When I was in high school, I saw something that I’ll never forget. On a ski trip to Colorado with my youth group (there’s nothing white Christian kids love more on spring break than to hit the slopes for Jesus!), I was fresh out of ski school and toward the end of a green trail which, it seemed, had LIED TO ME because the finale of that trail was a downward slope that might as well have been a jump off a cliff. I turned to my right, hoping a snow angel would appear to escort me down, and noticed a group of skiers congregated together, all wearing fluorescent bibs over their ski suits that read “BLIND SKIER.”

Well shit, I thought (though at the time I was a Good Girl so it was probably more like, Well good grief, Charlie Brown), my self-pity forcefully evaporating in an instant. If they can do it… I turned my skis toward the bottom of the cliff, arranged them in a V open toward me, and made my way down my own path at approximately 0.5 miles per hour, terrified but moving.

While living in New York, I attended church one evening and heard the familiar strains of one of my favorite hymns, “Be Thou My Vision.” I had listened to Ginny Owens’ version countless times in the years preceding my move, typically from the bottom of relationship valleys or the top of ill-advised personal cliffs I couldn’t see a way safely down, and it had saved me from despair so many times, pointing me home. On this occasion, it being New York, I looked up and saw Ginny Owens herself take the stage, and was reminded immediately of one of the primary features that had led her to a life of music: her blindness. And girlfriend was singing “Be Thou My Vision.” I thought about that. I thought about the blind skiers. I thought about all that had changed between that moment and this one, how in high school I had seen the skiers as a reminder from a lesson-oriented God that I should be more grateful. And how now, I just felt loved by him because of this woman he had put in my path who, in her weakness that was actually strength, pointed my skis back toward him before he picked me up, reminding me he can carry me down every cliff.

So imagine my shock recently when I realized my vision still isn’t perfect, after all these years.

The Kid is very into signs right now. He asks me what every sign in the world says, saving particular urgency for the “do not”-type signs: the forbidden sins of the law. I’ll tell him (amending the content at times; the “no guns” sign on the front of his school, for example, becomes “don’t bring your own toys because we have some here”). Each time I provide him the directive represented by the sign, he says he wants to do that very thing. My sweet little rule-follower; he and I both know the closest he’ll come to law-breaking is just saying he will. What he wants to know are the consequences. They give him context for what these rules mean. So when I tell him we can’t make a U-turn here and he says let’s make a U-turn and I tell him again that we can’t, he leans back in his seat and responds sagely, “That would be a time out.”

In seeing seemingly everything, he is showing me all I am blind to; all the things I miss. He never fails to notice where the sun and moon are, whether they’re little or big or orange, or whether the clouds are white or purple. And it’s beautiful, it really is. And it’s not lost on me that a few short months ago, he was “asking” me what things were by pointing at them and screeching. Now, it’s “that one Mommy, what’s that one?” It’s so wonderful and exquisite and blessed and sometimes I feel that if he tells me how to drive one more time I will RUN THE CAR OFF A DAMN BRIDGE.

Because the thing about having a suddenly verbal and always-bright child is that he has A LOT TO TELL YOU. Particularly, about how to get home. Like which lane to take, and where to turn. Like his mother, he would prefer that a driver go ahead and pull into the exit lane way ahead of the exit–but his preference is on the order of miles. So I hear his whining from the backseat whenever I don’t move according to his timetable, and I hear myself saying things like, “You have to let me drive, buddy. You have to trust Mommy to get us where we’re going.”

Good advice. I should listen to it myself.

As I dispense this advice, I hear grace whisper into my ear, gently and not in a lesson-oriented way, but unmistakable all the same, about the irony of my saying such things. About my own inability to take my hands off the wheel, my own need to direct the car, whichever road trip I’m currently on. “No thank you, we will not be uprooting our lives and moving across the world,” I directed, before pretending I was open to it by asking for a change of heart if necessary, and clear signs. Because that’s how we overly-spiritualizing grown-ups do it: we pray for clarity, which is really just asking for a sign, which is really just asking for control over the situation. A hand on the wheel. When the whole time, we’re always going to get home.

“Let the little children come to me,” goes the old story, and we talked about it on Sunday, how that may mean something different from (just) what we were always taught: how it might not just be about blind faith like children seem to have, but it might also be about the divine recognition of the not-so-warm-and-fuzzy things about kids–their petulance, their demands, their insistence on knowing the way–and that same divine recognition of all that stuff still in me, and the fact that we’re still invited in. The kingdom still belongs to us, not because we’re (just) joyful and trusting and excited, but even when we’re not. Maybe especially when we’re not, because it’s then we know that it was never about us or what we did/were in the first place.

As for my sign that we should move to Australia? It’s sitting in our entryway, boxed up and ready to travel with us: a wrought-iron plate with a post that will be embedded in our front yard, and on the plate, our family name and the numbers of our new latitude and longitude there. I didn’t see it in the catalogue until after we made the decision to go, after the whisper in my heart was unmistakable, even in the absence of a neon YES or NO. Maybe that’s because we’re not given signs; we’re given invitations, and once we recognize that the “yes” was always there, on our side and on grace’s, we get the signs then.

“…this is what I learned: that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness–the beauty and mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books–can re-dignify the worst stung heart.” –Mary Oliver

I didn’t want to like the show This is Us. The early photos bathed the characters in a gossamer glow that I know for a fact is NOT a component of real life. The first trailer left me writing the whole thing off as a melodrama that my cynical self would be better off avoiding. Then the magical word, twist, was mentioned, and I headed to the internet for spoilers, and despite my intentions, with the pilot’s biggest secret already lodged in my brain, I watched that first episode, and the one after, and every one since. I love it. There’s melodrama, sure, but there’s also a healthy dose of self-deprecation, along with the absence of pretending like what makes each character an outsider–the color of his skin, the number on her scale–is either not there or is the only thing about them. They do difference well. They do…differents well. And I know about some different. (Also, in case you’re wondering, I’m such a Randall. Quiz forthcoming.)

Last week I came across the idea of collective effervescence, which has to do with group unity conferring sacredness (and not buying the world a Coke, like I had guessed). Connectedness has been on my mind lately as The Kid is getting older and more aware of the world around him–and, wonderfully, interacting with it and its citizens more. While his growth toward people and even into simple friendships has been heartbreakingly welcome, it’s also left me heartbroken over leaving: leaving this place that is not just our home, but his, this place where he is known and embraced, where he has a place. Or, as he put it this weekend in the car, where he has something else: I was driving him to his swim lesson and telling him about all the people who love him, and after a beat of silence he responded, “James has people.” And he does–we do–these friends who are family: girls with whom I drink wine and commiserate over motherhood and special needs; sisters (both from the same and different misters) who gather at a hotel for a night away with me, at least half of which consists of either sleeping or reading silently near each other; friends who open their homes to us and our children and know our stories so well that those homes feel like an extension of our own. Kids who see something of themselves in TK and engage in endless chasing and rule-breaking games of “Duck Duck Goose” with him, who refer to him as “my James,” and people who tell me about how content Little Brother is, and how joyful. And we’re LEAVING THIS?!

Hey God, testing one-two-three: are you sure? And is this mic working? And is that a megaphone in your hand?

And so the days that began so darkly back when TK was on tables and in waiting rooms begin to gather this light around the edges until it seeps in everywhere and I begin seeing everything differently: how his anxiety can be managed, like mine, just by knowing him, our family of four sitting for lunch on a restaurant patio where LB, child of us both but especially of his father, grins easily and placidly from his seat and I watch TK take frequent “motor breaks” to circle the tables. I am learning which battles to fight and when to lay down the armor, and it helps. What helps most, maybe, is seeing myself in him, in knowing that whatever outsider status could be conferred in him will be swallowed up by a greater acceptance, the source of which also issues the plan for his life that includes redeeming all the hurt and all the pain and all the dark days. I see that the other world he inhabits is overlapping more and more with everyone else’s, and the joy I feel is aided and abetted by an acknowledgement of the beauty of his world–the things in it I never would have seen without him–and what was my fear regarding that world is being transformed into gratitude for it. Gratitude for what makes him, and each of us, different, those differences driving him to all the places and people that are for him.

Which is what I’ve been praying for with this move: that a place, and people, will be prepared for us–and us for them.

I go to his school early to pick him up and tell his teacher about our impending cross-world transfer. She tells me when I enter the room that when the intercom informed her of a visitor, TK proudly announced, “That’s James’s mom.” He hurls the door open for me and can’t stop grinning, his person finally here for him. A few minutes later, we’re walking down the hall together. We’re greeted along the way–so many people know his name! So many people know him, and soon more will–and when I turn to glance at him, he reaches for my hand and locks eyes with me, the grin deepening in his cheeks and he looking like he can’t believe his luck, to be here with me. His luck. This moment, like the one later with LB on my lap while I read to him, like so many that just keep adding up, bathed in a gossamer glow I never knew was this real.

Last week, The Husband and I were both able to go to Little Brother’s preschool fall party. We walked in ambivalently, feelings split because a) we love LB, so we wanted to be with him; and b) we are true introverts, so the thought of awkwardly conversing with parents we don’t know while our kids “make crafts” in front of us was enough to send us both burrowing into Netflix for the afternoon instead. Alas, we persevered and, when LB saw us in the doorway, his face lit up. He proceeded to show us around his classroom–and by that, I mean that he pointed to artwork on the walls and declared, “Apple!” to identify…well, everything. His joy at our being there, his pride in something that is just his, his growing confidence–it all reminds me of The Kid, now. But it also stands in stark contrast to The Kid, then. Back when he didn’t point, or show us things, or say a word. Back when he was himself, but not as fully as he is now. A version of him that is growing into more. LB starts in a different place than TK did, and I find myself grateful for the battles he doesn’t have to face even as I know he’ll have his own, even as his ease reminds me of TK’s difficulties. With all their similarities, they each have their own path. We all do.

“We’re versions of each other; we’re not the same,” said Norman Lear this week on Pete Holmes’s podcast, which is, I think, a more succinct way of expressing what I just wrote. I saw my likeness in TK last week, when TH and I took him and LB to the neighborhood playground, a site of some of my darkest fears and deepest anxieties. My children hanging from metal structures as if defying gravity, and my own breathlessness rises with their bravery, their growing confidence, side by side doing the things that, only recently, neither could. Growing in tandem and teaching each other, TK’s improving motor skills and confidence the source of so much of their movement and my anxiety. Brutal beauty. My likeness showing up as he steps out in air, then in hesitation pulls back: not yet. A few other kids show up, and the familiar cocktail of emotions assaults me: hope, fear, nervousness. At one point, TK runs over to a group of them, hovering around the edges, present but observing more than participating, and I am that kid again, on the outskirts, and in this moment I would do anything to protect him from the inevitable hurt of just growing up even as I know what gifts it can bring with it. I want to rescue them both, scoop them up before they ever hit the ground, intervene before feelings are ever bruised. The certainty that I can’t kills me. He runs back over and he’s smiling. Meanwhile, maybe I’ll start breathing again soon.

The next day I’m still battling the anxiety and the fear that kept me up the night before, that began on the playground and played out into the future as I lay in bed and wondered what their lives will look like. If people will understand TK, if LB will stand by his big brother, if…they will be okay. I “run into” my friend at the gym and she knows from my questions about her son, a decade and a half older than TK yet so similar–versions of each other–that I’ve worked myself into a knot. That I need reassurance, and truth, and hopefully those are the same thing.

They are.

“Don’t borrow worry from tomorrow,” she tells me, and I already knew this but somehow in the hearing it helps me breathe again. It reminds me of what my pastor and friend says, what he told me in his office when I came to complain about God moving us across the world: He’s still on the throne. Don’t take him off and put yourself there. It reminds me, too, of what I read this morning, that peace isn’t about the absence of something–challenges, difficulties, struggles–but about the presence of something bigger. Grace, which never leaves. The throne, it is taken. I begin to open my eyes, to look up. Ephphatha.

I think about how my friend, whose kid faces his own challenges that are different from ours but somehow make us all look more alike, how all they’ve been through has put them in contact with people, into friendships, they never would have known otherwise. “Our people,” I tell her, and when I go with LB to pick TK up from school that afternoon–one of our favorite parts of the day, jointly–we welcome him into our arms and I hear a kid in the office a few feet away exclaim, “There’s James!” I look over at him, this face I don’t even know who knows my son’s and therefore mine, and I search for meanness or ridicule. There is none. There is friendliness, and kindness. “James is a friend,” TK tells me all the time. And on Halloween–the first one we’ve actually participated in, the first year he goes up to each house boldly and excitedly–when we head back home, he puts himself in charge of handing out the candy. “More friends are coming to our house!” he turns to me and says, grinning, and the cynic in me wants to warn him, to prepare him for the people who won’t be “friends”–but something inside is changing. I am still me, but I’m growing into a version that is more fully me. And I grin back at him, nodding through tears, because that’s what life is–smiles and tears–and he, we, will have both. But right now he is all joy. Right now, there is a quote book inside that I bought because now we have words from both of them that could fill it. Right now, I am being emptied of all my crap, slowly but surely, so that I can live and love more fully. All the parts of me are coming to life, and breathing, and this is what being fully alive means: the hurt, and the fear, and the joy all there.

And I think of another thing I heard, how the voice had said what the author had written: “Sometimes I wonder if the burdens we carry don’t end up carrying us.” I gently amend it in my head, knowing the point, which is grace–that the burdens can all be blessings–but that we are carried by more. We, in all our versions, are carried by the one who never changes.

It’s bittersweet, more sweet than bitter, bitter than sweet. It’s a bittersweet surrender.

When I moved to New York, I would lie in my bed with the window cracked open because I was too cheap to turn on the air-conditioning, and I’d listen to the sounds of the city outside my window. At first it was an onslaught for my ears: yells, laughter, music, the occasional retching from a patron of the bar on the corner (the times that patron wasn’t me). After a few weeks, the city’s sounds became a symphony that lulled me to sleep: brakes squealing and cars honking made me feel less alone as I drifted off to their music. When I’d come home to visit and lie in my childhood bed or in the guest room at The Sis’s, the silence would overwhelm me; the absence of the city actually kept me awake. I was reprogrammed. I had changed.

Now I sleep with earplugs. The only noise that breaks through them are the (all-too often) cries of my own children. I need silence again–I’ve changed back. But not totally…

This past weekend, upon some hardly concealed threats, The Husband booked a hotel room for me and I camped out there Friday night. I spent most of the time lying on the bed, reading and watching TV and trying not to spill wine on the sheets. It was glorious. And it was quiet. Too quiet. I felt assaulted by the silence, by the absence of my children’s laughter before bedtime, by the emptiness without their calls of “Mommy” in the morning. Don’t get me wrong–it was amazing and I’ll do it again in a heartbeat. But it wasn’t everything. And so, on Saturday morning, I pointed the car home and I went back.

I know I will always go back, not because I’m perfect, but because I’m not. Perfection is never leaving in the first place–and let it be clear that I’m not talking about parenting here. Perfection left that building a long time ago, Pinterest boards be damned, and it ain’t coming back, no matter how your kid’s Hollywood-studio-budgeted birthday party turned out. I think the point of our changing and changing back and leaving and coming back is to show what, to show who, never changes and never leaves.

And thank God for that, because it is a weight off my shoulders.

I got The Kid’s OT evaluation emailed to me last week, and it showed the changes: improvement in every single area. A lot of it dramatic. And I watch him climb the play structure at the playground, his anxiety there a thing of the past (even as mine thrives). The road ahead is long, but the one behind is too, and both are brutally beautiful. So much else has changed: I used to narrate our car rides and every other experience, describing all I saw in the desperate hope that he understood and it would unlock his own words. Now? He narrates from the couch, from the toilet, from the elevator, from the backseat, reminding me which way to go, telling me who lives close to where we are and what exit we’re on and how Beth’s house is close to horse riding and, when a car cuts me off, “That driver is CRAZY!” because I said that long ago (might’ve included an adjective ahead of crazy but you don’t know my life) and when we pass the library, whose workings I described to him LAST YEAR, he tells me he wants to go there and get a card. All those months ago, listening? You’re damn right. Understanding? Every single word.

I’ve changed too: I see the world through his eyes now, noting every fire hydrant to either show him later or tell him about now; in Sydney, I felt like a kid on Christmas morning when I spotted a cafe car wash in our new neighbo(u)rhood. There is no earplug that will block out their voices, no distance that can separate us, not even a hotel that can keep me from going back. They have wonderfully ruined everything that used to be just mine, and made it ours.

There is no going back, and when it’s all said and done and I’ve had a night off to rest from it–there’s really no wanting to. There is us now, this messy and glorious reality that holds me within it, and even room service–oh how I love you, room service–can only compete for so long. There is that moment in the pool every week, that becomes moment after moment, of finding the spot to return to that keeps me breathing, keeps me going (mostly) in a straight line, keeps me in my lane. The place, the people I keep coming back to: this is home.

And when I drive back on Saturday morning to the sound of “Bittersweet” that just happened to cue up–the inextricable beauty of the not-so-polar-opposites, this bitter and sweet life–they meet me at the door, TH and Little Brother and TK, who grins and pulls my hand and says it: “Mommy came back.” And I pray that I always will while I know that what matters more is the One who never leaves.

A couple of weeks ago, as we were preparing The Kid and Little Brother for The Husband’s work trip (read: vacation) to Australia, TK started throwing around a troubling phrase. “Mommy always leaves you,” he would say to me, in discussions over TH’s departure or apropos of nothing, and I was affected in two ways: 1) we still need to work on pronouns (though his occasional use of the second or third person is a bit endearing and can come off like a royal affectation, which in his case I believe is totally warranted–all hail King James!) ; and 2) the thought that he sees things this way broke off a piece of my heart and set in adrift in the sea of guilt that seems to always surround me. In reality, I think he just misunderstood that I was going with TH again, and once I assured him I was staying home, he stopped saying it–especially after I emphatically added, “Mommy doesn’t always leave you! Mommy always comes back.” He finally began repeating the latter sentence: Mommy always comes back.

I’m beginning to understand how much of grace is about just showing up.

This was my prayer in the days leading up to TH’s trip: God, show up. Help me help me help me, and show up. And don’t let me miss you. Eyes to see, ears to hear, and such. My forthcoming period of solo adulting–five days with The Mom’s help but six days following that were all me–hung over my head like a black cloud and, as I told a friend who understands, made me feel as if I were living the experience multiple times before it actually happened. Maybe that’s why it felt like somewhat of a relief once the time did arrive: no more rehearsals, no more prep, just showing up.

I told the women about it at the weekly Bible study I attend, and before you skip the rest of this post in light of that, allow me to reassure you that this ain’t your typical women’s Bible study. It also ain’t the ones I’ve visited throughout my life, which often consisted of about twenty minutes of talking about how a verse made us feel followed by an hour of prayer requests that were really opportunities to talk about ourselves and other people (sort of like my late grandmother’s “Sewing Club,” which would have been more aptly named “Gossip and Bitching Circle”). These are not women who would have clutched their pearls in horror at the thing I told them: that I was afraid to be alone with my children this long. That one of my prayers, besides “Show up” and “Help,” was “Please make me a person my children don’t need to be shielded from.” Instead of disapproving head-shakes, I was met with nods, understanding. Grace. These are people who know just how wonderful and shitty motherhood, and we, can be. They said to call, to come over, to know we weren’t alone. They showed up.

And since then? In this past week of child-infested solitude? People haven’t stopped showing up. My prayers haven’t stopped being answered. It has been an at times rough, but also profoundly beautiful, time with the boys at home, our little triangle punctuated by phone calls and FaceTime with TH as a reminder of what our full shape really is, but the time between those reminders being full of sweetness we wouldn’t have known otherwise: the mornings that kick off with TK lying beside me on the bed, whispering, “Mommy mommy mommy,” and leaning in for kisses. The countless refrains of “Wheels on the Bus” for LB in the car and over the changing table. The post-dinner couch huddles, with two small but growing bodies draped over mine, sponsored by Mickey Mouse Clubhouse and wine. The chaotic baths and bedtimes that always end with two boys safe in their beds. My own sleep, sponsored by God and Advil PM. My anxiety, always lapping at my heels like that guilt, has been gloriously muted. Maybe out of necessity, in part–after all, as the only game in town this week, if I leave the ship we’re headed straight for that iceberg–but also in a remarkable display of grace and faithfulness on the part of the One who hears prayers and does something about them, if only we will look. I’ve found it easier to step out of that perpetual anxiety and see it for what it is–a part of me, not an all-encompassing whole, and a redeemable one at that. I’ve been able to cast it aside more readily, and less pharmaceutically, than usual. Which is not to make light of how crippling it can be, but is also to acknowledge how much greater grace can be.

And in all of it, the gifts of grace that are others showing up for us in the midst of our splintered team. Australian friends bringing TH over to their home for dinner and celebrating his arrival. Our friends here–the deacon who sat with me during an entire MRI having the boys and me over so that I could have a glass of wine and real, deep talk with his wife; the college/NY/forever friend who fed us dinner and supplied us with a playground, trains, and wine (recurring theme); the church friend who’s showing up today with her two.

During so much of what is our wonderfully typical square-shaped life with our team of four, I realize I’ve been pitting myself against the kids, against TH, delving into a me-against-them mentality born of a misguided sense of self-preservation. There hasn’t been a lot of “self” this week as much as a bunch of “us.” And I’ve seen how beautiful and life-giving it can be. That I don’t have to run from it to still be me; rather, this is me. Their mom. His wife. It’s so not a bad deal.

I got TH three different-sized jerseys for his birthday, each with a number on it: one for him, two for TK, three for LB. Maybe they’ll wear them on Friday, when I take a quick break to spend a night in a local hotel. I’ll be me there too, reading all the books I haven’t gotten to, drinking wine in my room, and peeing like nobody’s watching BECAUSE THEY WON’T BE. The next morning, though, I’ll wake up, and after a little time on my own, I’ll probably end up checking out early. I’ll point the car toward home, which I think of as the place you always return to; for me, the place where a triangle of males will be waiting to fill back out into a square and find out that Mommy, like grace did for her, always comes back.

These are my favorite three months of the year.

October, November, December–are you kidding me? We kick things off with pumpkin everything. I get some scorching-but-still-divine “me” time with my oven and mixer, baking until The Husband complains about gaining weight and The Kid asks for countless “big cookies.” Leaves crackle under our feet and the temperature finally, gloriously drops. Then it drops more to usher in November and Thanksgiving and the Macy’s Parade and the dog show and then…THEN it’s the grand finale, my favorite month of the year, the month to rival all others and stomp all over them with its romantic frostiness, prevailing goodwill, and sacred magic. CHRISTMASTIME, BITCHES.

(All praise to God.)

This year, though…it’s different.

These three months in this year, they share their glory and wonder with anxiety and anticipation. I ride them on a wave of ambivalence, knowing this will be our last Southeastern fall for awhile. Our last Christmas living in this house. Our last full season here, our home, before another place becomes home. It took years for this place to feel like home. Now we start all over again: new house, new schools, new therapists, new friends, new church, new country, new HEMISPHERE. Every day carries an undercurrent of last-ness, of finality, of nervous energy and, often, thickened teariness.

I’m a crying, gassy mess.

Last week I took TK back to the outdoor camp group–the one I had such a hard time finding the week before? That one. He approached this week’s treehouse with interest and hesitation, his own ambivalence written on his face, in his timid steps. He jumped on a trampoline. He pushed a rake around. Then he was invited to the top of the treehouse via a curved staircase.

He went. I followed him.

And when we got to the top, he got a bit too brave. He approached the edge a bit too closely, and was met with the leader’s gruff voice and pre-emptive, protective push. He was startled, and he looked to me with tears in his eyes, which is THE. WORST. for me, even when it’s a necessary evil, and I comforted him. Then it was time for the reason we’d come up there: the zip line.

He didn’t want to do it. I did and didn’t want him to. I’m split all down the middle these days, and not just because of Australia but because of life. Because of love. Because of kids. Nothing gets to be simple. But I nodded my head at him. “You’ve got this, buddy.” He sailed off, his face unconvinced. Terrified.

And then…the terror melted into euphoria and when he landed, I ran to meet him, and when he turned to me, his smile was the biggest.

He did it again.

When I moved to New York, my terror turned to euphoria. And, also, to bouts of depression, to deeper faith, to friendships, to falling in love. To finding home. And I’m about to do it again, with two boys and a husband in tow.

There are no shortcuts.

It hits me that I still want there to be. That I, in spite of all the rough-hewn paths of beauty, still, deep down, want ease and simplicity. I want to walk among soft clouds and perpetual sunshine. Then I read, in this amazing thing, what Heather Havrilesky said: “If you’re only walking in the clouds, you don’t feel where you are.” Then, on a Sunday morning, the question and an answer: “What is it that has brought you to your knees? Because it’s there you’ll find the love that is outside of you and for you.” And I realize it doesn’t show up on the sale rack or the luxury aisle, the eternal that is working itself out in our midst.

There can be ease and simplicity to the point of nothingness, or there can be this: these seasons split right down the middle, full of goodbyes and hellos, winter switching into summer, excitement and dread. Sitting outside one afternoon while the boys play with the Halloween decorations, I feel a lightness to the cooler air and for a second can’t remember if it’s fall or spring. I think about TH who is at our new house in Sydney, where the buds are bursting into life as the leaves fall from trees here, and realize it’s both.

It’s only when I’ve been brought to my knees that I’ve been able to really look up, to see now that we will always, no matter where home is, be under the same sky. The same sky that has covered us through the early days, when I filled out the OT survey on behalf of the kid and shook my head through tears over all he couldn’t yet do. Then last week, I answered the same questions with a smile at all he’s accomplished. There is the free fall, the sailing through the air in terror before the terror-melting grin appears. There is all that’s been left in our wake as we trod this path, all the tears and joy that have been and will be.

At lunch one afternoon as TH sleeps in Sydney and The Mom helps me here, we sit outside among other tables. TK finishes his PB&J and starts working the area: he approaches a couple at a table and grins at them. He walks up to a group of men and puts his hand on the back of one of them as if they’re old friends. This formerly silent boy is leaving joy in his wake as his Little Brother watches and laughs, gleeful. Then TK sidles up to the two men at the table next to us and begins a lengthy conversation full of complete sentences, and one of the men turns to me:

“He should go into politics. Or something where you speak a lot.”

And I tell them the story, how he didn’t say a word a year ago, because I love this story now that used to keep me up crying at night. It is our story. It is his.

He talks the whole way home under the same vast sky.

Last week I bounced The Kid out of one of his regular therapies to try something new–another kind of therapy. A friend who knows TK had told me about an Outward-Bound-type afternoon camp for kids with challenges/gifts like spectrum disorders, anxiety, ADHD, dyslexia, etc. I thought the camp sounded great (for me, too, though there was an age limit), and I got a hall pass from his Tuesday therapist to try it. So I left Little Brother with a sitter and headed west with TK.

Google Maps failed me. I struggled to find the street number of the church whose playground was the meeting point. We passed a school, then an unmarked building beside it. I cruised that parking lot no fewer than a half dozen times, which was unfortunate because (a) it was not the destination, and (b) the school next door had a playground, natch, and it was in plain view of TK’s searching eyes. Within five minutes we were both crying: he from the certainty that I was keeping him from the right playground, and I from the uncertainty that I wasn’t. Either way, our twin anxieties reached a fever pitch right there in the car, his urgent pleas stoking my frustration, my expletive-laden anger barely kept under my breath, our begging each other to just look. Or listen. Or go. Or wait. It felt like hell. And this was a few hours after I’d gone to the ophthalmologist and found that I’d been wearing the wrong prescription for a year.

I finally stopped and asked a traffic cop if he knew what I was looking for. He pointed me in the right direction, and we landed in a spot about fifty yards further than I’d driven–just past the traffic light where I’d turned around twice, fearful of going too far. I parked and turned around to TK. “I’m sorry it took me so long to find the right place,” I told him. He looked back at me, his tears drying. “Mommy went the wrong way,” he responded solemnly. “Yes I did,” I replied. “And I got frustrated.”

For the next thirty minutes, he played and climbed and ran and occasionally circled back to me to recap: “Mommy couldn’t find it. Went the wrong way.” It was funny the first few times. Then over the next week, I heard it more: “Mommy couldn’t find the playground. Went the wrong way. Mommy got frustrated.” We watched an episode of Daniel Tiger, who happened to also be frustrated and sang a song about it that I can’t get out of my damn head. I grew weary of the refrain: my frustration, my propensity to be lost, my wrongness. It began to sound less like an observation than an indictment. Not that I’m defensive or anything.

I seem to keep getting reminders that I’m looking in the wrong place, listening to the wrong voice. Two weeks after the rest of my family, I got a stomach virus last week that knocked me flat for twenty-four hours. All the plans I had flew out the window and I could no longer look around at all I had to do but only stare straight ahead. At my TV, which played The Hunger Games. Which was kind of awesome, interrupting sprints to the bathroom aside, because who gets to watch movies on a Sunday afternoon anymore?! Then there’s my phone, whose camera I broke during an ill-advised temper tantrum; I happened to throw the phone indiscriminately across the room and it happened to perfectly hit a steel drawer handle, which broke into pieces as my phone’s screen cracked into about fifty fissures. Now my camera won’t cooperate for photos unless I flip the screen into selfie mode. There’s a metaphor here, I just know it.

Little Brother turned two last week and we flipped him around too, his carseat now front-facing, and the once-reliable mid-morning nap afforded by our errand-running disappeared for a couple of days: I would glance at him in the rearview mirror and see him staring around, saucer-eyed, in wonder at this new view. And then there’s TK, whose teacher told me that he has been protective of one of the smaller guys in his class, a boy in a wheelchair. When he requires extra assistance to get out of the chair or be pushed down the hall, TK will come alongside him and “supervise” the teachers’ assistance or walk beside both boy and teacher in the hallway. When I asked TK later that day about his friend and what he likes about him, he told me, “He rides a motorcycle.”

In moments like these my eyes overflow by the beauty of all that I’ve seen so dimly, so wrongly, or allowed to remain unseen altogether. TK looks at a wheelchair and sees a motorcycle, and I want my vision changed to match his now.

A Thursday morning, and I’m doing laps at the pool when I see a woman at the other end sitting on the edge of my lane. I paddle back from my end toward her so that she’ll know this one is occupied and move along. When I reach the end, she’s smiling down at me. “Oh! I didn’t even see you!”

I took it a little personally. It’s hard not to when you’re the sole woman in a house of males, the mother of two young boys: the frustration over not being listened to, or of being seen primarily as an object to be climbed upon. My fellow swimmer was playing into one of my biggest complaints and, I suspect, one of my deepest hurts: feeling invisible. I smiled thinly and headed back toward the opposite end, the water enveloping me, and there in the waves I’d generated I heard a voice speak into the place that is deeper than sound: “I see you. I see you.” It took my breath away and gave me new life, like it always does, this never-not-surprising reminder that I am seen and loved and not forgotten; that this being seen changes everything. It changes my 3 am-anxiety attacks about moving to Australia; it changes my worries for my children; it changes my marriage; it changes my drive to the damn grocery store. It changes everything, because it means that the truest thing about me is not that I look at my phone too much or that I have an unruly temper or that I miss so much. It swallows all that up because it means that the truest thing about me is how loved I am, how held and protected and seen.

Dearest Will,

To quote Miley Cyrus–which I try never to do–you came in like a wrecking ball. From the very beginning. I remember the morning I first found out about you, before the sun or your brother had risen, while I was the only one awake in the house because your dad was stranded in Florida at a conference due to our Atlanta snowpocalypse. I read the word–pregnant–and immediately felt the rush of emotions that happens on such a hoped-for occasion: the thrill of possibility, the hope of a joyful outcome, the fear of another loss after the one from six months before. Your brother was sleeping on a mattress on the floor of his room because his halo-clad head wouldn’t fit comfortably into his crib–your crib now. He had undergone spinal surgery three weeks prior, a few days before you happened. He was healing, though it didn’t feel like that, with the sponge baths and extra seven pounds on his shoulders and daily wound-cleaning. It was both a dark time and a beautiful one, and that’s when you showed up. You showed up in the middle of all that life with your own.

The doctors wanted to monitor me closely, and when my numbers shot up they had to make sure there was only one of you–that’s how you came on the scene. No way to question your existence. You demanded notice. As your brother recovered, then took a brief spiral down, you remained, somehow present even before your birth, somehow bearing witness to all of it, accompanying me through it, often uncomfortably, but undeniably. Somehow, even before you were, you’ve always been here. You started out by growing in the midst of difficulty, and you mirror your brother in that wonderfully hard way.

Oh but how you’re also different. Your dad and I picked names we liked; we only considered the meanings after. Your brother is the supplanter, and as the firstborn, how true that rings, how much he reordered our priorities and refocused our vision. Your name means Protector, and I can’t help but watch and wonder how that will ring true as well–how you might even protect him and accompany him. I watched as your first words helped inspire his. Now he’s surpassed you, but I won’t forget that gift. I expect I will see many more.

Where your brother is cautious and circumspect, you’re more of a Category 1 hurricane. I remember the moment and the kick in which my water broke, something that didn’t happen the first time around. You were ready. And all the child-proofing we did for your brother? Turns out that was actually for you, as you attempt to leap off couches and armrests and pool edges and everything else, how you stomp around the house and practically beat your chest with tribal yells only you understand. Then I’ll notice silence, and I’ll find you “reading” a book on your own. You are, like all of us, never just one thing. You have bottomless love tanks, always wanting to be held close, especially by your daddy, and your endless need for love is matched only by the imperfectness of what I can offer in return and the wholeness of the love that designed you and holds you better than I can.

My favorite part of the day is taking you to pick up your big brother from school. You stand in the window at the doorway and when you see him coming, your hands clench into fists of barely-repressed excitement, you emit a screech of joy, and you jump up and down when he emerges toward us. Your grin is reflected in his, and I hope I never take for granted the feeling of completeness I have in that moment: you were what our family was waiting for.

It appears, at this point, that your particular challenges–and we all have them–are not front-loaded like your brother’s. But when they do appear, God willing, I will carry the honor of accompanying you through them like you accompanied me and your brother and dad through so many in those early days. I will leap into fires with you as you leap everywhere now, as you teach me with every leap how we are both held by a love that knows our names better than we do.

I love you more than I ever knew I had room for. Thank you for showing me that.

Love, Mom

I remember my last night in New York. The Husband, then Fiancé, and I went to church with a group of friends then hit our favorite Mexican restaurant after. I told everyone goodbye, hugging each in turn and feeling the weight of their absence, their presence diminishing in the night. I could feel my life there slipping away. TH and I went up to his rooftop, where he had proposed, and beheld the lights of the Empire State Building one final time as residents. The thought struck me: that I was taking my favorite part of the city with me. It was hugely comforting, and I still hurt.

The next morning I woke up sick. Maybe it was the dining out we’d been doing constantly since packing up the kitchen days before; maybe it was a physical reaction to all the goodbyes. Probably both. Whatever the cause, I lay in bed, my plans to run the East River path one last time scrapped as I willed my stomach to settle before our flight that afternoon. By the time our plane rose above Queens, I was better…but not. Goodbyes feel both final and endless, the subtractions and additions held in them unfurling for weeks and months and years, a pang here and a gut-punch there, memories carried into new worlds. I’m still not finished saying goodbye to the city that gave me so much.

And as I consider saying goodbye to the city we left New York for, to the home we’ve made here in Atlanta, I feel the pangs and gut-punches again before they’ve even happened: the last dinners we’ll have with friends; the final Christmas before our plane rises; the final time we’ll cross the threshold of this house in which we started a family, this place we brought the boys home to as newborns; the final time before takeoff that I’ll scrunch The Niece’s red curls in my hand or take the wine and bread on Sunday. Every day now has tears mixed with anticipation, and I can’t help but think this is real life: this fullness of emotion that overwhelms but reminds, that reveals in a way the usual dailiness never could what each person and place means. It hurts while it comforts.

There’s been a theme in my life, of life itself showing up in all the moments I didn’t choose: the Chronicles of I Didn’t Sign Up for This, the goodbyes to the idea of what was supposed to be and the slow embrace of what is. You’d think grace might find a new technique but it presses steadily on in the same direction, redefining what home and love and peace look like, redefining always, this upside-down kingdom always reintroducing itself to me, new rooms forever being revealed.

I spoke at a conference last year and told them how we’d always wanted to live near the water, had gotten used to being landlocked for five years before I recognized the creek that flows through our neighborhood. The water. I laughed about how I should have been more specific about the kind of water, not knowing that we were headed for a beach. That somehow we’ve always been headed for this beach across the world.

And it’s binding us together even as we say goodbye to others, this awareness that it’s the four of us: I sit on the floor with the boys and feel a familiar jolt of sadness as three months stretch ahead, unspooling so quickly that I have to catch my breath sometimes, but the sadness gives way to the simple realization, the same one I had on that New York rooftop: I get to bring the best part with me. I look at their faces, their eyes, think of how they have no idea of what’s coming. And I don’t either, really. But their faces and his will be the ones that go with me, that fill my days still, even fourteen hours ahead. They are always a part of home.

The benediction a few Sundays ago came just after I’d read the passage where Jonah gets a shady tree to sleep under; then it vanishes and he curses the God who gave it in the first place. God asked him (paraphrased): “You mad, bro?” Jonah replied in the affirmative and God bounced back (again, paraphrased): “You didn’t make it. It came and went in a night, bro.” I have so many shade trees that up and leave, and this is what I heard that Sunday:

May all your expectations be frustrated. May all your plans be thwarted. May all your desires be withered into nothingness–that you may experience the powerlessness and poverty of a child and sing, dance, and trust in the love of God who is Father, Son, and Spirit.*

Done and done. And doing. By a grace that refuses to leave, that doesn’t give prescriptions or to-do lists or hurdles to jump over, but this: its presence. “It was…his presence that saved them.”

*quoted in The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning as a blessing given to Henri Nouwen by his spiritual mentor. (Thanks, LE!)