I’m sitting in a hotel room in downtown Sydney wondering what the hell I’m doing.

Last week, The Kid and Little Brother and I were driving to TK’s school, our typical frenetic routine in place. I was yearning for some peace, some reassurance about the trip that The Husband and I would be making in a few days: a frenetic plan itself, globe-hopping to another hemisphere, the upside-down to our right-side-up, fourteen hours ahead and half a world away. I was wondering if we should update our will (we don’t have a will), get it in writing that The Sis would take our kids if something happens to us (I think I have an email or text somewhere to that effect), spending my last moments before drifting off to sleep suddenly and consumingly grateful for the mere feet separating me from my sleeping sons in their beds across the hall. On this morning, desperate and hungry for peace, I looked ahead through the windshield and saw the light through the trees. I stopped breathing for a second.

All down the road ahead of me, rays of light cast their beams, waves and particles gathering visibly only because they were traveling through something–spaces between leaves, around branches, dusty pollinated air, gray and scattered clouds. Blake’s verse came to mind, the one that can’t leave me even when my grocery list and name do: “And we are put on earth a little space/That we may learn to bear the beams of love.”

We feel that we are being called to a different space by a love that operates outside of our comfort zones, our familiar patches of geography, our personal plans. Cut to me crying alone in a Sydney hotel room, wondering if I’m reading that calling correctly.

I moved to New York eleven years ago in an act of desperation that could have been interpreted as reckless; my father sure thought it was after that first tax return. I came away from that island with a newfound faith, enduring friendships, and a husband. Not bad for five years’ exile. Now I’m sitting on an island that is a continent that is ten times as far from home as New York was, only this time around I have two boys and their lives to consider. Am I being stupid? Is this even doable? I went to lunch this morning with a fellow mom who fits all the parameters of New Friend; TH and I stopped by for a glass of wine last night with a New York acquaintance whose husband is a pastor here. I ALREADY HAVE A PASTOR. TWO IN FACT. I LIKE THEM VERY MUCH, GOD. WHY ARE YOU MESSING WITH THAT? We talked and laughed last night; today we ate and related, and it was all quite pleasant, and now I want to throw up, because this is getting very real. How is TK going to react to such a colossal, daily change? Am I giving him enough credit, or just using him as an excuse? Can someone time travel three years into the future and let me know that this is the best thing we ever did so that I can finally have a normal poop and a peaceful night’s sleep?

This all may sound very ungrateful coming from someone who is being afforded the opportunity to live within minutes of beautiful beaches in year-round temperate weather on a company’s dime. But this is how I need to process such a change, through the highs and lows of emotional recognition, the nausea-inducing taxi ride from the airport (I do know this from thirty-nine years of life: never interpret a city based on the ride from the airport) and the run along the harbor with the view of the Opera House and botanical gardens. I need to ride the waves that are appearing to lift us out of the life we know and into the one we are called to, the one being written by a love whose beams I am constantly relearning how to endure, a love that sends me on a reckless trip halfway across the world and gathers clouds just so I can see its light on a typical Tuesday morning, leaving the path we’re on full of so many unknowns even while the road ahead is scattered with illumination.

I have learned to kiss the wave that slams me into the Rock of Ages. –Charles Spurgeon

I spent so much of my life trying to fit in before I finally realized that I just didn’t. It took me a little longer to realize that this was an asset: my perennial location on the periphery of social groups taught me how to be an observer (not an Observer, to be clear), which taught me how to narrate human behavior. In short, being a creeper taught me how to write. And I am grateful.

As a bit of a social misfit, at least in my own eyes, I dreaded the fall as the worst of all seasons, for with it came school. Though in the South, school officially begins when the temperature and humidity still hover around 100. Nonetheless, as the leaves began changing, I would find myself staring down nine months of insecurity and discomfort, of struggling to find a place and usually feeling without one, of lunchroom-seat politics and not getting asked to dances or picked for teams. So I studied. I read a lot of books. See, kids? Staying in school does pay off–one day you might have letters behind your name as you sit at home and write for free while your student loans pile up!

Now, though, fall is my favorite season, and not just because of pumpkin spice lattes. Fall is when the God-forsaken heat and humidity lighten up, and with them, my mood. My hair calms the eff down in fall. I bake in fall. The days begin to shorten, which makes it less weird when I go to bed at an hour at which, a few weeks earlier, even the sun was shaking its head. Football is on, and even though I don’t really like or understand the sport, it seems to be accompanied by more reasons to drink and eat chips and myriad forms of dip. In the fall, new television series begin (yes I know they do that every other season now too, but I’m working on a list here). My kids will go back to school, which means more free time to write for free. People (department stores) start to think about (market) Christmas. I get to don sweaters and boots. I LOVE SWEATERS AND BOOTS.

With older age (I am currently twenty-one), other things have changed: besides loving fall, I hate the summer with a passion. Damn mosquitoes, aforementioned heat and humidity, children–the little blessings–always around watching me pee, and people. The people just come out in droves in the summer, do they not? The Husband and I experienced this recently during a getaway to the 30A-side of the gulf, where we spent a weekend while our kids remained under the watchful (when not on Facebook) eye of The Mom and Dad. I preached the Gospel of the Gulf to TH while we were engaged, when I informed him it was where we would be getting married. He fell in love with it quickly, August-temperatures-and-tuxes-mixture notwithstanding, and we go back often. Our other two trips there in the past few months have occurred in the fall and winter, so imagine our surprise when we arrived there in July and found that we had descended into the bowels of hell, with extra-nice scenery. Gone were the mild temperatures and empty stores, gone were the hours spent quietly lounging on pool chairs under towels, gone was the shalom that comes with no restaurant waits or tripping over families of seventeen. In the place of all that was chaos. Hot, nasty chaos.

The weekend reminded me of what a contrarian I am–my new, grown-up word for misfit–as I rued all the things that everyone else showed up en masse to enjoy. It reminded me–sad, sunburned me–of how this makes me different from many, this preference for lying underneath towels and away from people, this solace I take in solitude. It highlighted all the ways I tend to swim upstream, either insecurely or proudly, and it made me grateful that I finally found a place–a family, who resemble that too. A husband who would sooner put on a skirt than dress in khaki and white for pictures on the beach. A boy who takes one look at a crowd or unfamiliar environment and either runs the other way, or circles the perimeter, already smart enough to look for his designated spot on the periphery. We are the people who stick together, who prefer our own little cocoon, thanks, who don’t make friends all that easily because that shit is hard and, when we do have friends, we tend to bare our souls to them (no? just me? okay), so they better be the right people. We like our house, and our stuff, and our predictable routines and safe spaces.

Which is why it seems really mean that God appears to be calling us to move to Australia.

I mean, some of it makes sense–they do flip the seasons over there, and I respect that bucking of trends. But the rest–the discomfort of relocating halfway across the world just because God seems to think it’s a good idea (hey, I have good ideas too, God!)–that’s just insane. But it appears to be happening, despite my pleas/prayers to the contrary (I never should have invited the Almighty to change my heart. He TOTALLY called my bluff.)

The next few weeks will be telling. And this whole situation is packed with so many unknowns as to give me diarrhea at just the thought of it. I am all over the map about it (see what I did there?), and am hitting every possible emotional target. But here’s what I do know: our little family has weathered some storms, and some painful seasons (I even watched the final one of Glee). And while it might be necessary for me to seek stronger medication as adjunctive therapy to deal with this, I rely on a grace that is bigger than my plans (dammit) and stronger than my…well, than me. A grace that has bonded the four of us eternally, and will continue to hold us–and those we know and love–in its hand, which is also the place it keeps the whole wide world. Even the Southern hemisphere, I’ve been told.

God have mercy.

Let me open by saying that the past couple of weeks have been fucking hard. If that kind of language, or openness, makes you want to clutch your pearls or a rosary, then feel free to do so then keep reading, or not. All I’m saying is that this could turn out to be the Good Will Hunting of blog posts (f-word abounding…and a possible Oscar nomination?) so you’ve been warned.

We were on a break. Not the kind of break one chooses; no, no one chooses a solid week of diarrhea peppered with vomit emanating from their children’s various holes. No one takes the already exhausting season of parenting young children and says, “You know what we need more of? We need more intensity, more fecal-borne bacterial infections, more shit stains on our rug, more laundry piling up.” No one–okay, maybe some people, but not this someone, not yours truly–naturally embraces the shedding of a schedule we’d just gotten accustomed to, the watching of it being replaced by endless hours of Nick Jr and glazed eyes and dehydration and wondering if your own turn is next, if the getaway you’d planned for the following week has been shot to literal shit. No one looks at all that and adds layers atop it called “contractors working all over our house,” spraying dust and paint fumes and hearing my opening-scene-of-Saving-Private-Ryan form of battlefield parenting, all terse comments and desperate pleas and angry wails. No one figures the perfect cherry on top of that crap sundae would be an overhanging possibility–likelihood–that we are being called to move halfway across the world, away from family, and the network of doctors and therapists we’ve assembled for The Kid, and the church that has been a lifeline of counsel and laughter and tears and deep friendship. All that has made this place our home.

And yet we were on a break. A break from the summer routine, for there would be no trips to the gym or trips of any kind in the car, no limitations on screen time, no rules. Just survival. And (now that I’m a week out of it) I can see the beauty in that bare-bones form of living, that forced togetherness sustained by back rubs and tears, by TK calling me “Doctor Mommy” and by the three of us spending hours lying on the bed, their tiny sick and recovering bodies pressed into mine because some instinct tells them I am their protector, even when I feel like I’m shit at it. In lieu of gym childcare and my alone time, we headed outside: I pulled the stroller from its summer parking spot in the garage in the early morning and they piled in, pants-less and with a towel perched over the handlebar in case of leakage, and we pounded the pavement of our neighborhood in a way and of a duration that we’ve not experienced since late spring. I walked, I climbed hills, I marveled through copious sweating at how TK is conversational–a feat unaccomplished the last time we took a walk. Maybe I even got a little color. It was a break from health, a break from the usual, a break from my reliance upon routine. It sucked–hard–while making space for moments of sweet beauty that wouldn’t have shown up otherwise.

And then, thank God, it was over.

A day later than planned, we piled into the car and headed three hundred miles southwest, to my parents’. We arrived in one piece, without traffic or bowel movements–a modern-day version of water into wine–and unpacked. Settled in for a week. There is a view of the water from every room here, and shouldn’t that be enough? Maybe, if you’re the type flummoxed by f-bombs and calmed immediately by the sound of a Bible verse, but me? I’m given to more erratic blood pressure, to the occasional need for pharmaceuticals because they’re less frowned upon at 9 am than an open bottle of wine. I need a little edge with my Jesus, and we’re both fine with that, thanks. There are layers now, extending above and beneath and all around my own ish, namely in the form of small children and one in particular courting a brand of anxiety that both mirrors and extends in waves past my own, to recesses that feel beyond my reach and understanding, and what mother is ever going to just lie down and fucking accept that? So I feel myself trying, trying to get it, to fix it–to fix him?–and the effort, exhausting and overwhelming, is not the answer. A new environment, a new routine, a new time zone, and he is in pieces on the floor, and my heart breaks even as I want to scream and run as far as my legs will take me then call an Uber for the remaining mileage. Fear upon guilt upon sadness, and no water view is going to snap its fingers and fix that. In fact, that–the hard parts of our stories, the chapters that withstand our editing, that don’t get “try”-ed out,–it laps like waves at the parts of me I want to hide, the parts of myself I want to fix, and it makes all hope–all proclamations of “yet” (he isn’t speaking yet, he isn’t fully potty-trained yet, he isn’t holding his head upright yet, he isn’t proficient socially yet–yets both vanquished and still hanging around)–seem utterly stupid.

I feel undone, and the waves rise over my head, submerging me.

And yet–there is always a rescue. There is always grace. It never comes by my trying, for at this point I am down to my last breath.

I take TK outside while Little Brother sleeps, and he wants to walk out on the pier, to which I inwardly respond, “Goddamn it.” The wind is gusting, and he’s standing where the rails have ended, where a wrong step could land him in the bay. Swim lessons have not progressed to this point yet. We are on “vacation”, where a balcony appears and all I see are plummets to death, where piers materialize and all I see are drownings. No movie ever tells you this about love: how the threats close in so hard you don’t think you can stand it. I hold my breath, tense up, want to cry. How can I live free for both of us?

He turns, his bravery and my terror packaged in the same moment, and runs back up the pier, the rails on either side of him allowing me to breathe again. I consider–grace rescues me to consider–that there are rails everywhere–just like I’ve told him about potties–everywhere, I just can’t see them. That we are, all of us, moving freely along our particular piers in what looks like autonomy and freedom, but we will never move beyond the rails that hold us, that protect us. I think about the videos The Husband stumbled upon while downloading Peppa Pig to the iPad for our trip, how we watched them together on the bed I’d shared with the boys on all those sick days, how I’d stared, crying and laughing, barely able to watch how he’d been a year ago–silent and frustrated–this glimpse allowing me to see more fully where he is now. That today’s fucking hard is not the same as last year’s. As yesterday’s. That we are moving, and there are rails. There are planks ahead that I can’t even see, but I can see the ones behind us to know they will keep going.

The next day of “vacation,” I drive TH to the airport for his work trip, and for the forty-minute drive back to my parents’ I am alone, pieces of my heart scattered about the general vicinity but not beside me. There are so many red lights. I reach yet another and it gives me the time–the space–to look up. A rainbow is arched ahead in the distance. I am rescued by grace to consider how often I try to live outside my own story, the “what if”s–what if it were easier? what if we were both less anxious? what if I said fuck less and didn’t get so lost in my own emotional turbulence?–seemingly harmless but actually poisonous, because there is no What If to this pier, to this path–it is ours, period. Why do I try to edit it out? I breathe, try on embracing rather than fighting, and drive toward a rainbow with every single color, light that is always there whether I see it–feel it, believe it–or not, and head toward the promise that holds me between its rails.

I’ll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife.

So this is what an open heart looks like: at the beginning, a closed-off collection of rooms. Doors glued shut with staunch refusals at letting that type of light in, at being transported to that place, at sacrificing for that cause. So much other, so much they and them. So many bars and boundaries.

Then, an uninvited crack of light peeks through. Possibility enters the equation, coupled unbreakably with uncertainty–the most uninvited guest. The unknown beckons one moment, taunts the next. Life alters between impromptu symphony and cruel joke. Everything is changing. And just when you had figured out the rules, had gotten comfortable, had begun to understand the way it all works. You had fought for that comfort, for that understanding. And now you’re losing it?

Then you remember: you hadn’t fought. You had surrendered. You didn’t get, you were given.

Nothing feels safe anymore; the very idea of home is…dislocated? Relocated. Home becomes something different. Someone different. That’s when the bars sag and break, the doors are unlocked from the inside, and the whole damn space opens up. This is the slow and steady work of grace, this grace that operates not in one night stands or fell swoops but over years and in moments, ebbs and flows, until you wake up one day and realize you are not the person you were. But you are becoming exactly who you’re meant to be.

It sucks. And it’s wonderful. It’s painful, and healing. It’s nothing I asked for, and everything I needed. It is bloody surgery and fine art.

So this is what an open(ing) heart looks like now:

Telling my counselor ten years ago that I felt like a loser for not having what everyone else seemed to have: love, marriage, kids. The response: that I was describing loss, and needed to feel it, acknowledge it. That all these years and love and marriage and kids later, I still feel the specter of loss haunting me, threatening to take it all away. Everything, even grace, looks like a monster when I live in fear. And then, fear is overturned as sadness isn’t shunned but recognized in its rightful place alongside joy, the unbreakable coupling. And a heart opens to the wholeness of emotions.

I sit on a patio at a restaurant where, years before house and marriage and children and life-altering decisions, The Husband and I sat and talked about what that life might look like. All these years later, I sit across from a friend and the restaurant has a different name and I didn’t even know her then, before we shared stories and sons’ struggles and laughter, and I tell her what we’re facing and she listens, commiserates, supports. And a heart opens to the chance of long-distance friendship, of eventual reuniting, maybe on this same patio. At the same restaurant with a different name, because sometimes things get renamed, and this too is grace.

After nights of waking at 3 am with every possible fear assaulting my mind, I decide to write down each one of them, a listing that somehow feels like the opposite of the listing of rules I used to follow, try to master. And as the list grows, my fears unravel, turning into prayers that then become promises–I realize they always were. What looked like loss now appears as opportunity. It all was waiting to be renamed. I begin to sleep again.

She mentions it over wine, this idea she had of writing letters now to give to her children later, and one afternoon when The Kid goes downstairs to therapy and Little Brother goes upstairs to nap, I decide to do it. In composition notebooks–the ones I used to fill in school, with assignments–I write words that are deeper than my frustrations, expressions better than my outbursts, and the morning that was closing in on me becomes an evening that opens me again, to how much I love them. To what is most true. And now, they will know too.

A week of predictable schedules and alone time is shot to shit with two viruses, in two children, in a row, and while I wait for my turn in front of the viral firing squad, I mop asses and floors and write off rugs and spray Lysol and consider again that I made this choice, to abdicate doctoring for mothering, but that doesn’t keep me from feeling like I don’t know who I am or what I’ve done any given moment. Then he tells me he’s sick, and I think back to the last time–that he couldn’t even express that. But now, he lets me take care of him; he calls me “Doctor Mommy.” And while I feel sure that most doctors are not scrubbing vomit out of God forsaken sisal rugs while toddlers climb on their backs, I have to laugh: at the two identities fused in his mind while I haven’t been able to make sense of them; at the contractors keeping LB from napping and giving me a splitting headache while they improve a house we may not keep living in; at the impossibility of being whatever I was while becoming whoever I should. At this current, temporary-yet-truly-forever inability to plan, to see with certainty beyond an inch ahead. The way sickness and grace expose so little of tomorrow but so much of the faithfulnesses of yesterday. How these menial tasks can somehow both pin me to earth while providing glimpses of heaven.

How I ask for crystal balls and surgical notes…and get flesh and blood, beating into a story, within a heart that remains surprisingly, dangerously, beautifully open.

“I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory.”

All my life, I’ve been on guard against death.

A friend and I were talking about it recently, how we should form a Disaster Preparedness Society, because of how we both brace ourselves against it constantly, whether we’ve had cause to based on our history (her) or whether we are just the kind of people (me) who see it around every corner even if turns out not to be there. The disasters of my life have instead been opportunities full of the unknown, and I’ve turned them into fearsome, looming creatures when they were actually gateways to new life. But it’s not that simple–it never is. Because I wasn’t totally wrong to see them–my years of singleness, a move from Alabama to New York, my entry into motherhood–as a form of death. I wasn’t wrong to experience them as such, because that’s how it seems to work: before new life, death. Winter, then spring. Tombs, then resurrections. Sleep training, then…sleep? Sometimes?

Our family faces a huge decision in the next month. When I heard about it, I sobbed. Engaged in the adult versions of tantrums: indulging an already short fuse, casting withering stares, tossing about the silent treatment, curling inward until all I was left with was my own petulance and the realization that such an attitude was not sustainable if I want to function as a human being, sleep at night, and remain a member of this family. So I prayed for an open heart, and I waited. Threw some more shade, maybe. But waited.

The weirdest thing happened: my heart opened up. If you’re imagining that appearing like a bright light growing brighter, with unicorns and rainbows fluttering about, you’d be wrong. (We sold our unicorn–those things shit all over the place.) No, the open heart experience, while more positive overall than the Mega Bitch Posture, is more of everything else as well. The tears haven’t stopped. But now they’re more appropriately distributed, I would say–less over my own inconvenience and more over what really matters, over what letting go can look like, over uncertainty as it impacts not just me but my children. There are things worth crying over. I’m seeing them pop up everywhere. That’s the thing about grace–it opens not just your heart, but your eyes.

I think I’m learning how to grieve. Which would make sense, given the amount of death in life: the million ways we’re asked (or ahem, forced) to step out without an answer, without a roadmap; without immediate resolution. These are deaths, these U-Haul moves across the country, these losses of freedom at the hands of children, these hours spent on the floor watching urine come out of my child’s yang and cheering when I’d rather just be lying on the couch with another Sex and the City DVD. These are the deaths that preface life, and not recognizing them as such–not allowing myself the full experience of joy and pain, of rejoicing and grief, it may look braver and more behaviorally acceptable to the world but it just stunts my growth right back to that couch, where I’m reaching frantically for my phone or anything else that will displace a feeling I’d rather avoid.

So yeah, I’ve been crying. Crying in the bath over my impatience with the kids that day; crying in bed as I fall asleep over what new life we could be headed for when I’ve just gotten used to this one, thanks; crying in church as prayers are lifted up for victims in Baton Rouge and Minnesota and Dallas and grief is articulated over the ways we’ve misunderstood each other. This hurts, all of it. I’d rather check my phone, post a political fix to Facebook, steel myself against more pain. But I can see now, glimmers of awareness through freshly washed eyes, how guilt and fear and anger can be lids I place on top of sadness to seal it off, to avoid it. But that when the tears flow, they are coming from a deeper place than all those things and yet they are not the deepest thing–sadness is not the bottom. Because beneath that is the beckoning to an even deeper place, a soil where new life grows, where a love that never disappears is found, and holds me through the death part.

The other day we were riding in the car, the boys and I, and The Kid was yelling from the backseat, berating me with directions counter to where we were going. He knows the route to everywhere now, and sometimes he just wants to be contrary. Sometimes he wants a different path than the one we’re on. I switched to Chris Farley mode, all red-faced and angry and about to turn this bus around and really give myself something to cry about later, when I noticed he had stopped yelling. He was, in fact, singing. He had stopped fighting and started singing. We smiled at each other in the rearview mirror.

“Even my darkness is light to you,” we sang at the end of the service on Sunday, after the prayers and the tears and the acceptance of the undeserved bread and wine–the acceptance of the route to the table, through death to life. And I felt my disbelief sway and topple and give way to trust: even my darkness? Yes. Even that. I mean, there is so much of it. You sure? Yes. Tears for the right reason flowed once again, and that’s when the kids came back in, bouncing through after the session of grief we’d just experienced, their joy transforming the dirge into a dance.