The Sis called me lucky recently, in a conversation volleyed over an internet app, since we live across the world from each other (unlucky) but are able to communication instantly this way (lucky). Her description related to one aspect of my life thus far: celebrity spotting.

I know what you’re thinking: that’s some substantial shit. Enough to build an identity on! And you’re right, at least inasmuch that I’ve tried to build an identity on my knowledge of celebrity gossip (fuelled by a religious practice in my 20s and…maybe past that, sitting in the bookstore every weekend reading tabloids for free) and on being in the right place at the right time. Which is why I loved living in New York, the site of celebs living their “real lives” right where we could brush past them. I have a friend who would claim to see Tom Cruise’s brother or Katie Holmes’s cousin in each face we passed, but I on the other hand…I could spot the real deal a mile away. The Carters and Paltrow/Martins on the Upper East Side, Mandy Moore at Pastis…I should’ve kept a list. Apparently, Conan O’Brien is in Sydney right now and The Sis suggested I go find him. In that form of FOMO that sticks around long after the party is over, that part of me that still wants to be recognised for recognising led me to Ticketmaster to try to get into his show tomorrow night (spoiler alert: sold out).

I don’t have as much time (or energy) to stalk celebrities these days. I have two divas in my own home (three, if you count The Husband when he asks me if I would mind taking his dry-cleaning) who require full-time attention. And lucky isn’t a word I use much anymore, since blessed has taken its place. I am, of course, referring to the sarcastic version of that word with the hashtag in front, as #blessed is the name of a group chat of which I am a member as well as being a term my friends and I describe our lives when another kid has shit his pants or we forget to send cupcakes to school for a birthday. It’s all-encompassing, this word, in both sincerity and irony.

But lucky still pops up, like a way of hedging bets to keep from putting too fine a point on any situation, or of involving the divine in matters. Earnestness in relation to blessed, after all, implies the involvement of a Blesser and not everyone is on board with that. Which I get. But still…it’s the only way for me to survive.

Little Brother’s favourite teacher, and the director of his preschool, died last week (unlucky). The email relating the news was a punch to the gut, rendering me breathless there in my closet while the kids played in the next room and I felt a growing sense of dread over telling them. This man, who jokes with me about that carafe that looks like rosé in the school fridge, who calls LB “Groover” and tells him “toodle poodle” at the end of the day, who settles him when I’m dropping him off in the morning with a book on the sofa…he cannot be gone, but he is. Via an aneurism that leaves his wife a widow and his children fatherless and my sons with so many questions. Somehow, unlucky doesn’t sum it up. Doesn’t begin to capture the pain and loss so many are feeling right now.

The other day, on the way into school, The Kid asked me why not everyone has a therapist. I geared up emotionally, which for me looks like silent prayers and anxiety, and then he continued: “Are they just not lucky?” The breath left me, as always, at the beautiful way he sees his world.

And at the way LB said to me yesterday, “You know why I tell jokes, Mommy? To make you laugh.” This little performer, already so aware of others’ reactions, so different from his brother, and I get both of them: the thoughtful empath and the hilarious ham, each still so much more than that. Lucky.

But it’s not enough, this term. Was I lucky to have gotten to LB’s school last week in time to share one last joke with his teacher, or to arrive there that afternoon in time to witness a dance party in his classroom? Were we just lucky to have known him at all? Is TK lucky to have friends who, like this morning, bring him watches from their collections as gifts because they know he loves them? Am I lucky to smell salt water every day?

Are we unlucky to have to grieve a too-soon passing? Unlucky that I stepped on a sea urchin this weekend after a post-party dive into the ocean? Is TK unlucky to need a bit of extra help at times, or to face potential misunderstanding? Are we unlucky to be so far from friends and family across the world?

There’s no danger that I’ll stop using the hashtag version anytime soon, but I’m attempting to remember the sincere version, the one whispered as thanks in prayers over small heads, the one that acknowledges the faithfulness of someone outside myself even when I’d like to complain to management (him) about his techniques. This reality of being blessed, in the midst of loss and gain, of presence and absence, of ease and hardship, it is what connects and redefines the gulf between lucky and unlucky, what includes them both within its vast umbrella and makes them all, somehow, the same: grace.

Last night, as we were lying in their room and they were definitely not going to sleep–yet–the boys were asking me questions. All the questions. About school, zombies, our family. They like to ask about what happened prior to when they came along–calling it “Before Us”–and it goes something like this:

“Remember when it was just you and Daddy?”
“And then it was me?”
“And then it was just three of you because it wasn’t me yet?”
“And then Will came and there were four?”

“Yes,” I’ll say. “And then we were complete.”

Last night, Little Brother finished the story: “I like complete.”

I do too. I like it so much that I want to gather all the pieces of our story and make them symmetrical, matching, and done. I want to wrap it all up in a bow (or a tidy blog post) and have the ending all but written based on the parts before. I’m good at epilogues.

The annoying part is that our story is yet to be completely written, at least in chapters we can see, because we’re not the ones writing it. For example, last night as I traced my hand along The Kid’s lengthening leg trying to get him to nod off, I had a sudden image of sweaty armpits and puberty and it made me nearly hyperventilate. No, we still have story left, lots of it, God willing.

But there are themes we can count on, elements that tend to reappear and repeat.

The Husband just returned from a twelve-day trip to America, and it reminded me of his triplet of sojourns to Australia before we moved here, fact-finding and work missions. Those were the days when TK was five and LB was two. There were fewer questions about zombies, but everything else felt more difficult: unproductive toilet training, shorter winter days with longer darkness, fewer walking-distance friends to share it with. I would jump at every bump in the night.

This time, it’s summer and both boys have full school days, plus some: sport and school readiness on off days for LB, tennis on weekends for TK, swimming lessons for both. More ways to communicate beyond crying (for all of us). Friends nearby whose pools and company provide refuge. A house built like a fortress that allows us all to fall headfirst into the depths of sleep, along with earplugs to supplement.

It was easier, is what I’m saying. Not just because our surroundings have changed, but also because we have more experience–with life, with our story, with each other. We’re more of a team. We’re more us.

LB is more him, which means an innate awareness of his role as comedian of the family, his jokes–mispronounced words, toilet humour, pratfalls on the couch–accompanied by sideways glances to make sure we’re watching his perpetual show. TK as the older, more serious brother, the budding engineer who examines and questions everything, who gets a gleam in his eye when I tell him about how his teacher praised his coding skills.

There is more repetition in the responses of those around us as they continue to know us: laughter at LB’s antics, looks of empathy paired with “Are you okay?” as they see me navigating TK’s typical beginning-of-the-year anxiety and clinging to me, an anxiety I know all too well from my own childhood story. There are the studying looks his teachers give him giving way to enjoyment of his individuality, of his curiosity and kindness and gentleness.

Deja vu all over again.

And there is the familiar return of TH, the taxi delivering him safely to our driveway as the boys run out to greet him and I breathe a sigh of relief both because the workload has now lessened but also because you never truly know the ending of the story until it’s over, and ours is not. We’re complete once again, the four of us, our story continuing, incomplete as its pages keep being written yet complete in the hands of the one doing the writing.

You got more than you gave/
And I wanted what I got
When you got skin in the game, you stay in the game
But you don’t get a win unless you play in the game…

This was not how I had pictured my Saturday morning.

The room around me was dark but for laser lights puncturing the black, bouncing around me on all sides. Music blasted from unseen speakers. Children darted about, including one of mine. He alternately stuck to my side and shot out himself, out of my line of vision then back into it again. We were walled in but surrounded by faces we knew, trapped but free.

It was…fun.

Birthday parties have, over the years, been some of the sources of my deepest identity crises, but these days they are more the sites of a decent time. And this one, on a grey Saturday morning amid the tourists and trappings of the city, was turning out better than I’d imagined. The Kid and I had dropped off Little Brother at a friend’s house and picked up that same friend’s brother, who came along with us. I managed to find a car park without coupling it to a nervous breakdown. We had entered the party on time. So far, so good. TK broke off from the group, wanting to check out the arcade games. We did, then I pulled him back for our first reality check/group activity: laser tag.

We listened to the instructions and the kids divided into teams. I went into the darkened room with him and the rest of them, passing on a vest of my own because I am a Dignified Adult (patent pending), and I figured I’d need to helicopter-parent TK without being encumbered by bulky outerwear. The game began.

A few minutes later it was done and we filed outside the room to check the scoreboard. No points on the board for us, but while I struggled not to hyperventilate due to sensory overload, TK grinned. The organisers suggested another round. A couple of the parents opted for vests this time. I hesitated…then grabbed one of my own. I chose to be on TK’s team.

Some of the kids saw me put on a vest and cheered, as did TK. I think it may be one of my favourite life moments.

For the next fifteen minutes, we all darted together. I shot and was shot at, by kids and other parents. People look different in the dark, when lit up only by lasers. When they’re having fun. When they’re…playing. TK and I stuck together and ventured apart. We were both in the game, on each other’s side.

This time, we got points on the board.

I had to pull TK away early, before arcade time, to get to his first tennis lesson. I expected a meltdown but didn’t get one. We got to the court and for thirty minutes, he smiled. He played, and I watched from my own spot on the sidelines.

Earlier in the week, I took LB and his friend to a school readiness program and for two hours, I hiked. I covered ground I never had before, pushed aside branches and gasped once at a snake that slithered away. I happened upon beaches that are only reachable by trail and gazed upon views you don’t see from the car.

There are some spots that can only be reached by the more arduous journey. But then…what a vista.

TK’s annual fight against school is weakening already this year. On Mondays, I pick him up early for speech therapy, and this week I crept in silently. These are the forays that you only “get” to make if you’re facing something out of the typical: a dentist appointment, a challenge, a diagnosis. There have been times when I wished I could be the parent who showed up at three o’clock every day along with all the others; the parent who dropped and ran at every party; the parent whose kid’s road didn’t have bumps in it to navigate.

But on Saturday, I played laser tag. And on Monday, I surprised my kid and was met with a grin that lit up the room just after I saw him bent over his work at the jelly bean table, his wrist working harder than the others because it was born a bit weaker, and it wasn’t about having to do anything. It was–it is becoming–about getting to.

I’m writing this at our outdoor table while the boys, deprived of their devices all day, focus on iPads inside. It is a moment’s peace in between the moments of…life. Of waving to The Husband this morning from the driveway, the three of us in varying stages of anxiety (me: high; The Kid: mild; Little Brother: nonexistent), as he hopped into a hybrid Uber that fascinated TK and worried me. The car taking him to the airport for a nearly two-week trip back to America, a trip spent seeing family and friends but mostly working. And working on our future, at that. No pressure or anything.

I’m in between LB’s first day of school successfully completed and TK’s starting tomorrow. One precipice gently dismounted and another yet to come. After last year’s teacher debacle we must have been exhausted–well, by that and by the holiday we took afterward, #firstworldproblems–and we spent much of the summer not in the constant playdate mode I envisioned but more in hibernation, social events peppered in but more moments spent watching movies, sitting on the couch, and just staying home. I’m ready for that to change…and not.

I’ve found my expectations (definition: future disappointments) to be two-sided: on the one hand, that of the kids’ schools, they’re high. LB is at the same spot, in the same class, with the same teachers and the same best school friend. I’m a fan of same, even if it isn’t the card that’s been dealt most often. For his part, TK stands to gain a better teacher experience this year along with his same therapists at the same school.

On the other hand, we start the year without TH in his rightful place–with us–and my expectations for sanity are…LOW. Gone will be the early-morning hikes with my trek team, or the post-dinner zone-out while he rumbles with the boys. I’ll have the fleeting hours each week while the kids are at school to myself, with their own non-summer kind of worry mixed in, and no partner alongside me for support (ie, hearing my complaints).

We do have a hell of a security system, though. So there’s that.

On the flight back from our holiday, I watched Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. My expectations were low–any film with an exclamation point in the title already feels too chipper for me on a good day, and especially on a flight that was delayed three hours. But I found myself grinning like an idiot through the whole thing, including the credits, and feeling like I had pulled something off, had stumbled upon a big secret. I think this is how it often works–low expectations leave space for surprise. I’m sure life would be handled best with this idea in mind, but it’s impossible not to think ahead, not to form opinions of how things should, and might, be.

Yesterday TH took the boys to a movie and I wandered around the mall, shopping and thinking about the talk I’m meant to give at a conference in April. I dutifully listened to my most inspirational songs and watched some riveting videos and pecked away at my phone as a few ideas scuttled through my brain. None of it felt particularly right. Last night, I went to the bathroom and glanced at TH’s deodorant can, and that’s when inspiration hit. I can’t explain it and I don’t know that I want to be able to. It’s equal parts nonsense and amazing, this life.

So between the alone hours and the chicken nugget/wine and cheese dinners that will mark our coming days, I’ll try not to expect much while secretly expecting the world, because that’s how it goes anyway. I’ll expect to lose my mind a little while also expecting TH to be returned to us safely. I’ll worry about the boys at school while expecting their days to be historically wonderful. I’ll wake up with four legs in my face and I’ll get the grey dyed out of my hair and I’ll operate partner-less yet not alone, expecting grace to show up in deodorant cans and friends, in kid jokes and solitude, in everything if I’ll just look.

It’s the only thing for which my expectations can never be too high. I mean, what else would show up, just as I’m finishing this, as Little Brother with his pants down to his knees, saying, “How’s it going out here, man?”

You can’t experience grace until you’ve experienced yourself. –Paul Zahl

I have swum in a couple of oceans now, as well as a gulf and a few seas. I have lived on an island, in several states, and a couple of continents across two hemispheres. If finding myself were the goal, I have certainly been located by now. But it isn’t geographical wandering that has led to that discovery.

I have found myself, have learned myself, have known myself in the counselor’s chair, in the space between my children’s yelling and my exasperation, in the moments of deciding whether to pour another drink, in between the moves and the events. It’s the in between that is really everything.

I said yes to an invitation to join a team on a sixty-kilometre hike across Sydney in two months’ time, and my body is catching up with this decision and all it entails: early-morning alarms, chafed skin, blistered feet, aching muscles. And also: new friendships, unexpected strength, beach sunrises. I feel every step even as they all become a blur once the endpoint is reached, which is really just another starting line for the next outing.

The pain is intense and the views are incredible. This, I think, is life.

I don’t think I’d want to know the person I would have become if I’d gotten what I wanted, if I’d had the easy road: people who made excuses for me as easily as I made them for myself; parents who hired me a PR team rather than making me own my mistakes; marriage in my early twenties; a stationary existence. The flat path. Because it’s in the re-stationing, in the grappling that I have become and am becoming. Not the broad strokes or simple black and white, but the day-to-day: the blisters on feet and heart that come from messing up, from hangovers, from being forgiven, from coming up short and finding the enough elsewhere.

From learning how to breathe in a new way.

When The Husband and I visited before our move here, we drove by a car wash with a cafe attached. I could imagine the boys there: The Kid watching the cars move through their line, Little Brother beside him. Last weekend we sat in that spot, two years in, this car wash one of many landmarks now as familiar to them, to us, as any back where we were. These are the moments when knowing occurs: the moments between dirty and clean, which is to say, all of them.

On our most recent training hike we met in the dark and finished in the light. In those moments between dark and light, we walked and climbed and covered ground, and somehow this thing called sunrise, which is even assigned a definitive time down to the minute each day, it occurred while all that was happening. As if the sun isn’t always there shining, and we, the travelers, aren’t the ones moving, being brought closer to the light.

The other night I had a dream that our family was packing up the house we’d lived in since the kids were born: the home they were brought to from the hospital, the one that contains a marking of their various heights through the years, the one in which they spent their childhoods making memories.

I woke up and realised this house doesn’t exist.

What a strange thing. I have a house like that, one that had a dent in the wall in the bedroom my sister and I shared for years where she threw herself on the bed and skidded across it, knocking her noggin into drywall. It’s the house where we bicycled from in the mornings and where we returned at sunset after hours spent roaming the neighbourhood. It has the pool where my sister gave me a scar on my forehead after a stainless steel bowl slipped from her grip when she was filling it and dumping water on me.

My kids don’t have that.

Sure, we have the house in Atlanta where they came as babies from the hospital. The Kid spent five years there and Little Brother, two. They now call it our “Holiday House” because (a) they are under the impression that we own more than one house and are, apparently, some kind of real estate moguls; and (2) they now associate it with vacations because, much like Carrie and her 73rd Street apartment on the penultimate episode of Sex and the City, “WE DON’T LIVE THERE ANYMORE.” This is a strange thing to me, and bordering on the unacceptable: my boys have lived in four houses over the past four years and will surely live in a different one after the current year.

It would be completely unacceptable were it not for the fact that we didn’t ask for this; we were pushed off this cliff by grace.

I mean, we’re not even a military family. We can’t justify this wandering by saying we’re serving our country. And it feels wrong, in some ways, like when I dropped TK off for his first day of daycare as a baby and came home to sob. But it feels less wrong when I watch them run down the beach. When I carry them through the waves, literal and figurative, of our new life. When I’m carried myself through them, because I know we wouldn’t be who we are now were it not for a grace that moves us all over the map and goes with us.

We have gained so much more than we have lost. In fact, I’m trying to remember (besides proximity to some family and friends, of course) if we’ve lost anything.

Well, TK has. Last week, he lost his fifth tooth. In many ways, though, it was like the first. It was the first one he trusted me enough to let me pull–and I could see the weighing of options, the trepidation in his eyes. (I wonder if I ever look at God like that. Of course I do.) It was also the first upper tooth, which means that his smile his now changed.

“You have a new smile!” I told him, and he considered this–he, so resistant to change, but also strangely attracted to new things, to growth. I relate. He’s been playing with the new space, and verifying that it will soon be occupied by a “grown-up tooth,” and this is only one of the million ways that he, that they, that life reminds me of what I already know but always forget: that the empty spots are places to be filled.

That “home” isn’t a house for us because it’s the four of us, this equal-sided square bouncing around the world and growing ever closer, ever tighter. Sometimes painfully so. (See: trips to the bathroom.) That so much of life is spent in the tension between old and new, in the old leaving and the new becoming old again and over and over it all goes. That my children are learning to let go, and embrace. And so am I. (It’s not the easiest exercise.)

That we have front-row seats to watch, to participate in, what grace is constantly doing: new creations.

It’s exhausting. And wonderful. And awful. And messy. Just like so much, if not all, of the real parts of life are: the “beautiful moments through the tears” that a friend just texted me; the sunrise I woke up early for that was covered by clouds–clouds that allowed just a few rays through; the pain and blood followed by a gap followed by a tooth.

Yesterday I took the boys to the beach and we chose a spot right in front of the junction of a tidal pool on one side, and the ocean on the other. The boys stepped gingerly into the tidal pool, complaining of the cold water and wanting to leave. After awhile, they wanted to get into the ocean. And they didn’t. I hiked one up on each hip and we made our way through the waves. They protested; TK in particular felt his growing weight slipping down on me and said to stop, to turn around. I put him down and asked him to trust me, then held out my hand and turned back to the waves, fully expecting to be packing it in and heading home within seconds.

Then I felt a small but growing hand in mine. I hiked him up again–it was easier, because we were now deeper–and we got past the breaking waves to the place where we could ride them. I think we’ll stay there awhile.

Last week I hauled the boys to an outdoor playdate near a pool. In between the splashing and sunburn came a moment that often accompanies social events: the flashes of experience I linger over later, the happenings I sit on and overanalyse. I’ve done this my whole life, because #socialanxiety and also plain old #anxiety and also #introversion and….I could go on. Now that I have kids, though, I’m afforded many more experiences to study and feelings to interpret. Now that I have a kid diagnosed on the spectrum I have even more. It almost seems like Someone is doing this on purpose to me, hitting me right where it hurts and making me deal with it.

At one point, The Kid asked if he could do a wee in the garden. A “bush wee” as we call it here–it’s a cute way of saying “piss outside.” And, here, “garden” is not a word to describe an English outdoor masterpiece but, rather, a yard. A patch of grass. Anyway, I figure a couple of the benefits of having boys are (1) The Husband has to take them to the bathroom when they need to go and he’s around; and (2) when those conditions are not met, outdoor wees are often permissible. Let’s be honest–they’re probably too permissible in my book, because I’m lazy and it’s easy. So TK and Little Brother are used to dropping trou all over the place: music festivals, kerbsides, once on the side of a highway…you get it.

This trou-dropping is not about being on the spectrum. If anything, it’s a product of the parent I’m becoming because of this foreign sojourn–the very opposite of the rule-prioritising oligarch I planned to be before life and grace intervened. It’s about Australia, not autism: they’ve been spraying their golden showers all over this gorgeous country for two years now. And people who clutch their pearls over this…test me as a symbol of something I’m not. I think it’s actually a pretty good screening process for potential friends: you react in horror to my kids relieving themselves outside, we probably won’t be besties (see also: shock over f-bombs, hangovers, talks about mental health, etc).

Anyway, TK asked permission to go outside, and I considered running him inside before imagining the trail of dripping pool water certain to accompany us no matter how much towelling off occurred. So I asked my friend, the host, if bush wees were allowed at her place, and she said they were. So he did. No harm, no foul.

A few minutes later, though, a scene occurred that has defined so much of the angst in my life and the reason why I relate so deeply to the title of Mindy Kaling’s first book: two of the moms there were huddled together in the pool, and one of them cast a glance my (and TK’s way).

RED ALERT TO MY SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. I immediately felt my defences arise–on behalf of myself (my parenting, my personality, my very identity) and, especially, on behalf of TK. See, something often happens with people who aren’t around him much: there’s this thing they do, where they know something is “different” about him, and they stare. They take furtive glances; they study him surreptitiously. It’s creepy, and it’s common, and it annoys the shit out of me, and I often wonder if I’d do it myself if I were them, briefly, before I get back to eviscerating them in my head. On this particular occasion there were several glances and even instances of pointing out offences he’d committed (food dropped on the ground, for example; CALL THE F-ING POLICE). Both my anger and despondence were piqued.

A few minutes later, the boys none the wiser, we said our thank-yous and goodbyes and left. Cut to me on the car ride home, and for the next several hours (kidding, DAYS) analysing the whole thing.

A close friend who knows that I obsess over, well, everything, but especially how people treat TK, tells me that the differences that I think about people noticing are not actually that noticeable. I love her for this, because she means it, and because she loves TK, but she’s also around him a lot. Around us a lot. In other words, she would not have to enter a psychiatric facility if one of my kids pissed in her yard. And these are the people whose opinions should matter, right? The people who know us and love us?

Sounds like a great idea! TELL THAT TO MY EVER-WOUNDED PSYCHE. Because the truth is, there will always be a part of me that is operating from that raw, hurt place inside (my counsellor called it The Inner Child, yes I’ve seen some counsellors CAN YOU TELL) that the world damaged long ago and that is still struggling to recover from it. “The world” being, well, everyone in our history, reacting to everything about us that they notice: our size, our looks, our weird personalities. I’ve heard that there are a few rare people, Galinda-style, who sail through life without anything offensive in their natures drawing the attention of the world around them. But I think that, like unicorns and compassionate Trumps, these people don’t actually exist because none of us escapes childhood or adolescence fully unscathed. No, I think most of us–even (especially) the pearl-clutchers–come into adulthood with our factory settings switched to a default of “respond out of wounds.” Out of shame.

Ugh, shame. (noun) the painful feeling arising from the consciousness of something dishonorable, improper, ridiculous, etc., done by oneself or another. Yep, that pretty much covers it. Painful.

So whether you once farted in front of a group of people, or had a phase of really bad acne, or were just a didn’t-fit-in-anywhere outsider (hello from your friend me, who nailed the trifecta!), maybe you know something about this? Maybe you have it buried deep beneath layers of since-improved-to-acceptable behaviour/size/hairstyle. I don’t know, I’m not your counsellor (can you imagine? We’d just talk about me the whole time).

It’s there, though. And dealing with it is messy and involves lots of thinking and feeling and admitting and all kinds of other activities that cut into social media time and override filters. But dealing with it is the only thing that keeps us honest. It’s the only thing that keeps us real.

And I’m beginning to think that, inconveniently, it’s the only thing that keeps us from dumping it all over our kids.

On my best days, I examine. On my worst ones, I obsess. Most of the time I’m riding the wave between the two and trying not to screw my kids up too much, only too aware of how so much of their stuff coincides with mine in a way that feels targeted…almost as though Someone is doing this on purpose for me, hitting me right where it hurts and helping me deal with it.

The other night we watched The Greatest Showman for the thousandth time and TK, ever with his eye for/obsession with detail (wonder where he gets that from) asked about the men who burned down Barnum’s building and beat up his employees. “Why did they do that?” he asked, and we talked about how some people are afraid of what is different–of what they don’t know. I didn’t get into the subject of shame and how closely it’s connected with hate; I figure we’ll get to that. He kept asking questions until the next scene, when all those “different” people showed up in a bar. “Look! It’s the good people!” TK exclaimed.

We watched as these outcasts danced and sang–two things hard to do if you’re clinging to shame. “They’re dancing,” I told him. “And singing,” he replied, then sang along, the refrain of the outcasts who know their name, where they’re from, where they now belong.

“And we will come back home.”

My phone sits in a bowl of rice on the kitchen counter right now, the product of it being soaked in a torrential downpour last night. It was our third New Year’s Eve in Sydney, but somehow also our first: for the past two years we have landed at the airport that morning, and jet lag kept us from staying awake for festivities. This year, though, our feet had been on terra firma for a good three days after a week in Hawaii. We were rested (somewhat) and ticketed, for a celebration with friends at the North Sydney pool to swim, drink cans of wine, and watch fireworks. So we did.

Several bouts of thunder and lightning led to several pool evacuations, during which we ducked under cover and/or headed to the indoor pool behind the stands where our belongings sat, getting drenched. Once the rain finally lifted, we returned to our seats to grab some food (wine cans) and assess the damage. While the band played a medley of Mamma Mia hits in the background, I surveyed my poor lifeless phone. Then I jumped into the pool with the boys and bobbed around to the sounds of “Waterloo.”

And now, the morning after, I’m tempted to assign a New Year’s-sized batch of meaning to the fact that this morning, I was forced to drink my coffee without checking Twitter, and instead watch the boys playing. I feel the familiar urge to check my phone, to grab it and place it on the bathroom counter while I shower, to press Play on a podcast so sounds can fill the silence. Each time, the urge gives way to the realisation that the only thing touching my phone for the next few hours will be rice.

I went on a run with an old iPod The Husband found, one full of infant songs that I’d bought when The Kid was fresh and new, and I downloaded my own stuff but set it to shuffle, which left me fast-forwarding to the former soundtrack of my days, passing through hits like “Mommy Train” and “I Have a Doll!”. It’s the same feeling I had when the boys asked to watch Fireman Sam the other day for the first time since we moved here two years (!) ago: a crystal-clear nostalgia that invades through memories, memories of TK being tiny and me being so tired and fearful and confused by new motherhood; memories of hot days spent pushing TK and Little Brother through our new suburb, ten thousand miles from our old one, in a season that should be winter but was somehow summer. Newness drenching all the memories that, because of the arrival of new years, are now old, but can still hit me with the force of having just occurred.

Time is such a weird thing.

Our last night in Hawaii, I stood on our hotel balcony, twenty-one floors up, and saw the city to my left full of lights and the ocean to my right, dark yet full of its own life. It reminded me of summer nights on the beaches where I grew up, sitting on different balconies looking at an ocean of a different name that somehow still connected to this one. The days of our lives have been likened to sands in an hourglass, but I think of them more like water, passing by us yet never lost, connecting where we were then to where we are now. My newborn is now a wobbly-toothed seven year old; his brother so much more than an anxiety-filled hope enlarging my belly. That night as I sat on the balcony, they were feet away inside, their exhaustion giving way to sleep while mine gave way to frustration and irritation and, as usual, anxiety. It was time to return home, and my vantage point gave me views east and west. Two directions, two homes, with us in the middle.

Two directions. Two homes. Two years. Two kids, who, despite my shortness of temper and regretful outbursts, greet each day as though it’s brand new–which it is, but I of course forget–a shiny thing full of possibility. And last night, those faces bookended mine, with TH beside us, as the fireworks we’ve missed the last two years exploded right before us. Those two small but growing faces resembled TK’s one Fourth of July while LB was three months out from his first appearance: lingering smiles and eyes full of wonder. My own eyes collected tears at the true wonder of it all: how a place, and people, can be old and new at the same time–how all the best ones are, their history surpassed only by their promise. How grace keeps transferring us from one fireworks show or ocean or home to another, all of them still somehow connected.

If it’s possible to be self-aware to a fault, I would like to raise my hand for candidacy as president of that club. All my life I have worried, fretted, sweated over what people think of me; over how much space I’m taking up; over how I appear to the people around me. I’ve spent countless hours considering the impact of my words and actions on others (and, in an ironic twist, remaining completely oblivious in, doubtless, countless other situations).

Which is why this past hectic week has been such a gift to my fear-ravaged soul.

The boys each had their end of year/Christmas concerts with their schools: The Kid’s was an all-day affair last Thursday, beginning with a bus ride to a local school with a hired theatre where he and the rest of the students would perform both a matinee and evening performance of their choreographed and costumed dance, set to “The Final Countdown” by Europe. I remember running and spinning to this song in a past life, constant awareness of my “form” and endurance and energy level plaguing the course. This time, though, there was only him: TK blasting, as usual, through our expectations and crushing it onstage. His grin lit up the room. There were tears–and not just on my face. I sat by his kindy teacher from last year for both performances, and she brought her daughter–who had helped out last year–along. “I just love James,” the daughter told me, and the three of us matched TK’s grin as we watched him dance across that motherfucking stage like he owned it alongside his classmates. He was lit up like a Christmas tree by that incomparable smile of his, wobbly front tooth and all (though the sequins on his costume didn’t hurt either).

At the evening performance, his teacher brought him to me a couple of songs before they went on–apparently he’d gotten upset when he couldn’t locate us in the crowd–and I sat with him on the floor as we awaited his class’s turn. When that turn came, I returned to my seat beside his kindy teacher and waited. We wondered if he’d pull it off again, given the emotional obstacle he’d just endured and the exhaustion of such a full day. Then we watched–and embraced each other as he gave another knockout performance. He was rewarded with Oreo ice cream and an early exit to head home, where, after we put them to bed, a thought popped unbidden into my head: how boring it must be to have a “normal” child…

Enter Little Brother for his Monday morning preschool performance. He tossed his “shy/excited” smile across at The Husband and me, along with some exuberant waves, and launched into what can only be described as World’s Most Enthusiastic Performance. There was stomping, waving, dancing, grinning, singing. “We Mish You a Merry Christmas” was a highlight. Getting so many words wrong, so wonderfully, as he does (for example: sharp for him is shark–because, DUH, shark teeth are sharp). He bounced back to us afterward, red-faced and joyful and undeniably pleased with himself.

And I realised I don’t have “normal”–I have neurodivergent and neurotypical, but I also have quirky, for both, in spades. I have a wonderful lack of self-consciousness doubled and modelled to me. I have freedom times two, walking through the world, personified.

This is healing. It’s annoying, because it means my toes are constantly stepped on and my boobs constantly run into, but it is healing.

I have heat at Christmas time–have I mentioned that at all?–but, stepping out into it from LB’s concert, I have a counter-intuitive lightness along with the sweat and sun because I have a boy playing in that heat in his sunhat with his friends who bids me goodbye with a kiss and wave because he knows he is loved. I have a boy who waits for me as I take LB into his preschool and who, when I return to the car to take him to school, has left a map on my phone because he’s been traveling while I was gone. “Where have you been today?” I ask him, and see that this morning we get to talk about Italy, where–he already knows because he’s checked–they drive on the right side of the road. This is who they are, these unhurried souls who tell me things like “M’s my therapist because I have an apple brain” and “H’s feet are bigger than mine because he’s older,” without any, as yet, worry or concern about differences. How, exactly, do I bottle and extend and absorb that, please?

Before we left America, on our last Sunday before Christmas Sunday, our pastor-friend gave a sermon about the angel visiting Mary. The most outrageous thing that angel said? “Do not fear.” Then he named us, those sitting there that day, he named us knowing the things that we’re afraid of. I wept as he told us not to fear, knowing Sydney and goodbyes were on the horizon. But not yet knowing that concerts full of joy were too.

When we were in Tasmania a couple of months ago we entered a room in the museum that people were queued up for. A gradual approach revealed that it contained an interactive art installation–participants placed a mask over their faces and threw a china plate at a wall, allowing it to shatter and fall into a bin below.

I hesitated. There were people in line–they’d be watching. What if I did it wrong? What if I looked like a weirdo?

The desire to shatter dinnerware trumped the (ridiculous and impossible) possibility of “getting it wrong.” I popped the mask on and threw and heard the satisfying shatter. And my boys watched, cheering me on.

Yesterday I was tired and sore and sweaty after a marathon Monday, and when the boys and I stumbled in at 6 pm all I wanted was a shower. So, while our takeaway dinner sat on the counter and they played with cars on the floor, I absconded to my bathroom and jumped into the lukewarm water. Because–and I may not have mentioned this–for all our new house does have, it does not contain a single bathtub. So I stood–STOOD!–and let the water run over me. Soon enough, naturally, I heard my name yelled out, followed by one set of feet running toward me. LB spotted me in the shower and, in a flash, was naked, climbing in with me. A minute later, in came TK–same protocol. I remained there, the pain of being a woman radiating through my lower back and abdomen and legs, as these two creatures stood beside me, unabashedly hogging the water and unselfconsciously naked beside their mom. This is probably inappropriate, I thought. And I don’t give a shit. “HOTTER!” screeched TK, and the water kept flowing, running down the three of us like a baptism.

Yesterday was The Kid’s birthday, capping off a ten-day celebration that started on the 1st and would, were he to choose, still be going on. He woke up to balloons scattered throughout his and Little Brother’s room–both of them bounding up the stairs to announce, “Guess what?! There are balloons all over our room!” (yes, just like every year)–and a donut breakfast replete with Cars candle. I took more of those donuts in at the close of the school day and his class sang happy birthday to him while he grinned so hard I think his face stretched a bit.

We went to therapy afterward, because what kid doesn’t want that for their birthday, where we heard that he’s progressing so well that his sessions will be scaled back considerably next year, as will his school shadowing. Then we came home to a takeaway dinner with Oreo mousse dessert included. He fell asleep upon a pillow of questions as usual.

Meanwhile, I headed upstairs feeling like a Grade A asshole as usual.

It’s a broken record that I keep playing anyway: I want to be more patient. I want to answer questions enthusiastically and winsomely and in a way that encourages their curiosity. I want to stop, when they ask questions, picturing that kid at the beginning of Home Alone who follows the van driver around with queries until he’s told to get lost. I want to stop saying “because that’s the way it works.”

Christmas edition: I want to slow down. I want to stop transforming what should be a season of rest into a season of constant doing, or at least stop buying into a culture that does that. I want to stop turning everything–including viewing my favourite holiday movies–into a To Do List. I want to be still.

Meanwhile, the dining room table is covered with chocolate and cookies and Christmas cards that I will stand over TK and beg him to sign so that people will feel appreciated, dammit.

I remember one winter in New York, when I trudged up the steps near 42nd Street and 2nd Avenue toward Tudor City and the preschool there, where I was due to give a talk about teeth to the kids. Once I emerged on level ground, I saw the snow that had been my nemesis on the stairs–but here it was carpet, perfect and white and still falling in flakes. It felt like I’d been given a glimpse into a dream, into a scene to which I alone was privy in this moment. It was quiet, still, magical. Another world.

I want to see Christmas like that. But it’s SO HOT HERE.

And this is the deal–this weighing of the demands and realities of life, this day-after-the-birthday depression alongside beginning-of-Advent joy. The difference between complaining and recognising–recognising that it sucks that I won’t see my parents and sister this Christmas for the first time in years. That I won’t laugh with my cousins when the uncles make wonderfully inappropriate jokes. That I won’t see the marathon of A Christmas Story on TBS.

Unless they show it in Hawaii, of course. Because that is where I’ll be–poor little me–alongside my three male companions. It’s not a shitty deal, but it’s also not everything. I’m allowing myself a little space for the parts that are missing.

This morning my run was short. Because heat. But instead of turning around, I kept walking: over the bridge, down the stairs, and through the woods (“bush” here) to a private beach at the beginning of a hiking trail. I stood in front of the water, looking out for snakes, and felt it–what I had felt in Tudor City, but now years later and dozens of degrees warmer–the sense that I had been brought here. Led here by a love, a grace, that wanted to get me alone to show me something. To show me the magic that can happen in snowstorms and on beaches, in New York and in Australia, after Christmas and during Advent. The magic that has a name–Grace–that leads, and carries, us through hospitals and diagnoses and heat and cold and birthdays and day-after-birthdays and Christmas Day and Boxing Day and across bridges and past snakes (I assume they were there, hiding) and through days in which we are assholes and days in which we are…smaller assholes?…and through everything to moments like this: scenes of stillness and quiet, Nativities and the like, where we are singled out and loved and reminded that it’s not about the cards we make or the surprises we pull off or us at all, really. Advent is bigger, because grace is.

Anne Lamott writes, “This is how most of us are–stripped down to the bone, living along a thin sliver of what we can bear and control, until life or a friend or disaster nudges us into baby steps of expansion. We’re all both irritating and a comfort, our insides both hard and gentle, our hearts both atrophied and pure.” I’ll try to remember this tonight when the kids ask me a hundred questions starting with “Why?”–seriously, sometimes they sit on the toilet and just say “Why” and don’t even have a question prepared; I think they like saying it for the hell of it–and I struggle to maintain my sanity. I’ll remember what my friend CR said, that one of her Advent words is expansion, and that my kids sure do love to expand me–always have–and, mercifully, so does grace, which holds them and me both.