I should have known to turn around–and part of me did at least, as I watched car after car head the wrong way down the one-way slip near our house. One of them even approached me with a lowered window in the driving rain, its owner attempting to say something as I angrily drove past all the people breaking the rules on this dreary morning.

As we approached the curve ahead, the water’s depth grew, and I finally saw what was redirecting traffic: a fallen tree at the top of the hill. I pointed it out to the boys, who responded with approximately seven thousand questions (most beginning with Why), and turned around myself. That day would go on to be one of the stormiest in Sydney’s recent history, with mass erosion on the beachfronts and flooding of businesses and homes.

And the thing is, we could see it coming. The weather reports didn’t forget to warn us, didn’t neglect to recognise that a storm was on its way. There are just some times when preparations are in vain, when you can’t do anything until after the storm hits.

This blog used to be graced by a header photo of me and a nearly-two-year-old version of The Kid, sitting on the beach in Seaside, Florida, he with his characteristic pre-surgical head tilt and I with a beer on the other side of me. We were facing the water, its waves lapping before us, while a collection of dark grey clouds loomed above and ahead of us. I took it a bit literally, knowing as I did that TK’s surgery was approaching and that he should really be talking by then. I hoped those clouds didn’t include another chemical pregnancy and setback to our hoped-for-family of four. My second grandmother had just passed away, and those clouds carried grief within their billows. On the beach that day, though, all we could do was wait: wait for the storm to hit, then pass.

This year in Sydney has been more of Real Life. Gone was the idyllic kindergarten year for TK, with its constant triumphs and perfect teacher. His treasured therapist moved on, and we approached his Year One hesitantly. So much change, again. The year brought teacher woes but, still, victories. Another wonderful therapist. Some exclusions, as is typical with age, but new friends in his circle as well. New ones in mine too, more Fridays full of playdates and champagnes, more hangovers and wondering over drinking habits, more weight gained as comfort grew. A new church after a sabbatical. Another new house, dammit.

We’re rounding the corner on our second year here, approaching our third, and besides the house, we’ve capped it off in our traditional way, with LB’s and TK’s birthday parties. TK’s was this past weekend, in the house we just left: empty of furniture but full of people; a bounce house out front and water games in the back and beer and bubbles inside. This year has both flown by and felt like a marathon. It’s had more cloudy days, metaphorically speaking, but deeper and fuller ones. More serious talks over the wine glasses–but serious talks are my favourite kind–the ones that hold both laughter and tears are really the only ones worth having, I think.

I didn’t see TK or LB for most of the party–they were busy running around with their friends. Last year, when everyone started singing to TK, he hilariously ran around the corner to avoid the attention. This time, he merely covered his face partially with his arm, not enough, though, to hide the grin that stretched across his features. He clung to me, but loosely. He has come so fucking far.

I’m in awe of this boy who has undergone multiple knives, countless waiting rooms, MRI machines and offices; who has moved across the world and through three houses, who sees the world through lenses I’ll never fully have and deals with obstacles I’ll never fully understand and rises to meet every challenge in ways I’ll never fully know. I’m in awe of his brother, who waits patiently for his brother in waiting rooms and cars, who repeats himself when TK doesn’t hear him the first time and asks TK to repeat himself when he doesn’t understand (“I don’t know what you’re saying, buddy”), who cracks jokes with an ability beyond his years. I’m in awe of their dad, whom they recently have taken to calling Jason, and how he’s led us, because of his hard work and irreplacability, to this new home, to three houses, each better in some way than the last, to views I never imagined. I’m in awe of the grace that has been in charge the whole time, grey clouds and sun, storms and their aftermaths.

I’m tired because we just moved and because my stomach is cramping with a virus TK likely passed onto me. I’m emotional because it’s the Christmas season and with the hot weather here, I’m playing carols nonstop to make me remember. I’m reflective because it’s the end of another year here–another year away from family and so many friends, and another year embedded among more friends. Also, I have to pee and I’m holding it in, and I’m trying to avoid unpacking. There’s a lot going on.

On TK’s trip to the art gallery a few weeks ago, I was drawn to a colourful painting and read the card beside it, which described the artist’s “theory of colour harmonisation based on analogies between colours of the spectrum and notes of the musical scale.” Which, to me, is a fancy way of saying that there harmony exists because of the differences–in colours, in notes, in people–not in spite of them. Spectrum is obviously a fraught word for me but I often forget how there are so many different examples of it around us. As one of my favourite, yet somehow also strangely terrible in hindsight, Christmas movies might say (paraphrase): spectrums actually are all around us.

This is good news for me as I slow to a walk, stomach cramping, around the harbour behind our (new, again) house and see some clouds gathering to the west. There could be a storm coming: in my bathroom? In the sky? In life? But once you emerge on the other side of enough storms, you develop this weird ability…to see past them.

This year, we will celebrate Thanksgiving by moving.

Specifically, on Thursday, packers will enter our home and start boxing up our possessions. There will be no turkey in the oven; by the end of the day there won’t even be forks with which to eat. We’ll spend the next few days in the in-between, split between two houses much like we’re already split between two countries. We’ll dine on takeaway and pull our clothes out of suitcases, and I’ll grow increasingly anxious and unsettled, and we’ll get a key over the weekend to start hauling some stuff over, and then on Monday–traditionally the busiest (and usually the worst) day of the week–movers will load up their truck with all those boxes and take them to our new location.

Except they aren’t called movers here. They’re called removalists. Which is apt, I think, being that what they do is remove things from your home. Unpacking those things and making their new environment a home? That’s up to us.

And we’ve done that here, twice. Two houses, each holding our family for a year. Each with its own view and features and advantages and disadvantages. I rejected this new house the first time I saw it, The Kid and Little Brother in tow, because I couldn’t see us there. Another house was higher on my list, a smaller and more traditional (less modern) one, with a turquoise backsplash that reminded me of our Atlanta home. I clung to that detail while this new, polished, marble-filled house imposed before me. I looked at the bidet and the sharp-edged stairs and the (I KNOW) indoor pool and shook my head. Didn’t suit us. Weeks later and still without options, The Husband and I took another look. This time, it suited us. Funny how things change.

And now, I’m imagining us there. I’m browsing rugs on the internet and placing wall hangings in my mind. I’m arranging furniture and envisioning dinners with friends. This morning, I took a hike.

After dropping LB and then TK off at school, I hoofed it to the new house to map out the walk from TK’s school. On the way there, I saw a path with a sign marking its entrance: path to beach. A few minutes later, I found myself on a tiny beach in front of a harbour full of boats. I gazed across at the restaurants we’ve already frequented, a short walk away. I gazed upward and saw our new house on the hill. I imagined the four of us on this beach, swimming and building castles. Right below our house. Suddenly moving didn’t seem so burdensome.

I miss turkey. I miss the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and the Westminster Dog Show. I miss wine on the couch with my sister and sarcastic comments from my dad and letting my mom clean everything up (kidding. Or not.). I miss the temperature dropping and Christmas creeping in, slowly, until the day after Thanksgiving when it barges through completely. I miss shorter days and dark, sacred nights around the holidays. I miss not moving every year. New is hard, worrisome, and often defeating.

But maybe I need to be defeated, annually it seems? Because there is also this: TK delivering speeches to his class. LB showing me rugby moves. TK’s therapists telling me they’ll be fading out of school completely in the next year. LB singing me songs from the toilet. Both of them running off to join their friends at school and birthday parties and on beaches. There is this picking up–this removal–and dropping back down to somewhere different, where new life is to be found. Life I would never have sought out of my own, as I like to stay still thank you very much.

The other day I was walking home (to our current one, anyway) after a different hike. I spotted a snake in the tree in front of the house and snapped a quick photo of it, then ran inside to tell TH. He spent the next few minutes on his phone, researching the type and danger of the animal. Turned out it could either be very poisonous or completely safe, based on some colouring patterns that we weren’t willing to venture close enough to the creature to see. Over the next few days, the snake continued to hang in the tree, unmoving. We reasoned that it had died there. But not other creatures came to pick at its remains. Could it be…? A few days later, I noticed it lying on the ground in exactly the same position it had been in the tree. Plastic. The damn thing was a toy. It had been harmless the whole time.

Much of what I’ve feared in life, what I’ve obsessed over and worried about, has been, in the end, harmless. Some of it has not. In this case, TH simply tossed the thing into the trash with all of the others things we’re letting go of as we re-move yet again to a new view, together.

Little Brother has been performing, for weeks, a song he’s learned at preschool (fun fact: according to him, the literal translation of “preschool” is “the place where you throw dirt”). Due to LB’s…shall we say, reinterpretation of many words, I’m not sure if these are the exact lyrics, but the song goes something like this:

In upsy-down town, the sky is in the sea
The rabbit’s in the nest where the bird should be
The rain is going up instead of falling down
Down in upsy-down town.
There’s a chocolate cake as white as snow
And the more you eat it the bigger it grows
You walk up on your nose, you stand up on your toes
Down in upsy-down town.

Most days I feel like I live in upsy-down town.

Navigating life alongside a kid with superpowers/special needs has been described many ways: as Holland replacing Italy, as a marathon rather than a sprint. For me, one of the defining features of it (besides getting tagged on Facebook ad nauseum when people could have just sent me the damn link in a private email thanks) has been the steps forward, steps back, steps forward pattern that, only years in, is realised to be a dance. The movements start out erratic and unpredictable at first, uncertainty reigning, and then time goes on to reveal a rhythm not initially noticed, a pattern among the pattern-less seeming days, and beauty sets in. Brutal, terrific beauty.

Example: I can no longer count on Mondays to be awful.

Last year, The Kid’s teacher was simply wonderful. On report cards she discussed his weaknesses, praised his strengths, and told us (and others) what a gift he was to the class. She credited him with bonding the kids together. I accepted the compliment on his behalf and basked in its glow.

This year, we haven’t been as lucky. At least, not at first. But as situations have developed and meetings have been called and battles have been fought (I am especially handy in war departments; see my LinkedIn profile), other teachers have been added to the mix and what started with gritted teeth and reports has led to a now-growing list of People Who Know Him and Love Him, like the teacher who stopped me on Monday morning, as I was about to lose it over TK’s distracted focus on his hangnail rather than my instructions to change his reader. She simply said, “He is such a wonderful boy. You know what? He’s going to be such a beautiful adult. He will do so well.” A few minutes later, I spoke with the teacher who was in his class last Friday, who told me how social he is (!), and how much he loves interacting with his friends.

Monday mornings have typically been the locale for birdshit falling from the sky, tearful fights, and regrets to be apologised for later. Now they’re flipped upsy-down.

And there’s the birthday party thing. Long ago, I accepted (so willingly and graciously, I might add, and not with any resentment) that, as other parents began dropping their kids off for these affairs, I’d likely be remaining at the scene for years to come. So far, so true. But whereas in years past, when I’d follow TK around the perimeter of the location and silently plead for him to join the group, now he stays close to me for a few minutes before he either jumps in himself or is led by a mate. This past weekend, the party was at an indoor gym set up with activity stations: rope swings, monkey bars, etc. He lined up with everyone else as I hastily approached one of the helpers, telling her he may need some extra help, and I watched as he took his turn at each station, held by the helper at most and smiling through it. He came up to me afterward, red-faced and sweaty, saying, “I’m so TIRED. I’m really fit though.”

But he does still cover perimeters. Last week we were at LB’s touch rugby practice and TK came up to me beforehand. “I’m going to run twice around the oval,” he announced, and I told him to go for it even as I thought that I’d believe it when I saw it. As he circled one loop, I waved at him. “Want to come back?” I called. “I said TWICE!” he shouted back, covering the not-insignificant distance one more time before returning to me and my thought that we may have a cross-country runner on our hands–this boy who took what felt like forever (seventeen months) to walk.

On that afternoon, and at the birthday party, I thought of all the ground we’ve covered to get here, to this place where our 10 still often looks like others’ 5 (but don’t let that fool you; now he’s often finishing his worksheets first in class without help which is weirdly not a skill that is acknowledged at social and sporting events). To this place where he is forcing the Me I would have been out of the way in service of the creation of a better Me: a Me who can’t rely on being the person who has all her ducks in a row (it’s hard to line them up when one of the ducks doesn’t speak until he’s four); the Me who thought underdogs were just cute until their songs became our anthems; who gets that the track “Popular” from Wicked is satire rather than instruction manual; who would rather stay in the lane with all the Differents rather than be in the one who audition playdates for their kids (yeah that’s a thing). I know now that life can amount to keeping a list of rules–of How to Fit In, of How to Maintain an Image, of How to Not Rock the Boat–that end up amounting to BS and untold wasted years.

I know that it took awhile to get here and mean it, but that I’m okay in Upsy-Down Town. Especially when it has a bakery where I take him every Monday, before that string of therapy visits that could be (and often are) trying and long but also wonderful and ground-breaking, and when he walks up to the counter and orders and hands over the coins like I taught him, the server tells him, “You’re a lucky boy.” And I know that it’s true.

Last week when I was writing I had a singular purpose, narrowed into place by anger and endorphins and all the other things I mentioned. This week my rough edges feel a bit sanded down, by different things. I have been humbled (and not in the way that word is typically misused to mean humiliated, or #humbled to have reached a million Instagram followers. Ugh).

I think singleness of purpose can be great. It can be helpful in a season of needing to get shit done, of being focused and attentive. But more often I find myself in the land between What’s Definitely Right and What’s Obviously Wrong, in a territory where people are more than one-dimensional Disney characters (circa the 90s; they’ve upped their game recently), where there is more of the story to be played out than my current scene. This can be annoying, as I’m often ready for the play to be over so I can meet everyone at the bar.

This in-between place is akin to feeling adrift, not fully anchored–say, to a house to live in, or a desired outcome regarding a school situation, or…my sanity. It involves more tension, more floating and finding, a bit more nausea due to all the rocking. It involves iffy moments between friends, meeting conflict with them and biting your lip until you reach the other side, together and stronger for it, but damn that part before the other side was awkward, wasn’t it? It involves more terse conversations over the kids’ heads. It involves more meetings and more letting go of what people think (not my strongest suit).

But the company out here can’t be beat. So there’s that.

Lately (by which I mean his whole life), The Kid has had trouble articulating himself when he’s angry or anxious (wonder where he gets that sense of frustration from…). He will wave his arms about wildly as if they’ll do the talking for him when, more often than not, they’ll collide with me instead, and reader, listen when I tell you that THIS PUSHES ALL THE BUTTONS I NEVER EVEN KNEW I HAD. There is material there that has so much less to do with him and so much with my own past, of being treated roughly or misunderstood or met with physical responses to an emotional issue, and I could get counselling on that for the rest of my life and still show up to heaven’s gates mid-therapy. So the other day, when I was trying to get him to change his reader before school and he responded with The Wave, as we’ll call it, I felt like something snapped. I asked him if he would like it if I hit him when I was mad, and I immediately wanted to die and come back to life as The Mother Who Never Loses Her Temper (Fairy-Tale Edition because that shit ain’t real) and erase the whole morning and start over or maybe just skip it and go straight to dinner. No, bed. I was humbled by my own constant inability to be who I want to be, my constant mistake-making, my constant repertoire of regrets that lies waiting for me just outside the school gates when I’ve left the kids for the day and finally have some mental space…to recount all the awful things I feel I’ve done.

I pulled him aside minutes later to have a Talk, and to apologise, and he told me to stop apologising because I already had. I told him I felt horrible. He said, “You’re not horrible,” which was less a reflection of generosity and more a reflection of his desire to go play with his friends. I beat myself up about it all day.

That night, in bed with him and Little Brother, I apologised again. LB recommended a solution: “How about we just don’t make any more mistakes?” I laughed, ruefully. “That would be nice,” I began. “But I think we will anyway. What we need is forgiveness.”

Which is inconvenient, because I’m not good at forgiving myself or others. I’m not good at being in that place between shores, where feelings are a bit icky and there’s too much uncertainty and I’m not fully Home yet, in whatever sense of the word I’m currently using.

Yesterday I went on a friend’s boat though, and while there was rocking, there was also the kind of view you can’t have from the shore–the kind where there’s water all around, and conversation, and moments you just don’t have on dry land and within its certainty. There was movement, and healing, and, though it felt like we were adrift, there was also an anchor–you just couldn’t see it.

And this morning, LB was playing with TK, and he turned to me and said, “Mommy, I just want a cuddle. James–I’m going to get a quick cuddle.” He interrupted his play to come over to me and bury himself within my chest for a hug, then went back to playing. It made me think of how movement from place to place always gets us to where we need to be. That the depths we travel, of water and feelings, when we are adrift, they can be so uncomfortable but so full, and if I don’t face those depths–the depths of my own sadness, and frustration, and mistakes, and also love–that I’ll never meet the depth of love that meets me in return, upon my return, stepping onto shore once again, for now, until the next trip.

–If I were mixed up with you, I’d be the talk of the town
Disgraced and disowned, another one of the clowns
–But you would finally live a little, finally laugh a little
Just let me give you the freedom to dream
And it’ll wake you up and cure your aching
Take your walls and start ’em breaking…

WARNING: This post brought to you by persisting anger over a shitty American president and an abusive Australian teacher, endorphins, high-idling baseline anxiety levels, and a running soundtrack that includes songs like the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage.” What I’m saying is that, today, I’m here to chew gum and kick ass, and guess what? I’M ALL OUT OF GUM, BITCHES.

There are only a few weeks left.

This is what I keep hearing: from kids, from parents, from myself, even, as we approach the end of The Kid’s first-grade year. It’s been a hell of a year, too, in all the ways. He’s grown more independent, which means I’m off the hook for everything from poo accidents to pulling teeth (#usedtobeadentist). His language has skyrocketed in both amount and articulation. He’s made and kept friends. He’s kicked ass.

He’s also had a teacher that has been angry, abusive, and awful at most every turn, and much like the Dixie Chicks, I’m not ready to make nice anymore. I’m so over this that I’ve gone back under it, around the block, and past it again. I’ve hinted around, I’ve tried tact, I’ve stayed calm (for me). But this morning on my run, I remembered the wise words of Sean Connery of SNL‘s “Celebrity Jeopardy”:

I’ve got a pen(is) and I’m prepared to use it. As The Husband would say (when he’s trying not to call me a b*tch), I’m Fired Up.

Some background.

Recently over Voxer, where I speak my love language (outrage with an underpinning of heart), I was talking to a friend about having the kind of kids that are considered “different.” See also: “special.” “Challenged.” Any number of words that are meant to soften the “blow” that is the hand some have been dealt. And what a blow, what a hand, it can be–there’s no denying that. She and I have spent countless hours in waiting rooms, under lead aprons next to X-ray machines, holding our children down on tables, fighting for them at schools, crying over them in bed. We’ve stood on the edges of birthday parties and social gatherings wondering if it will ever get better or if the perimeter is where we should look for long-term real estate. We’ve fretted and feared and burned with pain and righteous (and unrighteous) anger. We have felt, and damn, can that hurt.

We’ve also laughed. Oh my, how we’ve laughed. We’ve pounded wine–not enough, too much, and just the right amount. We’ve held hands and jumped for joy. We’ve done victory dances. We’ve let our jaws drop in wonder. We’ve shaken our heads in disbelief. And oh, have we felt.

We’ve felt it all: the bridge between the way things are and the way they could and should be; the gulf between Same and Different. We are travellers who never stop moving. We are tired and weak and strong and able. We’re all the things, because we’ve had to be. And yet we’re never enough, which constantly both confounds us and sends us to a power outside ourselves, a deeper mercy and a bigger grace than we have within us. We fail miserably and win stunningly. And oh, how we love. But even more: oh, how we are loved. By that deeper mercy and bigger grace, which we forget about all the time but which still manages to lead us home every moment.

We are not the kind who can say, with conviction, “It’s just a few more weeks!” because, as advocates who have been through it, we know that injustice of any kind, that mistreatment of any kind, is not something to be shrugged off and tolerated, but fought. And we? We fight. We fight because we were put here–in a place we never would have had the bravery to choose ourselves–and we know that shrugging is no longer in our DNA. It’s been erased along with the passivity and lack of identity that plagued us before. We’re so done with that.

And yet…

(I’ll switch to “I” here)–

I’ve been left in a wonderfully awkward position. Because I love every person reading these words. Every person who disagrees with my politics. Every person who supports the abusive teacher or the shitty president, and this is why: because I’ve been there. I’ve been on every side of it. (Travelling will do that to a person.) I’ve been the one who wanted to fly under the radar, who wanted to take up arms for protection, who laughed off inappropriate comments, who questioned whether what they were doing with her kid was right but didn’t want to offend. I don’t have the luxury of a high horse (which I hate, because I would look so majestic on one, especially with a tiara) given that the primary agent of grace in my life rode into a city on a donkey (I would ask for an upgrade to at least Lil Sebastian). It’s so annoying, how I still have to love people.

Last week at the zoo, in between his teacher kicking students and stepping on their fingers and screaming at them, I tried to stick with TK and his group. I’d lose him momentarily and look behind me, searching for his face. Unfailingly, it wasn’t there. I would turn back around, look ahead. He used to be the one on the perimeter, at the back. Now? Unfailingly, he was ahead. Always ahead, and in the mix.

We will always be different. We are destined to be. That’s no longer the curse I thought it was. Because here’s the deal that goes along with that: I will fight for my child, and for yours–whether you want me to or not. I will pray for mine, and yours–whether you ask me to or not. I will laugh and cry and dance and feel harder than I ever did before I accepted that different is our lot. Because the difference–along with all the other ones that define us–is that now, I’m finally someone I would want on my own side.

I wish I could step from this scaffold…

The other morning I was rushing out the door to get a swim in at the local pool before my Holiday Schedule with the Boys began and we were immersed in therapy, hastily prepared lunches with small people barking orders at me, swim lessons, and too much screen time. I slid into my flip flops (thongs here, but that term could be confusing for the Americans among you) and stepped off our front porch. It was a rainy, grey day–like so many the past week–and the smooth steps beneath me were just slick enough to send my feet flying out from underneath me.

I haven’t fallen too much in my life. There was the time in junior high when I was rushing down another set of stairs at school and tumbled down a couple; it was enough of a spill to not be able to cover it up completely and a few people laughed. There was the time in ballet class at the same junior high when my pointe shoes had just the right amount of caked-up resin on them and I crumbled while doing a pirouette, kicking off months of fear heading into our spring performance that the event would repeat itself. And there was the time a few years ago when I was carrying Little Brother downstairs in the early-morning dark and I slid on the hardwood, sending us both to the floor in tears.

This most recent fall, like all of them really, took forever and an instant. My life didn’t flash before my eyes, but that scene in Million Dollar Baby did, and I helplessly thought to myself that this could be bad. Very bad. At the very least it could be a “help I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” situation culminating in an injury that aged me well past my, ahem, twenty-six years. Also, I wondered who might be watching, which was probably the scariest possibility.

That moment of suspension in between the beginning and end of a fall carries more than time allows; it holds the weights of expectation and fear, of pleading and prayer. What if I hit my head and got amnesia like the woman in that Liane Moriarty book–would I still have to make lunches? What if I broke a leg and couldn’t run anymore and depression set in, along with voluminous amounts of chocolate on my slowing-metabolism-twenty-six-year-old hips? What if I broke my hip and had to become more acquainted with Australia’s healthcare system than I’d planned? If there were pain pills involved, would I be able to drink wine with them?

Last week we went to the playground (#holidayschedulewiththeboys) and I let the kids loose. At first they stuck together, each grabbing a pair of handles hanging from the play structure and swinging to do their “exercises” together. Then LB caught sight of a boy his age. They hesitantly approached each other before running off together, fast friends. This is LB: outgoing and friend-acquiring, the lone extrovert in our quartet. Immediately, The Kid protested. Exhaustion and emotion got the best of him, and he yelled across the playground, “WEEEEE-ILLLL! WEEEE-ILLL! BE MY FRIEND! COME BACK!”

It was heart-wrenching, naturally. There I was, torn between the two of them and their separate and unique personalities, but totally empathising with TK: I’ve often been the one abandoned for other options, left too shy and fearful to do anything about it. I encouraged him to play with them anyway, knowing how hard it would be. He continued to melt down. Two other mothers approached and kindly asked if he was okay, if there was anything they could do. One was the mother of LB’s new friend and tried to get him to offer TK some food or a play. TK would have none of it, preferring to become a puddle of tears, exulting in his emotions, despairing over his lack of control (of his little brother).

I can so relate. This world and its people hardly ever do I what I want.

He remained on the ground beside me while my own emotions swirled: irritation, frustration, sadness, that special kind of despair that only a parent who’s wondering what to do can feel as she fears she is ruining her child’s life.

After a few minutes, he stopped crying. He looked up at LB and the new guy, and something switched. He got up, resolve now written across his face instead of tears, and joined them.

There are so many moments in their, and my, life, when I hang suspended between the before and after on that Ferris wheel. So much so that it feels like life is made up of only those moments, the in-between, the “during the fall” while the unknown permeates the air around me and I can only wait. I realise more now (as I enter my late twenties) than ever that the control I fooled myself into thinking I had when I was younger was always an illusion. It took kids, and the spectrum, and an across-the-world move, and a million other things (with some falls thrown in) to make me finally laugh (and cry) at the truth being revealed. I am always mid-air: waiting for a new house to move into, waiting for another milestone to be achieved, waiting to know we’ll all be okay.

Meanwhile, a grace beyond and within these mid-air moments, these forever falls, guides me both to and through them, and promises that whatever shape I land in, there is only one true home and I am always headed there.

Which can be just words when I’m dealing with a sore ass, but also more when I think of how I landed on the part of my anatomy that is best-padded, and that the glass water bottle that shattered within my bag was beside me, not underneath me, and that even if there had been blood and guts and gore, there would also have been grace. Just more pain pills along with it.

Every morning, he wakes me up with verbal dissertations on watches: where they’re made, whether they’re digital or analog, how expensive they are. He speaks as though he’s addressing a lecture hall, bursting with knowledge he can’t wait to share. I sleepily nod and mumble “Mmmhmm” at this wonder of a boy, this one I prayed and planned for who upended every one of those prayers and plans.

He and his brother are not what we imagined. They are more.

And this is the way it goes with grace: the expectation supplanted by something different that feels at first like subtraction; then there is not an exclusion that isn’t replaced by a better inclusion, something taken away that isn’t replaced by something infinitely better, either via the promise of One Day or the gift of Right Now.

There is a lot of Right Now right now.

At the beginning of this, the third of four terms in a school year that is flying by, The Kid brought home his News packet: a bundle of pages designating the weekly topic for speaking in front of his class. I flipped through it and saw, at the end, that they’d each be picking someone in their grade to identify via clues. I sighed. Who would he pick? More importantly, to my bleeding maternal heart, would anyone pick him? Included or excluded? Remembered or forgotten?

Last week, a dad approached me for a playdate. His daughter was insistent: James must come over. Maybe even spend the night? We decided to start with the two-hours-in-the-afternoon version of events, and that day I had a cup of tea with her parents then left as the kids went to to the park with the dad. As I was leaving, the mom told me: “She’s picked him for her News this week.” The next morning, at school, the girl asked me to lean in and she whispered, “I picked James for news.” They lined up moments later with their class, she behind him with her arms wrapped around him, he holding them in place. His therapist and I shared the kind of look that only those who have been through battle can share: tearful, exuberant grins.

This is the math of grace: always more.

And on Saturday night, I sat at a tall table of women, in between two of my closest, and listened to those two talk about what he’d taught them, how much he means to them, this boy of mine, and I feel the math take shape into something more than numbers, into a gratitude that is begotten of answered prayers and kept promises and all the light I couldn’t see before: my fears, once again, allayed, over wine and love.

At birthday parties, he charms the guests with his questions about their watches, inspiring outheld wrists and patient listening, and then he grabs Little Brother and they tear around with the rest of the kids as if they’ve always been here. I drink a glass of champagne to celebrate. We move about, this family of ours, among people who understand and know us, who make space for us.

Facebook lets me know, through its Memories feature, that I used to post WAY too many pictures, used to overshare on the reg (who, me?!). It lets me know that LB was the one who taught me to use a Q-tip as a laxative (#blessed). And that TK gave the following lessons: “peepee comes out of a penis and poopoo comes out of a butt,” and “if you pour Baby Magic on your house then the rain will wash it clean.” I recognise in the moments of being taught, in the way the math works out, what self-protective BS my planned method of parenting would have been, how I was headed toward a path of agonised addition and subtraction, molehill-enlarging.

During TK’s playdate, I walked down to the reserve and sat on a bench in front of the water. It changed constantly, reflecting sun then clouds, staying calm then moving, placid then rippled. These changes making it what it is. We’re planning LB’s birthday party and so TK, naturally, is talking about his. “Who do you want to invite?” I ask him, numbers and logistics running through my brain until he answers, “Everyone. I want everyone.” And I look down at him while also somehow, always, looking up to him, this boy of a set of two who never stop teaching me.

“You’re not trying to figure things out; you’re trying to enter into what’s there.” –Eugene Peterson

Last week included a day left uncovered by The Kid’s shadow therapist; she was away and the backups were otherwise occupied. So I made the executive decision to call it a “Mommy and James Day.”

“I’m spending some time with my mum today,” he told everyone from the shopkeeper to friends, and we started at the oval next to the beach, he on his bike and I on my feet, one of us alternately chasing the other, my “run” more of a “bouncing around on my calves” until he transferred to the playground and I jogged in circles around it, periodically calling his name and waving while he kept watch for my location. This will be the illustration they one day use for helicopter parenting, but whatever. #mylifemychoices.

After that we headed to the indoor swimming pool, where we each grabbed a noodle and bobbed around on them until his teeth chattered (Australians have a different definition of “heated pool” than Southerners do) and we stopped by the house before moving on to the mall and its cinema. There we watched a crappy animated film while scarfing down McDonald’s and popcorn. Success.

Today, the day his therapist was meant to return to school, she sits stuck in the snow in New Zealand and I sit under the shade outside his classroom, typing on my computer and listening out for signs of distress. One of the learning support teachers “happens” to be in his classroom today, and she is lovely, and so I’m sweating slightly less than I would be. I didn’t break the news to him until after we’d dropped off Little Brother and I snuck my laptop into TK’s backpack and we headed out the door, walking the couple of blocks while I chose my words carefully. They were littered with phrases like “red toy shop after school,” “give it a go,” “I believe in you,” and “trust me.”

Oh, that last one. That one was uttered by both of us: he meaning it in the “I can’t do this so take me home” sense, I meaning it in the “I could be totally screwing up here but I’m going to fake it for your sake and we’ll see how we come out on the other side PS has anyone seen my Xanax” sense.

The words we choose leave other ones excluded; often we opt out of language altogether. That’s what TK did for the first four years of his life, his silence belying the intricate thought process underneath the surface, language being measured and analysed and gathered until he was ready to present it, whole and sure. Now I find myself constantly measuring my words, typing them here and doling them out to the boys, confidently and shakily in both settings.

(I take a break to text a friend about what I’m hearing from the classroom, the shouts of the teacher and yet the absence of distress from my little fighter within; the harbour glistens below me and I am suspended in the tension that words can assuage but not remove; all this and I’ve sworn off wine tonight and tomorrow. #jesustakethewheel.)

It occurs to me that words have been the great measuring stick of my life, my most constant currency and signifier of meaning, but they are far from its full embodiment. Not the little-L words anyway, I think, as the teacher screeches for the children to write their words and I’m trying to capture the whole thing here both for posterity and therapy.

I am meters away from one of the biggest chunks of my heart and I need more than words to tether us. There are more than words that tether us.

And yet they are so much. They have to be; sometimes they feel like all we have. “Use your words,” I tell TK and LB when they are reduced by their emotions to puddles of tears on the floor, arms flailing at some transgression the other has committed. TK’s therapists call this functional communication: giving him the tools that provide an option other than melting down. This morning, stuck in traffic and already anxious about what lay ahead, I pounded the steering wheel, my own functional communication reduced to a meltdown, and TK asked it from the backseat: “Are you angry?” This recognition of an emotion that, I see now, he has learned from me to name, and just like that the student becomes the teacher. “I’m frustrated,” I respond, then attempt to describe the car that has backed us all up by trying to turn from the wrong lane, and the words don’t fix it but they do help defuse: I remember that I don’t have to hold everything myself, that I can share.

We’ve been reading Psalms to the kids at bedtime because I remember The Mom reading them to The Sis and me as we grew up, and the words took root somewhere deeper than I realised because it turns out I still carry them with me. I want this for the boys, and I tell them that this part of the Bible, it’s poems. Poems written by people who knew no better way to talk to God about how they felt, and one day I’ll also tell them what I’ve learned about the words of poetry: that they are the opposite of summary; that they are the recognition of how little we can control ourselves and the surrender to the mystery that life really is. Not the figuring out, but the entering in.

And words can’t describe it, but poetry can try, these moments that populate our days now: the Aussie-American hybrid that the boys are because we said the word yes. The “I love you”s that the boys utter so frequently now. The sound of LB’s voice as he quotes the psalm along with me, his memory already at work. What TK’s Scripture teacher tells me–that they read The Lord’s Prayer in class and he raised his hand: “But what does it mean?” The poems at night and the prayers in the car and the exit from the classroom in the afternoon that, for so many reasons, has become a victory walk–that will be one this afternoon. How much more of it than I ever expected has turned out to be poetry.

I believe in grace, but I live by karma. This distinction is only one of a few thousand contradictions that define me, but hey–at least I’m aware of it, right?

I constantly prefer the tit-for-tat method of living, the “you be nice to me and I’ll be nice to you, and vice versa” brand of social interaction. If there’s a petty or passive way to resolve (i.e., not resolve) a dispute, I’ll cling to it like a life raft unless/until forced to be a bigger person. Usually, annoyingly, by The Husband, who–though I’ve known for awhile is a better human being than I am–keeps providing opportunities for the lesson to be hammered home, this ever-returning drumbeat of grace.

Were it up to me, the school playground would be (as it is for so many, AHEM) a battleground for deep-seated insecurities to play themselves out as a drama amidst the backdrop of blissfully unaware children. Recently, at the annual fundraiser for one such school that my son may or may not attend, TH and I were engaged in a bidding war over a birthday sign. It was a repeat of the year before: same sign, same bidding war against the same person. I retreated to the dance floor but kept an eye on TH, sitting at the table in his Cast Away wig, pecking at his phone screen. While I threw my hands in the air like I just didn’t care (I SO DID CARE), he secured our son’s future delight/my pride. After a minute, the silent auction was over and he raised his own hands in the hair and I screeched in victory.

Later, he was so awful about it: he suggested we share the sign with the other bidder as a token of goodwill and peace. BARF.

I don’t want to share, I thought. I want people to learn their lessons and pay their debts and be completely levelled by the side-eye I distribute to them on the playground for not inviting me, excuse me my child, to whatever the event-du-jour is, and this is the kind of fairness I prefer thank you very much.

Meanwhile, I sit as the recipient of a grace I don’t deserve and could never earn and I squirm uncomfortably each time this is revealed.

“UNDERSTAND ME!” The Kid yelled recently from the backseat, as I struggled to do just that. His speech is rapidly improving, but most days our 10 is still everyone else’s 5 and I hate being reminded of that–almost as much as I hate his feeling misunderstood. Because I know that feeling, that need to be comprehended and how closely it approximates (is) the need to be validated, to be accepted. How it feels so much like being loved that it can become a substitute for it. How misleading that can be, when it comes to bids and birthday parties and crusades for justice.

It’s the feeling I got while sitting beside my friend after a rough week for both of us, as Ronan Farrow talked in the Opera House about doing what’s right even if you feel all alone while doing it, and we turned to each other in glee over the unintentionally personalised message that met us where we were at that exact moment, in our own little crusade. It’s the feeling of being seen, and known. And it’s intoxicating, but it’s not always love.

Love is deeper and more profound. It’s not the guy ahead on the stage but the friend sitting adjacent. It’s the other friend, from the sofa, laughing as TK orates incessantly over our own conversation and saying, “Tell me again about how he used to not talk,” because she wasn’t around then yet somehow she was, because she is now. It’s not the lady at the outdoor market picking a jumper for me because, as she says, she “knows my style” (she does, and I buy it, but come on, she’s running a business). It’s later that day, when TH pushes an unwilling Little Brother on his bike and I have to run to keep up with TK on his, this TK who used to be just as unwilling as LB but with more reason (talk to your local occupational therapist about bilateral movement and crossing midlines and dyspraxia, thanks for coming to my TED talk about our 10 and your 5), and now he grins as he shoots around the oval that lies next to the beach, shouting, “I’m WINNING!” into the wind, the same wind that carries LB’s cries that will one day turn into shouts of their own. A minute later, TK takes a soft tumble to the ground and I cheer, telling him it’s time to celebrate his first fall because it means that he gets to jump back up from it, and he goes along with it: “Dad, I had my first fall!” Around us, similarly-aged children are riding without falling, without training wheels, and part of me wants to tell them our story, just to be understood. Another part wants to shoot them some withering side-eye and tell them I didn’t want to come to their event anyway.

And another, buried deep within where only good counselling and wine and grace can reach, sees this oval as a circle that, for now, is punctuated with falls and fives but held in all its broken places with a grace that will one day make it whole.

You can’t keep safe what wants to break.

“This must be killing you,” she said.

We were standing in the kitchen with our husbands, glasses of champagne in our hands. The boys played steps away with their sitter, and the men…well, the men had placed their beers on the countertop so that they could take a look inside the hood above the stove. To see if a dead animal was there. Also, we were all in costume.

It went like this: days before, I had noticed a burning smell coming from the kitchen even though I wasn’t cooking. A few days after that (on my birthday, no less), I had stumbled downstairs in dire need of coffee and was greeted by the smell of death wafting from…where? The trash can? We emptied it. The flowers wilting on the countertop? We chucked them. The toaster? We cleaned it. Candles were burned, surfaces were wiped, and still it remained.

Until that evening, the costumed champagne evening, when I was making dinner for the boys and saw it. It was a dot on the counter, then it wiggled. I yelled up the stairs to The Husband.

IT WAS A FUCKING MAGGOT, Y’ALL.

And as I shrunk from its writhing body, I scanned the area around it and noticed more. A half-dozen of them lurking in the crack between the backsplash and the counter, mocking my attempts at cleanliness and order. Which is why she was right, when she said it must be killing me: “I know you love things to be clean.” Endless bottles of spray, countless nights of wiping, a possible Swiffer addiction, all leading to this: what would later be discovered (by TH, as I got the hell out of there while he looked) as a dead rat all up in that hood.

Jesus help us.

It’s embarrassing, really, to know that that rodent sat decaying up in our wall for a good week before we (he) disposed of him; that despite my daily and nightly efforts, something was still rotten in the state of New South Wales. That there is no amount of scrubbing that can get rid of the hidden skeletons.

There’s a metaphor here, I just know it.

Earlier that day, I’d gotten a text: The Kid’s therapist was ill and couldn’t make it into school. Neither of them could, actually, and this year not being last year (i.e. this year’s teacher not being last year’s teacher, and Year One’s grammar not being Kindy’s play), a quick chat with TK and his educators wasn’t going to cut it. Little Brother and I had plans with one of his many “best friends” and his mum, one of mine, involving a ride into the city and an art gallery, and the three of them waited patiently on the playground while I tried to sort it all out. Once TK was, against all odds, settled, I made motions to leave. That’s when I heard the sobs. And our plan changed.

The four of us went to the beach instead, to the playground there and its coffee kiosk, and for an hour endured the sunshine and water views (and my anxiety, nonetheless) of Plan B. I wanted to salvage what I could, so I took TK back to school while LB and our friends went to their house. I watched gymnastics class. I helped with some grammar. I situated him into music class. And then I left and headed for my friend’s place, where LB and his mate were engaged in Nerf wars. I sat on the grass in the sun and told the truth: how hard it is sometimes, when you see that things aren’t what you were maybe telling yourself they were.

She displayed her typical more masterful grasp of objective reality, tempering my purely emotional-based one with some truth of her own, and I was once again pulled off the ledge by love, which is a nice little recurring theme in my life. And when I picked TK up a short while later, he was better than fine, despite my frayed nerves and sore heart. We do this: our family, and our friends-as-family, we survive the spectrum and dead rats and maggots, because this is what we do, this is our story. Even when I try to hide or deny the parts that make it ours.

Sometimes the challenges that TK faces feel like a direct punch in my heart. My fears for my children’s feelings, for their being loved and enjoyed and never ever made fun of, for my deep-seated and insecure need to never fly above the radar despite that being where I’ve found the most grace–they are targeted by the spectrum, laid waste and left to die and be eaten by maggots.

Is the metaphor working?

What I’m saying is this: autism and changed plans and anxiety, they are killing me, and my fears alongside them. And they, because of how grace infuses them, are also bringing me back to life.

It’s messy, and it often smells, and there is so much struggling and searching to find where the rotten parts are, but then there is the morning after, when it smells and feels like home again because I’m not trying to cover up or deny what was meant to die and be carted off, and what was meant to be there in the first place.

We saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire Saturday night at the Opera House, where it was accompanied by an orchestra playing its score, and I had forgotten so much of it: how this is the one where Voldemort comes back to life, how somehow this is also (consequently?) the one where it starts getting good, how this is the one where Hermione says tearfully, at the end, that “everything’s changed now, hasn’t it?” And Harry responds, matter-of-factly, “Yes.”

Afterward, we came home to two sleeping boys, and I climbed in bed between them, and thought of all the ways they’ve changed me. All the boundary lines, the Before and the After of their existences, the deaths and the resurrections. I listened later to the truth: that “difference is a teacher.” How my sporadic and flailing and fearful efforts to make TK “like everyone else” would rob the world of so much, of him–one of my favourite teachers.