit. I sat in bed, reading and rereading, tears overflowing, as she finished by saying how happy she is to teach him. I just…sometimes, you know, the hard stuff is too much. And sometimes? The beautiful stuff is.

The other night TH was putting the boys to bed and I saw our wedding photo book sitting in its new spot on the bookcase. I grabbed it and a glass of wine and took them both outside, poring over the decade-old memories: the two of us having no idea what lay ahead, a couple of non-tired idiots forging ahead into a new life. Having no idea what cleaving to each other would look like, what forms it would take as it shifted between joy and sorrow and pain and glory, too hard and too beautiful, everything too much and yet carried on the breath of grace that somehow makes it just what, and where, it should be.

I’m convinced that some (some) of my anxiety comes from a simple failure to recognise patterns. For example, right now I sit twisted in figurative knots as I await a move in forty-eight hours, prior to which packers will be arriving (tomorrow) and after which will begin a lengthy unpacking and settling-in period. We’ve done this already–four times in the past three-and-a-half years, to be exact–and we’ve made it through, every time. But I’ll still sleep erratically for the next two nights and will be powered by cortisol for the next two days. After which I’ll find something else to be anxious about.

Having moved out of, and into, so many houses over the past few years, I can honestly say that this one brings the most excitement because it feels like ours. (The hefty money transfer occurring would testify to that as fact.) When we fill drawers and decorate walls, we will be doing it knowing that (as far as we are aware), we won’t be undoing this all in a year or less. We will be truly settling in. This is terrifying, and wonderful. But, especially given that we can’t even go to the US right now, it feels right. It feels like it’s time. Soon, I will be releasing a three-point-five-years-held breath.

But I’ll still be anxious. I’ll be unnerved by all the boxes, overwhelmed by all the choices, and looking towards the next stage of our lives with questions: are we here forever? What should we do about high schools? And was that post I just read about the prominence of leeches here in damp yards meant to prepare me for something?

So many questions. Which feels only appropriate, as my life thus far has taken the shape of one mass and constant exodus away from the certainty of all I know and into grace and all its mysteries.

This plays out in strange ways on the ground. Because sometimes, having the Red Sea parted for you looks like finding out your kid’s brain works differently because this is the only path that will get you all to where you need to be and to the people who will be with you there. Sometimes, being rescued looks like the opposite of it–say, like getting swallowed by a whale or, in less dramatic examples, like inching away from the philosophies you grew up hearing until your new moral ground looks decidedly more diverse, less predictable, and much like getting called a socialist by those who knew you back then. And sometimes, being shifted into the current of grace looks like buying a house in a foreign country to which you protested moving because now, that country is home.

For some reason, foreign words keep finding me, and this week’s is the Welsh word hiraeth: a homesickness for a home to which one cannot return, or a home which never was. I feel both parts of this definition, deeply. I know that I have moved past the comforts of much of what I was taught, from the clear lines that were drawn that separated us and them, from the lack of nuance and complexity into a world where grey figures in prominently and people are more than one thing. I cannot go back there. I have seen too much, and the etchings of time and pain and love and grace have done their awful and wonderful work. I am profoundly grateful.

I also know that I long for a home I haven’t experienced yet, one where justice–true and sweeping and sufficient justice–has made all things right, where love has made all things new, and where all that is sad has, finally, become untrue. I await this home having never seen it but trusting it is real both because I believe it is and because it just has to be. Because its future reality and its present promises are unveiled more and more to me by grace, by the unremitting love that is grace–the love that will not leave me to comfort when it can be with me in the more.

I’ve caught up with several friends this week, a couple of whom I haven’t seen face to face in over a year each, and even with my anxiety over these reunions (will I say the right thing? Will I know how to behave in a social setting when it’s been so long?), they have been like mini-homecomings. At the end of one of them, my friend said, “I think of you often,” and I told her the same as a woman nearby glanced up at us quizzically, surely wondering what our deal was, and as I thought about it on the way home, I realised that this is our deal–my deal: that without grace intervening and making this particular story our story, I wouldn’t ever hear things like that, truths spoken in person and over email that are often taken for granted: I’m thankful for you. I’m so glad you’re here. I miss you. I think of you often.

This is what being in the flow of grace is: floating along peacefully one minute, thrashing about the next, each moment unpredictable and beyond my ability to control it. And knowing, for all the moments, that I am held and heading home.

For the past few days, I’ve approached our washing machine and recoiled in disgust as the fumes of faeces have hit my nostrils. I’ve made as many excuses as I can for this stench without actually diving into the machine for firsthand research: maybe it’s all the rain we’ve been having? That has contributed to some stanky mildew masquerading as a boom boom? I’ve rationalised my way out of dealing with the problem until a few minutes ago, when it practically hit me in the face: a small log of poo resting neatly on the inside door of the machine. The problem–and its true source–could no longer be ignored. It had risen from the depths to the surface. And I had to clean that shit up.

So I did. Half-heartedly and gagging the whole time. As I wondered how many past loads of clothing have been stained by said shit, are now carrying around flecks of it, and how many future loads will bear its traces. This baby log likely (definitely) erupted from the skid marks of one of the boys’ underwear, but it will live on in ways both seen (smelled) and unseen.

(I’ll give you all a moment to adjust out of your “metaphor” setting.)

This morning I ran across the nearby bridge as Coolio sang the bars of “Gangsta’s Paradise” into my ears, and it took me back twenty-five years, to a dorm room in Birmingham and my first year of college. My new sorority sisters and I danced and swayed, beers in our hands, to the soundtrack of Dangerous Minds as we prepared for a night out on campus at our homogeneous school, situated in a “bad” (black) area of the city, across the street from a bar whose owners sold us cheap beer. In return, we gave them our patronage and assuaged our own consciences; how could we be racists if we supported their business and listened to Coolio?!

I’ll tell you one way: by, the next year, voting down the return of a black girl to our second night of rush after a heated debate. I remember the battle lines drawn that night and I remember who was on each side of them. I remember being on the wrong side as my friends on the right side recoiled in their inability to understand. I remember trying to justify what was utter shit: hatred dressed up as who cares what because it was, simply, racism. The shame I carry from that night, from so many other moments like it, will rightfully last me the rest of my life.

But I’m not here to fetishise past sins or create a linear narrative of wrong>>right. These white-girl stories of “I’ve seen the light” smack of virtue-signalling, and the position of White Saviour has been eradicated from the job listings, FYI. I’m here not to seek absolution but to grieve, I suppose, because when in doubt that posture has always been life-giving. There is always something to grieve in this world, especially now, and I know from experience that grace meets me there, always, with its hope.

I’ve been clinging to a Hebrew word recently: hesed. It has been defined many ways, but what it is, is a synonym for grace that dives deep. It is a covenantal, irrevocable love bestowed upon a beloved. It is unassailable. It is what I think about when I watch my kids cross into the school gate that I can’t, currently, cross with them: they are held by this chesed love that is greater than what even I can give them. It reminds me, it re-members me, when I am curled at home in a ring of anxiety wondering about their present and their future. They are beloved, and so am I. They are held in hesed, that which is greater than I can force or imagine.

All of us are held in this love. All of us were created to bear this love. This love that is greater than I can imagine, that cherishes me, it created and cherishes everyone, especially the brokenhearted, and it makes their lives matter. It proves their worth and it defies all hatred against them, and if I stand against them I stand against it. I stand against this death-defying, unassailable, perfect love.

I’m not going to do that.

The boys’ forced independence has forced dependence on my part: dependence on this greater love that holds them and directs their steps within a plan beyond what I can see, or smell, or imagine. I am counting on their belovedness, I am counting on mine, and I am coming to terms with all the ways I have begrudged others that belovedness before but how I can see it now, this love for all life that binds us together.

Yesterday, Little Brother had his first soccer practise and he ran up and down the field, pure joy streaking across his face. Later I got an email from The Kid’s teacher, letting me know he’d had a great day, how he had reached out to partner with the new girl in class and when another friend had wanted to join, he asked the teacher if they could have a group of three so she wouldn’t be left out. I watch these children of mine and know they are constant proof of a love greater than I have shown, greater than I can give. I see them as hope of a better world.

There is another Hebrew word I cling to: shalom. And it doesn’t mean, simply, peace like I used to think, but is better represented by wholeness. It’s a word that’s so far from describing our world right now, but its mere existence–like that of my children–is a source of hope: that it’s what we’re meant for. That it can be where we’re headed, carrying our grief for now but carried by what will heal it, all of us, the beloved.

“The big thing is so ridiculous that you absorb only the smaller miracles.” –Kevin Wilson, Nothing to See Here

On Sunday morning I was drinking my coffee when I received an email about Little Brother’s soccer team: they would be having their first practice the next day.

This is the soccer team that was formed nearly three months ago and whose original first practice had been called off, like so many things, due to the pandemic. I had been given second-hand uniforms from a friend but still lacked cleats and shinguards and whatever else you need to play soccer that I don’t know about because if it didn’t involve a book and solitude, then I didn’t grow up doing it, and the whole idea of this Big New Thing left me reeling. I’m not ready, I thought. I’m not ready for the real world yet.

I went outside to do some yoga a few minutes later, to relax and get away from all the people in my house, but the wind was whipping my mat around and I grew angrier by the second. I don’t think an ideal yoga practice is punctuated with obscenities, but there I was trying to relax, dammit while cursing the weather and the world.

Last week, when school was just occurring one day a week and I had opted out of the online homeschooling component and social interactions hadn’t graduated several levels, a friend and I talked about how maybe things were at the perfect point: there weren’t many obligations we had to meet or people we had to see. We had reached Optimal Pandemic Response Level and maybe could stay there awhile? But now the kids are back full-time and things are opening back up (slowly, here; what are all those assholes doing on the beaches in America?! GOOD LUCK WITH THAT) and the restart, this reintroduction into society, is making me pine a bit for our former seclusion. It’s also, apparently, making me angry.

Here’s the thing: when I’m carrying around irrational yoga-mat or otherwise-directed anger, I know it’s due to one or both of two things: anxiety and/or unprocessed grief. This is the kind of wisdom that therapy provides. I used to walk around the world bruised and mad and not knowing why. Now, when I scream “F— you!” at the wind, I think of what my counsellor would say: that anger happens when we haven’t properly grieved. Or what he did say, in our most recent session: that maybe the panic attacks and other anxiety have come up because that anxiety has always been there, latent, and this quarantine gave it space to rise to my awareness.

This makes me wonder what else is hiding in there, waiting to come up.

But I already know, really, and it’s new versions of the same thing. It’s the same sadness over the space between what the world is and what it should be; over the disappointments that arise when expectations are not met. It’s the anxiety of watching my children navigate this world and wanting to protect them through it in a way that would be unhealthy and suffocating for all of us. It’s living in this world, period, as myself, and dealing honestly with all that’s not perfect instead of distracting myself from it. And it’s doing that over and over again, like some kind of idiot, which is to say…surviving.

I went to the mall yesterday, nervously and begrudgingly (always), and picked up a book about raising kids with special needs. I wondered what advice I might glean from scanning and not buying it, and as I flipped through the pages, I realised it was a “how to” narrative that I have already “done” most of on my own. Battling loneliness, managing advocacy, facing denial–I’ve been there, and I will be there again, but I’m not where I was. Same thing, different view.

Then I drove to our new neighbourhood, where we’ll be unpacking in two weeks, and to a lookout near that house where we’ve spotted rainbows before. And then (because the kids were still at school!) I drove to our current nearby beach and walked it and looked at the same water I had just seen from a different vantage point. I thought about how it feels like this, how we’re always starting over at the same things. About what Michael Jordan had said on the last episode of The Last Dance, describing the beginning of his career with the Bulls: “Started with hope…started with hope.”

How, even with the grief and anxiety–no, because of it, because living deeply acquaints us even more with it–so within the grief and anxiety, at the start of every new thing, lies hope, which is really just grace born anew, over and over.

“The matter is taken out of my hands. And that means liberation. A great anxiety is lifted, the greatest of all.” –Karl Barth

Last week, the boys and I hit a wall. We actually hit several smaller walls on the way to this one but had somehow either pushed through those or found a way around them, but this wall…it was no joke. This wall had homeschooling written all over it and after hitting it, we were done.

I was tired, as previously mentioned, and this facet of tiredness had to do with juggling my mom and teacher roles, and feeling I was failing at both. Cracking the whip of learning while also trying to be their comforter and refuge. And for their part, the boys had turned into major assholes, defying my every instruction and groaning endlessly about the smallest amount of work. Things began to grind to a halt when Little Brother screamed out for help only for me to look up and see that he was…watching a video? And needed help with it? (See also: when he asked me the opposite of hot. They were done with the “thinking” portion of homeschool, is what I’m saying.)

So on Sunday night, after half-assedly brainstorming ways to make learning fun (gag), I came up with a plan. It should be noted, at this point, that I am great at plans. I’m fab with ideas. It’s the execution part at which I do not excel.

I emailed both The Kid’s and LB’s teachers and told them we’d be bowing out of online learning for the most part. That I was going to pursue more outdoor experiences, more on-the-ground-as-we-go lessons, more guided-by-their-interests projects. And after waiting nervously for responses that I ostensibly hoped would be positive but inwardly really hoped would acknowledge me as The Mother of the Universe for making this call, I heard back from the teachers. Their responses were affirming and lovely and, most practically, were green lights to my plan.

So Monday morning, I sat the boys on the couch with our whiteboard, which typically lists all of their assignments for the day and is the scourge of their, particularly TK’s, existence. And in dramatic fashion, I took the eraser and wiped the damn thing clean.

They didn’t get it at first. Then they tried to quantify what was happening: how many things did they actually have to do, then? Was spelling still on the table? What time would we finish this new kind of learning? But they were overall on board, as it sounded like less work than they’d been having to do, so we settled in to our new routine. I was chipper about it. This is always a bad sign: me being chipper.

After a bit of time at the table doing reading and maths, then on the floor doing English (conjunctions are like trains connecting sentences together and my children do not care), we headed out for the Field Study component of our lesson plan: a walk to the Aboriginal drawings in the nearby bushland. The last time I was near these drawings was during my twelve-hour hike and it was nighttime and I wanted to kill the world, so my approach had been a bit different.

This time, we parked at a nearby overlook and set out on the path I thought would take us quickly to the drawings. Surrounded by complaints about everything from my choice of parking to the existence of the sun, I felt my temper fraying. TK stopped to do a bush wee then complain some more. I may have whispered the words shut up. I may have muttered the words the fuck between them. There may have been tears and desperation. And we (I) may have finally given up and returned to the green oval to throw a football around then head home.

On our way to the car, though, something happened. TK, who is in that stage of Protesting Everything We Do and who is also a control freak like his mother, looked left and pointed out a rainbow. We have been positively rife with rainbows here lately, short rains giving way to sunlight and the spectrum of colours inhabiting the space between them. In this moment, the three of us looked across the water to that smattering of hues in the distant-but-not-too distant sky. And right there, the lesson plan changed.

On the way home, as they argued with me over which route to take, I told the boys how lucky we were: we had planned to see drawings that we can go back and view anytime, but instead we saw a rainbow that we could only catch in that moment. They argued this, telling me that we see lots of rainbows, but I told them how each rainbow is different from all others, just like each person is different from everyone else. Yes, I polished that turd up good, to a lovely sheen, but even I started to believe what I was saying. We went in with one plan, I told them, and got a rainbow instead. (And a blog post. Though I didn’t tell them that.)

And once we were home and they’d eaten the gourmet lunch I’d prepared (PB&J) and we had all retired to books/screens, I thought about how much I suck at execution, at how I always seem to have a plan but never seem to know the way. And how in the end–at the end of homeschooling, or saving myself and/or my children, or anything really–how that doesn’t matter, because grace has both a plan and a way. And they’re both so much better than mine.

I feel it all, I feel it all

The wings are wide, the wings are wide

Wild card inside, wild card inside…

I know more than I knew before

We bought a house. And I just dropped my kids off at school. You might say things are…settling into place?

You might, and you’d be wrong. Or at least only partially right? Because the thing I’m beginning to understand, after more than four decades on this planet (thank you, Jesus and therapy), is that it’s a bit more complicated than that. And complicated is something that scares the hell out of people.

But not me; not anymore. (At least, not most days. #workingonit)

So to begin again: yes, we bought a house. It was the one that we thought had slipped through our fingers a few weeks ago. Maybe that whole “let a thing go and if it comes back to you, it was meant to be yours” rings true now, or maybe it’s more complicated than that (you know I’ll go with option B; I never met a cliché I didn’t hate). All I know is that the agent came back to us after a week and we ended up striking a deal (by we I mean, of course, The Husband), and we’re moving seven minutes away in four weeks’ time. That, and there are two glorious bathtubs, which means the boys get their piss-filled one and I get my own. God is real, folks.

Second: the kids are back at school one day a week. And what a beautiful procession it was, the one-and-a-half block walk, the greeting of friends from a social distance (I received an illicit hug; oh, the joy!), the running onto the grounds where parents are, wonderfully, not currently allowed. The beauty of it all being in response to rational, scientific thinking instead of quarantine fatigue (feel that side-eye, America?).

So, at this moment, no one is touching me. No one is demanding that I wipe their ass or bring them food. A friend just texted, “this is one of the happiest days of my life.” GIRL, SAME.

And this feeling of all being right in the world? This sense of everything shifting back into its rightful place? This calm of well-being that pervades my soul? It shall last approximately five minutes before anxiety creeps back in and I fret over how the boys are doing and how much we have to pack.

“Know thyself,” goes the Greek maxim, and here’s the thing: I’m starting to. And it’s messy, and scary, and incredible.

There is a fringe contingent of Christianity (and I say fringe not because they’re crazy, but because everyone who doesn’t belong to it is) that is, finally, acknowledging the connection between self-awareness and mental health, between spiritual and mental health, between therapy and grace. And, because I get to police my own mental health if I don’t want it to fly off the rails, I’ve been diving deep into this group’s offerings: these therapists who cosign on such “woo-woo” practices as meditation, as attentiveness and awareness. Because the truth is that there a lot of people walking around with no sense of identity other than a narrative of their own making; living reactively rather than receptively; not knowing who the hell they are. And I know, all too well, what that’s like.

It’s captivity. And this is not how we are meant to live. It’s not how we were made to live.

If I sound a bit all over the place, a bit in the clouds, maybe it’s because I’ve been drinking for an hour (I’m KIDDING). No, maybe it’s because I am all over the place, and in the clouds. Because the freedom that comes with knowing how many terrifying and dark nooks and crannies there are within myself, and knowing at the same time that this is okay because grace is big enough to handle that and has always meant for me to be on a path into and through that? That is true freedom. That is joy. That is resistance to the status quo of “be positive and agreeable and hide/fight the hard stuff.”

Fleming Rutledge writes, “the beginning of resistance is not to explain, but to see. Seeing itself is a form of action.” We seek simple answers–explanations–because they distract us from the truth that much of life is more complicated than we’re comfortable with seeing; there’s more mystery than we want. We want to know that everything is shifting into place and moving back to normal because we can’t face the idea that things may never be truly normal again.

Well, I’ve lived with “not normal” for awhile now, and it’s kind of wonderful. Also, it can suck. There’s room for both here.

Kay Redfield Jamison wrote An Unquiet Mind (girl, mine too!) and in it she says, “I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces…It is, at the end of the day, the individual moments of restlessness, of bleakness, of strong persuasions and maddened enthusiasms, that inform one’s life, change the nature and direction of one’s work, and give final meaning and colour to one’s love and friendships.”

So, to recap: here, there is room to despair. There is room to feel sad. There is room to be angry. There is room to say “this isn’t right, nor is it okay, Whitney.” There is freedom to look around and mutter, “This sucks,” much like even my five- and eight-year-old boys do (back off, pearl-clutchers; we actually say much worse around our house; remind me to tell you of the Lego Incident of last weekend).

“To see yourself,” writes Sarah Wilson, “to see that you are part of a big magnificent whole–you have to go to the depths…but–oh glory be–by being in our anxiety, by going down to the dark depths, we finally find the connection. Because anxiety, eventually and inevitably, makes us sit in our shit. It takes us there, to the darkness. It forces us to do the journey. And only then can we see what we were looking for. We can see the truth. We see it all as it is.”

As it is. Not as we want it to be, or as we’re trying to make it. Not as we want ourselves to be, or as we’re trying to seem. What we are, as Wilson writes, is what “guides us home.” And that is not a chin-up moment of decision, but a journey.

So if you’d like to be a shit-sitter, come sit by me. I won’t ask you to change, or pretend, but just to look. To see. To gaze boldly around, ahead, and take in the awful magnificence of this world and ourselves: the dark nooks and crannies and the terrifying unpredictability and the wonderful truth that this world–that we–are so much more than one thing. That we are full of the beauty of unexplainable mystery. And so, thank God, is grace.

It’s like learning to ride a bike.

I think about that phrase often these days, as we’ve given the boys new bikes–not the crappy Cars– and Paw Patrol-themed hunks of metal they had before, but legitimate ones they can ride for years. They both still sport training wheels, which is a liability in a place where every other kid seems to not do so, but I’m willing to bet none of them ever had spinal surgery and a halo when they were two so they can ride off into the sunset for all I care; we will get there when we get there. Which, by our estimates, will be tomorrow, when we take our maiden voyage without said training wheels. #prayersplease

The other day, The Kid–after yelling at me to “keep holding him!” (he had a fall a couple of weeks ago and hasn’t bounced back yet)–started his ride with a query for me. “So,” he began. “How’s it going with your husband, Dad? Is he being nice to you? Tell me some stories about it.”

Later on the trail, we talked about fear and how it can help us in dangerous situations but hurt us other times, if we let it run the show. This may be the hardest part of parenting to me: the groundwork-laying that–instead of letting me off the hook to just skip over the givens that I’ve come to accept–asks me to teach these details to my kids, which can be sooooo tedious and always involves questions from them, typically of the why variety–my least favourite.

But this time, after my lecture on fear, TK just nodded his head. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s why I ask you those questions at the beginning of the ride. And why I want to talk the whole way. So I don’t think about my fear.”

This is the same kid who, this morning, wheels turning almost visibly in his head, turned to me and said, “Mom? I think human beings are actually the disease that is killing the earth.” So…yeah. My mind’s been blown a few times lately by him.

And it’s been beaten down, by this whole unrequested teaching gig. We struggle over next-level addition and subtraction and multiplication and division and I want to scream (and often do), and then I remember that it wasn’t long ago we were struggling through adding single digits together, and now I get (get?) to watch him put the pieces together, build on top of what we’ve already done. This is what learning looks like, what growth looks like, and I’m bearing witness to it in a way I never would have chosen and will be happy to hand off again but for now…it’s a bit breathtaking.

Little Brother works alongside us, starting with the basics as kindergarteners do, and after he reads a bit and adds a bit and spells a bit, he calls me over to his break area, the tent that’s been set up in our living room/school annex/fort centre, and he invites me inside to tell him, again, the fart story I made up a few days ago, and he laughs as hard this time as he did the first. And instead of giving into tedium and claustrophobia I try to sit there, in that close space with him, where it is warm and did I mention close, and I remember being a kid myself and gravitating toward spaces like this that felt me-sized and safe. And I feel that way again, with him pressed into me. Back to the basics.

My first day of working at NYU, I was introduced to an over-fifty-years-my-senior Southern gentleman in a bowtie who immediately became one of my closest friends at work, and in life. We would meet at the opera and ballet and over lunches. Once I moved, and would come back for visits, he and I would catch up at his apartment overlooking Central Park, and I’d call him from Atlanta to update him on my life. He always sent a Christmas card. Five years ago, he took me for dessert while I was in New York for the weekend, and as we said goodbye on the corner of Central Park West and he walked away, a feeling pierced me that this was the last time I’d see him.

I was right. The next time I called him, it was clear he was struggling to remember who I was but was making a valiant effort of pretending he knew. This week, I got another feeling, and I searched online to find out he passed away a month ago, of natural causes, in his apartment overlooking Central Park. He was ninety-five.

I grieve for him. There seems to be grief to spare these days, given the new world we inhabit. I find myself writing in my planner now not what I’m going to do but what we’ve done, memorable things the boys have said or small events that have already taken place. Commemorations. This act not of planning so much now, but remembering. Re-membering, the pieces starting small but somehow building, all these moments of endings and beginnings adding together to create a whole and new thing.