In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. –Albert Camus

It starts within seconds of my waking up.

There is the initial stirring, the feeling of being warm and protected, and then it shifts. My consciousness peaks, and the load lowers: the weight of the day, week, month ahead, coming to rest squarely on my shoulders, heavy yet raising them to my neck. My muscles tense–the tension always comes with it, this tightening I’ve only recently learned to become aware of, to attend to, to intentionally release. Lower the shoulders; open the palms; breathe.

This is anxiety.

For so much of my life I’ve felt alone, yet this companion has always been constant. Now, I’m not alone in any way, the prayers of my youth answered in the form of a man and two boys, at least one of whom is typically beside me when I wake up, this forever sharing of space. And this, this wonderful blessing, it also can undo me, this coming to the surface struggling to breathe with a foot in my belly or hands on my legs, my body no longer my own, and there is the focused reinterpretation of it: not as violence, but as love. This sounds crazy to some people.

All of this will sound crazy to some people. Buckle up.

Adrenaline powers me out of bed, a list of tasks already forming in my mind: make the bed. Make breakfast. Clean breakfast. Vacuum the floor from breakfast. What if there’s traffic?! Make lunches. Pack backpacks. What if other kids are mean to them?! Get three people dressed. Lay out their clothes for tomorrow. Get everyone everywhere on time. What if we’re late?! It all arrives at once, along with some attendant fears thrown in for fun. This is how anxiety works.

Breathe.

Some of the tasks sound unnecessary: why not just cross a few out? Who needs a made bed, after all?

I do. I need the made beds, the wiped counters, the clean floors. I need the toys put away and the shoes lined up. I need the order because it smacks away at the anxiety. Simply put, it makes me feel better. I need straight lines and uncluttered surfaces and I see this need in The Kid and I don’t always receive it, living with others. More anxiety. Breathe again.

There are things that help, besides the order. There is classical music. Prayer and meditation. Exercise. Time alone, oh blessed time alone. (“Is there anything better than time alone in your own house?” The Sis wondered recently. “It’s like therapy.” She is an ally.) There is the beach, two minutes away and a gift I still can’t believe to be our daily reality. There are water views in between beach visits. There is medication. There is wine–but not too much wine (this is tricky).

There is grace. There are the unexpected reminders that, contrary to what anxiety tells me, everything does not hinge upon my orchestrations, my performance. There is the car that backs out of its driveway three seconds after TK has already run past, mere feet ahead of me and under my watchful eye yet–I am reminded–ultimately protected by someone else. There is Little Brother, safely clinging to the side of the pool and bringing himself back to more shallow water as I watch, breath bated and heart stopped, knowing this is how he will learn yet hating it all the same. There is running into a friend and her girls one morning when we take the back entrance to school, walking and talking together, my self-imposed rush slowing down. There is the manic joy of TK’s morning time before the bell, the smiles he brings to people’s faces. There is the self-aware goofiness of Little Brother that he knows will make me laugh–and it does. There is the way The Husband bends to my craziness because he knows it will help–the handheld vacuum now part of his routine too.

All my life, I’ve had this companion, this anxiety that I thought was something everyone dealt with, but now I realise it is the other, the extra, the thing that doesn’t belong but is here anyway and not likely to disappear. So, yes, there are strategies, but there is also this:

I don’t know that I want it to disappear. Because it is part of me now, for better and worse. And if there is this companion that has never left, somehow that is what makes it easier to believe in another companion that never leaves, in a mystical balance that grace provides. In the moments at the beach that I feel forced to fill, to produce–how can I put this into words?!–as an unheard but felt voice tells me to just be. That in this place, staring at this water, warmed by this sun, is where I am allowed to let go and just be.

Know this, when you see me, when you see any of us who are afflicted and accompanied: we are constantly doing battle.

But there is this: that somehow it makes my life richer. There is TK, demanding the way we took yesterday, the back way into school that leads us to our friends, the long way. Yes, I prayed for this, and I also prayed for patience, and I saw Evan Almighty too, and I learned that we are given situations that make us patient, but the scooter he had to ride to school is now swinging around, tripping me up as he drags it, and I’d like to change my request for patience into one for a bottle of wine and a desert island. Maybe some Xanax on the side wouldn’t hurt either. But we walk together, and I see that the long way, though it can feel crushing, is filled with more: more scenery. More “chance” encounters. More moments together. More talking, and more quiet.

And I know that this God-forsaken anxiety, this long way home, it is not God-forsaken. It is somehow given, and it is where I am met. It is how, and where, I am taught to breathe.

I remember the preliminary visit in the receiving of The Kid’s diagnosis; the prelude to the bomb that later dropped. The doctor, accustomed to a range of reactions after years of thirty-minute appointments spent barely observing a child before slapping a label on him (#notbitter), had fine-tuned his process so that his nurse/assistant/social worker spent the bulk of time with the families first: asking questions, dispensing surveys, and this: mentioning all the celebs who were likely on the spectrum.

Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Bob Dylan…the list was varied and esteemed, and designed, I suppose, to soothe us before the sucker punch. I took it in, nodded obediently, feigned being impressed. Acted like we were receiving a gift from them rather than getting the air knocked out.

It was only later, midway through the denial and grief, months down the road, that I received the phone call that was everything that visit had tried to be: a friend of a friend with a kid like The Kid who had actually been there; the effort of putting a brave face to it didn’t ooze off him because there wasn’t any effort, only truth: One day you will realise you’ve been given a gift.

The words fell so much differently, later. They always do, on a heart that has been softened by time and tears rather than toughened by defence. Later is when it usually all happens.

We went to a birthday party on Sunday, and when I recapped it to a friend later, I explained how much easier birthday parties are now. How hard they used to be: first with just The Kid, who would circle the perimeter and study the goings-on from afar; I’d have to follow him closely but not too closely while fear and anxiety followed me, swirling around in a cocktail of frustration. Then Little Brother came along and I’d run interference between the two of them, exhausted physically in addition to the former emotional drain.

Not to be melodramatic.

Now, though? Well it was a bowling party. I assumed we’d give the lanes a shot then retire to the arcade, the three of us separate as usual. Instead, both the boys bowled alongside their peers, their friends, and each turn was a mini-celebration. TK decided, after LB scored a strike (with maternal aid), that “X’s are bad. You don’t want to knock down all the pins because X’s mean you’re wrong.” So we cheered for his partial removal of the pins too. Later, they sat at the table and scarfed down nuggets and cake and I was there, watching them and talking to friends. It felt like a Carnival cruise–and only because of the years prior.

LB has his own way of seeing and saying things too, the way he replaces B‘s with V‘s, refers to the villain Two-Face as Toothpaste, calls computers pa-yooters. They’re both into superheroes now, but especially LB, who lines up his Marvel and DC squishies in an impressive array of costumed powers. They are defined mainly according to the Good vs Bad distinction, and when they fight each other, the result is predictable: “Always the good guys win, Mommy.” I listen and agree, this oversimplification (and often non-truth) resounding in my brain with the follow-up, Eh, we’ll get into it more later before I let him knock out the villain I’m holding. (Always he gets to be the good guy.)

Because it seems like it should always be true, this idea that karma holds; that we do the right thing and are rewarded without fail; that the good guys always win. It feels like it should always be true, but it also feels like it isn’t. People get sick or in accidents; you look out for the kids in your kid’s class and still get angry parent emails; Netflix stops working (these grievances may not carry the same weight).

But underneath it all, I know it to be true because I believe it is. I know that just as anxiety has dogged me relentlessly all my life, something else has pursued me not only equally but harder. More unfailingly. Beyond karma, and fairness, and predictable outcomes, I believe that there is a later that changes the now. That sometimes things have to feel wrong before we see they’re right. Grace deserves the fullness of time to reveal its beauty.

The other day we found a new playground and trail and the four of us, our family, followed it down to the water. Awhile ago TK would have faltered, rejecting the unknown. On this day he went ahead of us all, declaring himself the leader. The birds–the ones who startled us all when we first arrived with their scream-like sounds–squawked above us on their own path, and we barely noticed, their voices a part of our normal, our later that is now.

Hiking…is walking.

I don’t remember when or if I put it this way, but the other afternoon as the boys and I drove the twenty-something minutes across suburbs to The Kid’s therapy, he told me from the backseat: “The Lizard Centre is where I go to learn how to be a grownup.”

Well. Kind of? For all my effort to talk about everything, to make sure The Feelings Train is always stocked with snacks and ready for passengers, I’m learning that there are…interpretations. Their little minds whir all the time, creating realities that must be bolstered or deconstructed, like the other one TK announced into the darkness the other night as I lay beside him and Little Brother:

“Will’s not smart.”

“Excuse me? He most certainly is!”

“No, he’s not smart because he doesn’t have an apple brain.”

Cut to me laughing quietly and ruefully over my own overcompensation, or was it his misinterpretation, of my efforts to lay the foundation for TK’s confidence in light of his strengths and challenges. Which is to say…we got some work to do. Always.

I explained to him and LB, who lay unworried beside me and announced that he has a Goofy and HP brain, are both smart in different ways–and will both need help in different areas, too. “But I’m smart,” TK clarified when I finished talking. I sighed and smiled at the same time, my standard response these days to most everything. “Yes. You are very smart.”

TK has a new kid in his class who doesn’t speak a word of English. The other day when we took LB inside his classroom I noticed a sign on the wall: 50 Ways to Say Hello. I beckoned the boys over. “Hey look, James! They have Mandarin on here! You can tell your new friend ‘hello’ in his own language!”

He was vaguely interested, preferring to build a quick Lego tower instead. I’ve maybe been harping on the new kid too much lately, telling TK how important it is to be kind–“Remember when we were new? How it could be scary at first? You’re being a good friend, right? You’re being kind?”–while he responds, “YES, Mom! You already said that! I AM KIND!”

He is a language I am constantly learning. So is LB. There are a million answers to each of their questions–and that doesn’t even count the ones that don’t get asked. Meanwhile I fumble for answers, overanalyse my responses, and wonder if I’m doing any of it right.

The Husband and I went last weekend to see “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” and from the opening cacophony of sounds that sent me jumping and TH laughing at me, I was moved. Discomfited. Reassured. Validated. Unsettled. No two kids on the spectrum are the same–hell, no two kids are the same–and there is no manual (I’ve spoken to Management about this and the fact remains annoyingly unchanged). But as I watched the story unfold before us–the parents’ love and frustration, the boy’s anxiety and outsider-y-ness–I felt less alone. There are fifty ways to say it–autism, spectrum, special need, apple brain–but there is only one James. One Will. And they are ours. And, somehow, they are happy. More than that, they are loved. Imperfectly, and well. This is all we get to know right now–Management also remains frustratingly tight-lipped on all the questions I have about their futures.

“That means I can do anything, right?” the boy asks at the end of the show, and there is no response from the adults around him. My own apple-brained boy has started to both cling and fly, jumping onto me for the walk to school, laughing as he tells me he’s making me stronger, then running when we arrive to climb the rocks–he never used to do that. “I’m good at climbing,” he says, later claiming to climb a tree while placing one foot on the lowest branch, and I applaud because he never used to do that either. Can he do anything?

No. Can anyone?

While the boys are at school, I decide to take a rare walk around our area–usually I’m attempting to run it, or just walking the distance between our house and his school with them in tow. On this outing I scale the hills that define our streets. It feels less like a walk than a vigorous hike, which was not what I signed up for, but it’s starting to feel natural. Like it’s the same thing anyway.

And out of all these things I’ve done, I think I love you better now

Every Monday afternoon, the boys and I head to a suburb twenty minutes away for The Kid’s two hours of therapy. Little Brother and I sit in the waiting room where he yells profanity or plays games with me while TK works in the back. One Monday each month, LB and I come to the back too, to a separate room from TK’s, where LB alternately plays with the toys and seeks our attention while TK’s team of therapists and I discuss his progress and challenges.

These meetings have run the spectrum (see what I did there?) between awful and poignant, terrible and magical. When they first began, I more often felt like I was being called to the principal’s office to discuss what was shittiest about my parenting out of all the shitty things I do. It’s possible that I was a bit defensive and over-sensitive, but it’s also possible that the meetings were run in a bit of a condescending fashion. Since those early days there has been a handover to a new leader, a few changes on the team, and, not for nothing, some growth in TK, and myself, and between us and the people who sit in that room.

So yesterday was a bit magical. Both inside and outside that room.

LB started back to school yesterday, but TK’s term started a day after–so he and I got one of those rarities to share: time together that wasn’t just about therapy. We went to the playground with some friends, then through the McDonald’s drive-thru (I did not have any confrontations this time!), then back to Ant-Man and the Wasp for another go. We made it through the whole thing this time. If sitting through a two-hour film could be considered a life skill (I SAY IT IS), then I am an expert–but up to this point it has been unheard of for TK, until now. I think the handcuffs helped. J/K! He was just as mesmerised as I was by the story, and watching a woman don a suit (that wasn’t cut to expose every inch of her skin) and kick all kinds of ass? YEAH, THAT HAPPENED TOO.

Once we got to the therapy centre and TK went to his room, LB and I settled in to ours and I talked about TK. I recounted progress from the last month and mentioned weaknesses. I saw nodding heads. I heard quotes from his sessions (in one, he got upset about something and he told the therapist he was going to have her fired.) I listened to moments of understanding and plans geared toward his well-being.

It was a good day.

Not every day is, of course. There are the tough ones, the sad ones. TK has had trouble with those lately–specifically, the “sad bits” he doesn’t want to discuss. He runs from conversations about difficult things, which for him includes cuts and scrapes, accidents and such. His anxiety extends to a fear of getting in trouble I think, even about things that aren’t offences, and he’ll say it when we bring such topics up: “ONLY HAPPY THINGS! We don’t talk about the sad things!” And we tell him, again, that we have to talk about the happy and sad things. That we talk about all the things here.

I get it, though. We live in a filtered world, in a place where images are curated and narratives are chosen. I guess that could extend into some homes, where hard topics are avoided and difficult conversations aren’t had? Well I’ll be damned if that happens here. We’re back on the Feelings Train, that space in the dark at the end of the day when all the feelings are discussed (don’t tell The Husband; he’s still at the station acting like he forgot his wallet; also, LB is getting a bit too freestyle with his, bringing up shit that happened eons ago. We’ll deal with that later).

We went to the mountains last weekend, where we celebrated Christmas in July at a family-friendly hotel that boasted a cinema, game room, ball pit, car and train and pony rides, indoor pool, and Santa at a shitty buffet dinner that cost a month’s car payment. The kids were in heaven. TH and I were…fine. At breakfast one morning–a repeated scene of meltdowns and chaos–the little girl at the table next to us took off her shirt in the middle of eating her eggs and sat, bare-chested, while her dad begged her to put it back on. I sat drinking my coffee and pretending it was wine. TK turned to me and pointed at her (ha. I remember when he couldn’t point). “She’s showing her private bits,” he stage-whispered to me multiple times, his observation the product of a recent health course at school. What he called private bits is something that, at home, is called a belly shirt. At home, where we’ve recently had to relegate all talk of farts and butts and wieners. At home, where we can talk about anything.

At home, where we have an incredible view that we could never afford were we not shipped here by God and a credit bureau who pays for it (for now), a view that prompted one of my friends to semi-jokingly say, “If I had this view I think my problems would disappear.” I get that too. It feels silly to worry about a leak in the roof when we’re surrounded by gorgeous water. It feels silly to think anything could be sad.

Yet I still take Lexapro and we still go to therapy every Monday and we (I) still worry, and this is our life: the good days and the hard, the sad bits and happy, the mountains and the beaches. We settle back into our routine, missing pieces of ourselves that had to travel back across the Pacific, navigating changes and differences, and the boys sit at their LEGO table, across from (fighting) and next to (befriending) each other, these waves and their ups and downs not interrupting our life, but filling it.

“But sometimes the orchestra plays something in swelling chords of luck and joy, and all I can hear is that one violin sawing out a thin melody of grief.”–Catherine Newman (again)

The other day the thought broke through the daily monotony and stood out amidst the minutiae: how far would I go to protect my children?

It sounds like the tagline to a Lifetime movie, and it was likely born of one too many true-crime podcast listenings, but cue the dramatic irony anyway, because this afternoon I was given one answer, at least, in the McDonald’s parking lot.

The truck cut across a lane (my lane) of traffic after I had already begrudgingly let one car over, and he nearly hit me, the boys in the backseat oblivious. I laid on the horn for a good five seconds, at which point he pulled to a stop and opened his door.

Oh NO YOU DIDN’T, I thought, and watched as he spotted me, then hesitated before stepping forward. I think his goal was just to intimidate me, but I opened my window. “What were you doing?” he griped, to my utter astonishment, as though he were the one wronged, and I fired back, “YOU NEARLY HIT ME!”

“I didn’t even see you,” he downplayed, as if it were a defence, then added the piece de resistance loved by females around the world: “You need to calm the fuck down.” He began to walk away, shaking his head at my ridiculousness.

“YOU CALM THE FUCK DOWN, YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE! I’M PROTECTING MY CHILDREN,” I bellowed from the driver’s seat, the boys no longer oblivious behind me, and the mansplaining driver whipped back around, so I sealed my point with a middle finger. If we were in America (thank God we’re not), he likely would have reached for his firearm next. Instead, he returned my salute and angrily climbed back into his car.

Well that’s ONE thing I’d do to protect them I thought, as the boys in the backseat fired questions at me about what had just happened. They were squarely on my side, calling the man “not nice” and “mean” and graciously telling me that he needed to learn to drive. I agreed, telling them that it was my job to keep them safe (“and love us,” clarified Little Brother, citing the even more fraught of the two tasks), and, upon repeated postmortem analysis of the event, not regretting my reaction at all. If my children are to see me lose my shit about anything, I want it to be their safety.

But. It’s easy to tell that story. It makes me feel like a firebrand, a bit of a warrior, a Mama Bear (I hate that phrase) who is not to be f-ed with (like that one better). I felt justified, not exactly Jesus-turning-tables-level, because let’s be honest, that illustration is about as mis- and overused as it gets, but nonetheless…I felt strong.

I am so not strong.

I realise how easy it is to be lulled into a rhythm of safety, of sameness, of “I can do this” mentality when routine is in place and waters are smooth. Then a displacing event occurs and I look around to remember that at best, I am docked not in a harbour of calm waters but at sea between storms. That life is not a matter of “arriving” courtesy of my own wits but of being swept around by the same hands that save me.

Or something? It’s just that sometimes I feel the “reset” button has been pushed and I’m left feeling barren of hope and I’m starting over just when it felt like things were evening out.

Last week we were at a playground with The Niece, who immediately made friends because she inherited only her paternal grandfather’s genes, and she told her new friends, “That’s my cousin James. He has an apple brain.” She was stating it as fact, but I searched nonetheless for a mean edge to her voice, wondered at the harmless laughter from her new friends if they were looking for a beatdown. She was echoing what I’d told her the week before, after we’d dropped The Kid off at school and I’d gingerly approached the topic with her, of his different ways of learning and behaving. She’d remained quiet, which made me think she was getting it, until she proclaimed, “All this talk of apples is making me hungry!” Turned out, though, that she had been listening. And was ready to repeat what she’d heard. And there, on the playground, the reset button was pressed and I felt it: the hopelessness, the fear, the worry over how he’ll be seen and treated, which often doesn’t touch the bubble where we live out our usual days, among people who know him. There are the moments that pierce that bubble, though: the mention of high schools, or the pull-up at night (LB right there with him, but three years behind) that precludes sleepovers elsewhere (or at least complicates them), the quirks that can be beloved while inducing an urge for to me walk that line of explaining without sounding to others–or him–like I’m apologising.

And then there’s just the everyday shit, like LB interrupting a peaceful moment at the beach with diarrhoea. Oh, and I tried to take them to see Ant-Man and the Wasp, which was…less than successful. (Loved the first half, tho!)

We are different. He is different. I am different, skewed as I am by the winds of anxiety and depression, an island of belief among people who are fine without it, a writer of words who hasn’t mastered them in person.

I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M DOING, is what I’m saying. In case I had fooled anyone into thinking I do by showing up here and writing something every week, or yelling at men in parking lots (though that could have gone either way, let’s be honest), or because sometimes I actually do my hair. I am a mess, a ship tossed on the waves: my shins will always hurt because I don’t run right or stretch enough; I overcompensate for social anxiety (and stress) with wine; every time my doctor refills my anti-anxiety meds and reminds me to check in if I ever want to wean off them I laugh because LIFE; and whenever the hard realities of that life encroach, I want to curl up in a ball and run from the responsibility of, for example, navigating my and my children’s emotional (and otherwise) health.

Also, LB is a little too obsessed with Thanos for someone who can’t even sit through Ant-Man.

But my boat always has space for the other people who don’t have it figured out–and plenty of wine.

The other night I decided I was sick of depending on the ear plugs I’ve worn for years to sleep and went without them. What followed was a restless night. The next night, I wondered why I’d tried to be such a hero. We all need help. I stuck those effers back in (that’s what she said) and drifted off.

To close: the boys and I have been going back to the beach, to the rocks where they’ve been identifying several “hideouts.” (Hiding is their latest favourite activity. I relate.) As the three of us crouched into a crevice and watched the water pound the rocks around us, I thought about how all these divets and hidden places have been worn by thousands of years of water pounding at them. How what looks to be the victim of ruthless waves, of storms and weather, can end up looking like design: the very spot where a person can find safety.

“…but to me it’s the timeless and universal concept of shelter. And so, finally, I am home.”

I’m writing this from our dining table, my laptop the lone technology amidst a sea of play-doh and tiny boy hands, classical music in the background because I’m fancy.* Little Brother turns to me occasionally and says, “I’m sad,” while The Kid keeps his feelings internalised for now, and I sit between them on the emotional spectrum, each of us dealing with the grief present in the empty space, the area vacated yesterday by The Sis and The Niece.

*it helps my anxiety

I am not one to mourn visitors’ leaving. I am of one mind regarding their exits: relief. The ability to fully inhabit our own space again, to function independently of others’ questions and need for entertaining and meals. But this was different. This was the closest to not having visitors that a visit can be. I have not a memory without either my sister in it, or at the very least inhabiting my universe. We were born twelve months and three weeks apart, and I often think we share a brain (and she got the bigger half). To have her here was to have my own reactions to life reflected back to me, validated. It was as though this Australian adventure wasn’t completely real until she saw it too.

They became a part of our routine, the first to repeatedly join us on school drop-offs and collections, the first to sit around our table with friends as part of Champagne Fridays, to play with the other kids who have become my kids’ friends. There’s something about having your present witnessed by someone who knows your past. It’s all-encompassing and whole. It’s comforting, but more–it’s healing.

I thought about it as we ice-skated around the rink on their penultimate night here: how much time and experience we were covering just by being together. I remembered the days of our own youth, when we’d join our friends on the ice rink at the mall and slide around inexpertly but freely (as freely as a child with the pangs of anxiety can). I watched as our own kids struggled through their learning experiences: how LB spent fifteen seconds on the ice before declaring his displeasure; how The Niece raced around with more confidence than skill but totally free; how TK gripped my and The Sis’s hands tightly, talking through his anxiety, tiny and cautious movements defining his laps around the rink. I watched as LB exited the rink with The Husband’s help and they took off for wild rides while we continued our loops. And I thought about how long I’d known them all, am still knowing them.

This Sis: how I knew you when we wondered whether we’d have our own kids and family. I knew you when surprises jumped out on our paths and the conflict and pettiness that defined our youth gave way to what was lying underneath the whole time: a kinship that defines definition, an unwavering support for each other even as we do things differently, as our lives–husband, two kids, home–look alike yet, ten thousand miles apart, can veer apart drastically while remaining tied together.

Little Brother: how I knew you when you showed up in the middle of the night, explosions accompanying your arrival; when your days and nights were reversed and I thought I’d go insane; when your skin was soft and you loved the word “butt” more than anything; when you said “hold me” everywhere we went; when you grinned at me with a mixture of mischief and delight in perfect proportion; when you challenged my ideas of how much I had to give and showed me reserves I didn’t know existed; when you were TK’s biggest cheerleader and confidence-builder.

The Kid: how I knew you when you were shuttled between waiting rooms and from doctors’ offices to hospital rooms; when the ignorant psychologist declared you, at three years, to have the intelligence of a three-month-old; when you choked after a feed one of your first nights home and I was hurtled into a world of fear and love like I’d never known; when you faced down a cross-world move with triumph after triumph after only just beginning to utter words; when you crawled into bed with me every night and woke me with your feet even morning.

The Niece: how I knew you when you were the first of your generation and we toasted your arrival with contraband champagne in the hospital; when news of your days and nights, related by your mom, was the first honest assessment of motherhood I’d been given; when you grew from baby into girl, your limbs lengthening and your vocabulary growing and your sassiness knowing no bounds; when you proved that it’s not just boys who make unending physical demands of parents; when you cried upon our leaving, then yours.

The Husband: how I knew you when we both looked young in photos; when we rode with the top down in spring on a smaller island toward a future we had no way of predicting; when nights in hotels were trips, then escapes; when we texted to check in on each other, then on kids; when we were two, then four. When we were more than we had planned, and it was hard and wonderful.

How I knew love when it was a feeling, then a choice, and grace when it was a word, then a breath that saved me and kept me alive. When it all came down to this: that we were together, and we are, and we will be, and this sticking around, it is the hardest and the easiest and the everything.

They left yesterday morning, tears in their wake, and the boys and I ventured back to the beaches we had shown them, and pushed even further, into empty inlets and caves that we then filled with our voices and bodies. We came back home and there were flowers waiting, from a friend I know now and knew then: when we were strangers in the schoolyard, when we bonded over wine, when our kids’ friendship mirrored and extended our own. All of these surrounding us, answering the prayer I prayed on a teary track of my own two years ago: that there would be people here for us, our people. These people meeting and knowing our already-people, so that the hellos grow as frequent as the goodbyes and the empty spaces never stay that way for long.

Just when you think you’ve had enough and your dreams come true…I just want to be closer to you

Lately it feels like my children are more attached to me now than they were when I was pregnant with them.

It’s a recurring theme, in my own assessment and in my conversations with other mothers: the incessant need with which our young kids confront us, this constant and seemingly magnetic attraction to our bodies. The clinging and grabbing and leaning and pushing, the never-ending physical contact.

Yes, I know it will one day end. I know it will wind down to next to nothing compared to now. But right now I choose to enjoy the parts of motherhood other than The Kid’s kicks to my stomach in his early-morning slumber. Or the way Little Brother doesn’t have to go to the bathroom until I’m upstairs and sitting on my own toilet, completely indisposed but for the fact that he’s three and anything I have to do can wait, or be interrupted.

I coined the phrase myself–Mommy Protection Agency–for when The Husband is chasing them; it was a momentary lapse of judgment, a failure to see every time they would, from then on, race to me from him, hitting me full-speed, usually while I’m standing over boiling water at the stove or sitting with a glass of red, “relaxing.” In its best uses I am their willing landing pad, their safe haven, and we all fall into a pile of laughter together. In its most unwelcome ones I grit my teeth, sigh, imagine an island getaway for one. This territory defined by extremes is the essence of motherhood. I’m beginning to accept it…resentfully, usually.

I want to purely enjoy them. I want to be their safe harbour in a world full of threats that they will grow only more aware of. I want to be their unfailingly soft spot. I pray it at the end of hurried mornings and long days: help me make them feel safe, always. I pray it differently after tense moments and harsh words: let me never be the one to make them afraid. And yet I see the same regret I feel over those moments mirrored in other mothers’ eyes, hear it echoed in conversations in the school yard: we all feel like we’re failing. We are one bad morning away from having our maternal licenses revoked, and we have mixed feelings about it.

And then I think about how the hugs from my own mother, growing up, felt most familiar; how everyone else’s in comparison were just off: too bony, to fragile, too tight, just not quite right. Yet she wasn’t perfect either.

I want to be their most familiar, most comfortable embrace for as long as I can be. Also, I want space. This is motherhood.

No need to tell me this time of physical assault is temporary–I am well aware. I already carry the future guilt of my feelings around. Thank you, anxiety issues. Your forward thinking is always SO HELPFUL. That doesn’t change the fact that now, though, can be brutal. It can be unyielding and rough. I am scarred, always will be. I had no idea that pregnancy was only the beginning of carrying them with me.

“Loves like a hurricane, I am a tree/bending beneath the weight of his wind and mercy,” I hear through my headphones at the end of a brutal run–they all have been lately, and short–and I think about how it’s always been the hardest things, the most well-rounded assaults, that have shaped me the most: the runs, the labour and childbirth, the moves across country and world. How they have always led me home.

The other day we arrived at TK’s school and he raced up to a classmate, a close friend, and got right up in his face the way he often does, boundary-less as he can be (when he’s not working behind ALL the boundaries; the territory of extremes is familiar to both of us), and I sucked in my breath, waiting to see if it would be all too much for his friend as it so often can be when those boundaries, that personal space, is broken. Not that I know. And TK’s friend, he gave a grin, gestured his hand toward TK, and said, “That’s my buddy James.”

I breathed again, the space around me suddenly granting more room while being more full at the same time. My body being this place from which they venture for longer and longer stretches but always return to, for now, home.

It was a family event: we all lumbered down to the hotel pool so that The Husband could swim with the boys and I could swim…laps. Otherwise known as exercise. Otherwise known as sanity after a day of being in Auckland on my own with them while TH worked a few blocks away.

I prefer to exercise in the morning, but my kids don’t give a shit about what I prefer, so instead we had spent the morning walking to breakfast, then being shuttled up sixty floors in the Sky City Tower, which I could swear was swaying in the breeze as we circled its summit. After that, we hurtled back down to the gift shop where the kids each bought something they’ll never touch again, then the rain began so we headed back to the room for a movie.

When TH arrived back, my eyes told him I needed a break.

As I headed from one end of the pool to the other, I set up a rhythm of paddling, breathing, turning. Once I fell into it, I peeked through my goggles and saw a woman sitting in her hotel-proffered robe and slippers by the window with its view of the early winter darkness. She was on her phone and I couldn’t help but think that this was not the scene she came here to relax to: two boys splashing and shrieking as their dad egged them on and their mother swam away from them, then came back. Swam away, then came back. Always with the coming back.

“I used to be you,” I thought to myself, to her, considering the million ways my travel experience–my life–has changed since bringing the two of theirs into the world.

I used to be the twenty-something girl casting glances at the families on the ferry, likely thinking, “Ugh. That looks miserable,” as tiny legs and arms were wrangled into seats and jackets, as “inside voices” were encouraged, then begged for, as commands gave way to bribery. We used to be the couple at the restaurant who lingered over each course and paired it with wine instead of guzzling down the red while mopping up the youngest’s spilled milk then leaving in a rush because it’s bath time.

“Other countries are different,” The Kid protested the night before our trip, when excitement had predictably given way to anxiety and I was trying to reassure him in the darkness of his and Little Brother’s room at bedtime. “New Zealand is new and different. Australia is old and the same.” The latter clearly being his preference.

“But Australia used to be new and different too,” I told him as LB began to snore beside us, anxiety a missing part of his vocabulary. “Imagine if we had never come, if we had never gotten used to it. New and different can be good. They can become old and the same.”

He considered it as he drifted off to sleep. So did I, as I lay beside him.

We spent the next few days exploring the new and different: riding a bus around an island filled with wineries (and only visiting one; this would NOT have been the score pre-kids). Driving two and a half hours to see hobbit houses, filling the time with a kid-friendly recounting of the tales from Middle Earth, TH and I bouncing back and forth with the details we remembered. Riding lifts up and down. Losing my wallet in that damn gift shop then having it returned to me later by security. Taking the boys to the pool myself, where we found the hot tub full of errant bubbles and proceeded to slather them all over ourselves. Spending rainy afternoons piled on the bed watching Paddington 2 again. And again. Piling back onto the bed as a foursome after brief and semi-disastrous dinners, smashed together, all of it too much and just right at the same time.

And with every other lap in that hotel pool, I would turn and head back toward them: TK’s legs bobbing in the water as he faced me, waiting to grab at me when I passed, his laughter reaching me under the water where mine bounced back in response, bubbling to the surface.

I don’t laugh on my solo lap-swims.

This life and its mundanities–two kids, a house, piles of laundry, dinner ruts, grocery trips, the same paths covered daily on the way to school and work–being the source of such extremes: extremes in mood, in emotion, in geography. This life, smashing us into its corners and crevices until we fill it all, together.

On the way home from the airport, we asked the boys their favourite part of the trip. TK spoke up first: “The hotel.” The place where we woke up each morning, where we returned each night, where we piled up in the bed. Four walls filled with such extremes, but so much sameness. Same being what we always come back to–yet another word for home.

I may say I don’t belong here, but I know I do…Nobody looks away when the sun goes down.

On Sunday, The Kid woke up complaining of a sore tummy. He dragged himself from the bed to the couch, where he promptly vomited. We spent the day at home accomodating his illness, and I stayed positive about it, thinking all this rest would do the family good, plus he’d probably be better by the next day, twenty-four-hour bugs and such.

On Monday, with grey shadows lining his eyes, he announced that he was still sick. We took Little Brother to school and came back home. I rolled his six-year-old ass out in the stroller so I could get some exercise and we passed a dead squirrel whose carcass was being picked at by a nasty bird (redundant. All birds are nasty).

This morning, TK and LB and I walked out the front door and came upon an entire gaggle of such nasty birds, picking through our trash and tossing it around our yard. “Why are they eating rubbish?” the boys asked, and I couldn’t even enjoy their proper Australian phrasing because I was yelling at the birds. “Get OUT OF HERE!” I screeched, as a mum from TK’s school who lives down the street walked by and grinned, waving, my life playing out like a horror movie before her eyes.

The mornings always come with full force, and I never feel ready for it.

The mornings are when TK and LB know how to push each other’s buttons, one sitting justcloseenough to the other on the couch to drive them both crazy, feet flailing and hands slapping, screams over the TV I shouldn’t be letting them watch while I show up for work as short-order cook, school-bag-packer, bed-maker, ass-wiper, referee.

The mornings are when the weight of the day sits square on my chest and I let it, seeing only the To-Dos. The mornings are when I feel only chains, and no freedom.

These late-autumn days are short, and the morning sun arrives late, and I want to stay in bed until after it’s high in the sky. Impossible, most of the time. But the evenings arrive early, and Sydney has planned ahead for that. In the Northern hemisphere, the arrival of short days and cold weather initiates my Pavlovian response: bring on Christmas. Here, that thought springs to mind then is quickly corrected: bring on the lights. Vivid Sydney stretches over a few weeks, over the bridge from autumn to winter, and in the cold we see not the twinkling lights of Yuletide but the illuminated colours of June, the art splashed across the Opera House and the twinkling of the ferries, the city and its bridge piercing the sky with pink, purple, green, blue and back again. It’s not Christmas, but it’s not nothing.

The other night The Husband and I took one of those ferries into the city. Along with everyone else on it, we looked through our phones and even our eyes at the festival of lights greeting our approach. The night before, we had gone to the zoo with friends and their kids, frogs and elephants and giraffes formed out of coloured bulbs. On this night, though, the kids stayed home with their sitter and we sat in a theatre, floored by music we only knew a few words to. The rest was new, but it resonated, lyrics as poetry as narrative. “This is Alabama,” he sang, the second time my home state has been featured on the Opera House stage for me to hear, sounds of a deeper home than state or country inching their way through my soul, stretching across hemispheres and oceans to right where I sit.

Evening is for date nights, for bedtime with the four of us splayed across two doubles that have been pushed together because the boys like being close and they like for us all to end the day in one spot. I keep thinking we should put a halt to this; it eats up too much time, right? But I see eight feet lined up and wonder if maybe this is how it should be.

The mornings are heavy. But they’re also when, lately, the boys in TK’s class have been playing Lava Monster, and he rushes me through the school gate so as not to miss it. He runs and jumps onto a bench alongside him and they shout his name with all the others, and LB’s if he’s there too, and TK looks around, grinning widely.

This morning I went back out and returned all the rubbish to its bins, then looked around for a more permanent solution. “How are you going to weigh it down?” TK asked me, itching to get to school already, and I spotted the rocks in our driveway. I grabbed two handfuls for the two bins and placed them in the centre of the lids, knowing that upon my return the stones would likely be scattered by our nasty feathered friends, and TK grasped my hand as we headed away.

I kissed his grinning face then walked back with a friend, turning onto our street and holding my breath, gearing up for my new job: trash collector. But as I approached, I saw that the birds had given up. The rocks remained, blocking their pecking beaks, blocking their destruction and decay.

Some mornings bring stones in place, mystery held inside that looks an awful lot like death and mourning. Then it turns out the stones were holding life, which also seems to come in the morning, chains broken and real light coming through.