Yesterday, we had to stop the car to let a bush turkey cross the road.

Things like this are part and parcel of our life in Australia; oddities that are no longer oddities; the day-to-day around here. All the elements of our life here–the birds that sound like small children crying, the spider webs stretching across street blocks, the seagull poo dotting the sidewalks–my brain has moved them from Strange to Normal territory; my ears block them out, my hands automatically brush them away, my steps avoid them.

What once used to be my bedtime soundtrack–the horns and sirens and noise of New York City–had to, a couple of weeks ago, be blocked out by earplugs after my valiant, sleepless effort to prove I hadn’t changed that much. Then came the manicured and predictable paths of suburbia, with even the hidden corners feeling polished: my walk with The Niece down hills and over creeks with rocks arranged just so (naturally, we had to move them, via splashy-tossed rearrangements).

I didn’t know how much I missed–no, need–the bigger water until I returned to it. Now it glimmers outside my window, and one thought, above the stretching of love across the world, wins out: it’s good to be home.

It’s good to be back to the bridge that raises and lowers outside our window every day, The Kid alerting me to its activity. It’s good to be back to the smell of salt in the air. It’s good to be back to two bodies pressed against mine on the couch. It’s good to be back to dropping temperatures and shorter days.

It’s not quite as good to be back to TK running into the bathroom, asking what kind of poo I’m doing: “Is it diarrhoea?” To the privacy of solo plane rides shattered by Little Brother yelling from the next room: “Hey James, let’s go put our penises on something!” To “HEY!” yelled in my general direction when a need remains unmet for longer than three seconds.

“Why are you so angry?” The Husband asked the other night after a simple question was met with a guttural sigh and frenzied tone from me. I was jet-lagged, sure, but it was more. It was culture shock: my solo self clattering back into my decidedly accompanied self. “Reentry is…hard,” I answered.

And yet it often seems to be what my life is made of: reentry into the South after five years in New York. Reentry into America after years of Australia. Reentry into New York after a year away from its streets. Reentry into Atlanta and family and friendships after months of long-distance. Reentry into reality after holiday. The landings are often delayed, and rarely perfectly smooth. There are adjustments that need to be made, laundry to be done, Game of Thrones episodes to be caught up on.

But there are also reports: of Little Brother regaling his friends and teachers with song reprises–“Sunflower” and “Shotgun” are current favourites. Stay tuned, You Tube. There is TK’s assessment that term two is “going so great so far!” There are familiar faces and terrain. In the midst of reentry and what feels like a growing unpredictability about life the older we get (waiting on our local package, wondering if we should plan for American or Australian high schools, not exactly having a clear idea of where we’ll be past a year or so down the road…) there is…home. Right now.

“Is it the future?” TK asked me on the way to school this morning, and any sense I have of time grows skewed with age (see above, and also a recent viewing of Avengers: Endgame). “It’s the present,” I told him. “What’s the present?” he asked, and I thought for a minute. “Now is the present,” I said. “So…it’s always the present?”

He looked like me after the Endgame credits rolled. As in, “I have…questions.”

The Husband and I, two consummate planners, are living one foot in front of the other (much like my hike from a couple months ago, but with less visible blistering). Manna and mystery are our diet, along with lots of carbs. I long for the order of a bullet-pointed list, the assurance of a set-in-stone calendar…even as I’m pulled, and even brought to strange new life by, waves of unpredictability and seasons of change.

There’s that classical music station I love, the notes falling in a textbook rhythm most hours, but in the middle of the day they change tunes. And it sounds like what is happening with us, this life we’re called to that defies expectations and what we planned for it, the neurotypical and the not-so-typical, the manicured lawns and the bush turkeys, and a grace that seems to be making jazz out of my life: rhythm giving way to wandering, notes lingering into the future that becomes the present, the blue of the sea and the sky sometimes indistinguishable, with the biggest surprise being…that I like it.

A couple of weeks ago I picked The Kid up early from school for his Monday speech therapy appointment. I told him, as we drove, about a book I had gotten him and his brother about kids who are different and do cool things: profiles of men and women who started out a bit unusual and went on to change the world.

From the backseat, he pondered this briefly then asked something I didn’t understand–hence, the speech therapy–and, as is often the case when I need him to repeat something, he grew frustrated. Finally I comprehended him: “Are the people in the book autistic?” he was asking.

I inhaled sharply. It was the first time he’s used the A-word, as we usually call it his Apple Brain, a phrase that seems more personalised and descriptive of who he is and feels less like a label. He went on to ask several more questions about autism, including whether individual members of our family are autistic “I wish my brother was,” he mused). I asked what made him wonder about all this: whether someone had mentioned autism lately outside of my talk to his class, and he responded that it was that talk that led to the questions. Later that day, he mentioned casually, “I’m an irregular kid.”

Cue the heartbreak. I had told him earlier that I was glad he and Little Brother are different because they can teach each other and us their own things. But this irregular talk–I didn’t like the sound of that, and I wondered if someone had called him that. No one had, he replied–it was just his logic making sense of his differences. He attached no negativity to the word, it was just how he saw it in the greater scheme of things. Dare I say he even sounded a bit proud of the distinction?

I of course analysed this…well, up to and past this very moment of writing it. But no matter how many ways I look at it, he seemed okay with it. And for all my fretting and searching, there’s a growing part of me that is too.

Because I am irregular. I write this from a hotel room in New York City, cranes churning and buses honking outside my window, a place I sought out because I didn’t fit in any longer where I was. Here, I found friends and The Husband and grace. I grew up. I found home, so much so that the streets are imprinted in my memory and on my heart: odd numbers west, even east. The layout of this island is a map of me, ten years ago and somehow forever, a barrage of memories pummelling me as I ran along the East River this morning, as I picked up a bagel and coffee from my corner shop, as I stood before my old apartment building and the fire escape where I thought and wrote, as I walked past TH’s old building where he proposed on the rooftop. It still fits and it doesn’t, restaurant fronts changing over and my old gym disappeared, so much changed and unchanged, like me.

I would never have come here if I had been regular.

If I had been regular, I never would have had the precedent set in my mind and soul that home can be a thousand miles away, to set me free to let it become ten thousand. I never would have flown across oceans and hemispheres or met the people I now call friends. I, my children, never would have had the stamps on our passports, would never have seen kangaroos up close, would never have descended over the mountains of the south island of New Zealand, would never have stood on an island off Tasmania with the bay on one side and the ocean on the other. There’s so much we never would have seen, felt, done.

And in a text from TH as I was dragging my jet-lagged ass to bed last night, scenes that I’m missing across the world, from the backseat once again:
LB: “James, ‘Sit Still Look Pretty’ is a girls’ song.”
TK: “Well sometimes boys like girls songs.”

YES. My irregular kids, schooling each other on the way HOME from McDonald’s, sharpening and teaching each other as I, ten thousand miles away yet always right with them, split my heart between homes and time zones and all the irregularities of my own path. Just the way it should be.

I am brave, I am bruised, I am who I’m meant to be
This is me.

My boy is covered in scars.

The other day I noticed some scabs on his elbow and asked him about them. He grew defensive, thinking I was upset, when all I wanted was the story. He’s growing so much more confident these days–swinging from the monkey bars he used to avoid, running with his friends on the playground–that accidents are bound to happen. Scars are bound to show up. There’s his elbow, which will bear a mark, and there’s the line going down his neck from the spinal surgery, and the dots on his forehead from the halo afterward. There are the callouses on his hands, where he gently bites when he gets excited.

So maybe not exactly covered, but I feel them all. I carry them too. And there are enough there, I think, even as I know there could be more to come.

The boys asked me the other day for a definition for courage. I thought of what my answer would have been in a previous life, the one before them, before grace: doing big and scary things? Taking a huge, noticeable leap? Something public, to be sure. Something grandiose. Fearless.

Like moving to New York, maybe? People told me I was brave then, leaving the familiarity of my Southern home for the wilds of a concrete jungle, but I just felt out of options. I was desperate, not courageous.

I see courage now in so many of the things we don’t choose. In the scar from the port the doctor placed to pump medicine in. In the scarf worn once the hair loss has grown noticeable. In the mother sitting beside her two-year-old who’s receiving chemo every other week. In the six-year-old who walks into the hospital and then fights, but emerges hours later into the sun. In seeking therapy for a problem we never wanted to have.

And then…in telling these stories. The stories not of glory, but of wounds. These wounds are when are insides are forced to emerge on the outside, our greatest fears gone public without our permission, our being forced to admit we can’t do it all the way we thought we could before.

I remember standing in the cold at dusk on a New York sidewalk in the depths of a seasonal depression. I stayed. I was braver then than in the U-Haul, riding in the sun toward things I didn’t even know.

Courage is knowing, and staying anyway. Emerging.

When we were in New York with the kids, a busker was playing the trumpet under a bridge in Central Park. “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” bounced off the walls of the tunnel, emerging into the spring air. Later, I took the subway down to Union Square on my own. I had forgotten that the farmer’s market would be there, white tents gleaming in the Saturday sun. I emerged from the damp depths underneath it all into that sunlight, the memories catching up with my present, bringing it all into one moment: this moment on the New York pavement, a book to launch and a man to be married to and boys to raise and a life to live here, and in Atlanta, and in Sydney. One boy in constant need of attention and the other in constant need of assurance, and yet they both want to know what it is, this word: courage. They need music for the lyrics. They want to be brave, we all do, before we learn about the scars involved–some songs have so many sharps and flats.

“It’s when you’re scared and you do it anyway,” I told them, knowing how begrudging that “doing it anyway” can be, how much I’ve fought it, how many times I’ve said no before the yes was nearly forced from me, was pulled even without my will, how often I would have run down another path given the choice. Does being brave even exist when its truest moments demand so much of what we never would have given on our own?

“You’re both brave,” I tell them, knowing how much higher the cost can grow as they do, wishing for no more scars even as I know how the stories that come with them can knit us to the people we’re meant to be with, and make us who we’re meant to become. Knowing that when we emerge on the other side, wherever that is, the biggest grace is not that we limped to the line, but were brought there.

The attention-seeker asks for the circus song from the backseat, and I love that one too. Next, the assurance-lover asks for his favourite. And because we know the words and the melody, we can sing all the songs, together.

“Are you home now?” she asked me, her kindness over the last fourteen hours adding to my tearfulness, which I hid successfully until after telling her that yes, we were home. She welcomed me back, then set about preparing the cabin for landing. She had let me sleep on the floor with Little Brother (#noupgradesthistime), had offered the boys toys, had looked after us, and her kindness–on top of the series finale of Friends that I had just engaged in emotional masochism by watching–and on top of the exhaustion from travel–and on top of the recently (as in, five minutes ago) acquired monthly hormonal influx–it nearly undid me. When she walked away, my eyes overflowed. I thought of all the places we’d been in the last two weeks, all the people we’d seen, all the love I’d felt.

We are constantly saying goodbye.

I brace myself for these flights, these visits, these journeys across the world and back, saying it’s about the difficulty of traveling with small children, or the jet lag we’ll experience, or the bouncing around from place to place. But really, mostly, it’s about the pain: about the mandated letting-go, the onslaught of emotions that threaten my fragile composure, that beckon my anxiety. It’s about not wanting to feel so much.

I’ve always failed at not feeling so much. And I’m so grateful for that.

This morning, The Kid sobbed in bed with me. The Husband was downstairs with Little Brother, who had woken up at 3:45 am, talking nonstop in the pre-dawn hours since. TK, though, he slept two hours later than his brother then woke up tearful and afraid. He didn’t want to go back to school. It was hard, he said, and boring, and could I go see the principal about getting this term shortened to four days? I said I would, I told him I would share his sad, I prayed. Proving that everything looks worse in the dark, he bounced out of bed an hour later, and ran into his classroom without a look back. First: he feels everything. Then: he lives. I like this blueprint.

There is so much we did while we were gone that I don’t even know where to begin. So I’ll begin here: I’d never been to the Central Park Zoo. I’d walked by it, glanced at the sea lions from behind the gate, but never actually been inside. This trip to New York was full of firsts, and so many of them were because of the kids: first trip to the Zoo, first time renting the remote-control sailboats, first time flying down the slide of a playground with a skyscraper view, first time ending my Central Park run early with The Sis because we were too tired and so we just walked and talked. First time launching a book, and can I just tell you, doing so in front of TH and the boys, watching my sons watch me onstage and know they were a part of it? It was everything. But in case everything wasn’t enough, TH had recruited surprises: The Mom and Sis, my college bestie, Yankee Mom and Dad, and, later, my Second Husband* along with all the rest for a round-table dinner full of wine and laughter and love. We walked, we took the subway, we brunched. The expectations were low, and they were defied. Surpassed.

I did sleep on the floor of the plane on the way back, but you can’t have it all.

My phone immediately picks up the wireless at our Atlanta house, at the church where the Mockingbird conference is held, at my sister’s place. How are all these places not home? And yet, all these places are home.

This morning, I walked into seas of people I know. At LB’s school, his favourite girl walked up and announced, “Will is my best friend,” and off they went to play legos. In TK’s classroom, a boy greeted him, “Hello, different James,” and I bristled until realising it was because the other James in his class was already there. He’s just another James. And not, of course.

We are constantly saying hello.

We can’t stay in one place, and yet we do. We can’t call more than one place home, and yet we do. We can’t deal with all the emotions, and yet we do. We live within the impossible constantly made possible.

And when the leaving gets to be too much, when all I want to do is find one place and stay there, I look around and realise: we do stay. Because the four of us–we stay together.

*if he turns straight, and things with TH don’t work out

I lived in New York for five years.

Half a decade. It’s a long time–both long enough, and not nearly enough, but that’s how hearts work: splitting the difference, stretching across miles, scattering around places. When I first arrived in the city, summer of 2005, I spent those days before work began just walking around, circling the perimeter and moving my way inward, exploring side streets and main avenues, finding my favorite spots and avoiding the ones that I didn’t feel were for me. I became a part of New York, and it became a part of me, over those five years, but the early days are what I remember most: the unfamiliarity becoming familiar, the unknown becoming known, the uncertain becoming…home.

One of my proudest moments happened on an afternoon when I left work and emerged onto 51st Street. A group of construction workers stood atop a dump truck in front of our building, and as I headed toward 2nd Avenue, I heard the unmistakable sound of “locker room talk” from their perch. Their native language was once my second one, back in high school before I lost it, and in a fit of rage I spun around and yelled, “YO HABLO ESPANOL, ASSHOLES!” Their shocked expressions gave way to mirth and, I think, a kind of grudging respect, and I turned the corner feeling like I had finally made it here. Now, off to everywhere.

I thought I was bold then. I had no idea what was coming next.

You entered the scene on a stick, in plans and prayers, and then a spot of blood that became a phone call that became a ride to the hospital, and from that day everything changed. These past five years have been short, their days long, so much and yet never enough, and it’s hard to remember there was ever a time without you.

I almost can’t breathe when I think of how much I love you. Your little brother. Our family. You are me, my insides and my life, my breath and my hope. My insanity and my recovery, a part of every prayer and word. I am utterly ruined, and finally remade.

But first: a brief history.

I circled around you those early days too, like I did the city, but in more confined spaces and darker times, early-morning wake-ups and late-night cries. You wrecked me. I needed it. But I fought it anyway. I didn’t know how to be me, and your mom. I’m still working on that, but now I know they’re somehow the same, pieces fitting together slowly but more surely each day, as we still circle each other, drifting slowly in from the perimeter to end at early-morning moments with you next to me in bed, saying the word it took four years to hear as though you love the sound of it as much as I do: “Mommy.” I catch you looking at me, studying me like I do you, and we both grin, your smile a mixture of mine and your dad’s, your understanding beyond description. We have gone through so much to get here: nights on the high-risk ward, willing you to stay put. Nights in the neuro ward, willing you to drink so we could go home. Willing you to heal so I could breathe again. Days in therapy, willing you to speak. Willing this to get easier.

It has. But beautiful? It’s been that the whole time. You’ve been that the whole time.

I thought I was brave on 51st Street; you’ve been brave on operating tables and in scanning machines, through evaluations and in waiting rooms. The old me would have never called a child my hero. How many parents can say that–that their hero is their son? All these gifts you’ve given, and each of them so unexpected. I never would have chosen them, but grace would have nothing else: how like it to show up as a child.

Oh, and that? That first Christmas season, when we had barely gotten the lights strung and the stockings hung before you made your entrance, and I waited before for you, then waited after for Him, and for help. Advent would never be the same, this season of waiting, of expectation, of knowing how much more I needed than just myself. This year, though–this year was something else.

Your first year with words, and on December 1 it was like you knew it had begun. We were the only two downstairs, and you grabbed my hand. “Mommy, mommy, come to the red room and look at the Christmas tree!” And in the early-morning darkness, we turned on the lights together, and your face lit up in response. You patted the chair next to you and we sat there, gazing at the tree–we always find our stories, our rescue, at trees!–and in your face I saw my own, as a child and, in pieces, now, the hope and joy that can’t be too unlike that of the angels, they gazing now at what we wait for to happen and yet know by faith in every moment.

For this is what you do, what you’ve always done: you reset me. You force me, in your gentle and hard ways, to slow down. To breathe differently, as an act not just of survival, but of faith. You make me sit, and see. You have made it five years of Advent every day, waiting and watching all that you become. You, your brother, your dad, and grace itself through each of you and in its myriad ways, transforming my days and my growth into an unwinding instead of unraveling, unfurling rather than coming undone though they can often feel one and the same. I am assured, by Advent, by your story, by faith, that they are not.

And one more thing: all those months and years we longed for a brother for you, the loss before the yes, and the time I thought was too long, the separation in ages I wanted to diminish, it is perfect, of course. His words at first surpassing yours, and you now teaching him not just speech, but so much else. I watch each of you, so alike and so different, and feel my heart–as hearts often do–stretch between two tentpoles, land in different places, unfurl across the hemispheres of this world, of each of you, and of a grace that stretches five years, ten thousand miles, and forever.