We are full of paradise without knowing it. –Thomas Merton

Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again? This lockdown is feeling like a sequel that got its shit together. Mostly. This is due, in large part, to all we aren’t doing.

Gone is the cursed whiteboard with which I used to start our days: I’d prop it up next to me while the boys watched from the couch. Little Brother would survey what he had to do with excitement; The Kid would tally up his list with anxiety. Then we’d attack the day like we were at the battle line. Zooms, worksheets, and tears would follow. One day I had a glass of champagne in hand by 10 am (to be fair, that was for a video call with some friends in America, but still–it left me thinking most days would be better if they started that way).

This time, during Zoom meetings in which teachers run down the list of assignments, the boys and I look at each other and shake our heads. “Are we doing that?” they ask. “Nope,” I reply. I’ve spoken to their teachers and told them that we’re taking more of the “world is a classroom” approach: that we’re cooking and baking together, reading together, researching together, playing maths and reading games together. There is a lot of together. The “how can I miss you when you won’t go away” kind. But so far, only one major meltdown (mine, and I’d rather not discuss it except to say that TK has forgiven me and we’re not doing Reading Eggspress together anymore).

Occasionally that twisted form of FOMO will hit me and I’ll wonder what the other kids are up to; I’ll lurk on Google Classroom and check how many assignments we’re avoiding; I’ll consider whether I’m setting my kids up for failure for life.

Then I remember what we were doing a year ago and I push the F*ck It button, again, and we head to the beach. In the winter.

Because here’s the thing: all the materials we’re sent, they’ll acknowledge that you don’t have to do everything, that you need to choose what works for your family, that bonding with your kids is the most important. Then all the metrics–the awards given out, the recognition dispensed–lies in favour of those who do the most. And I may have just become a maths teacher (again), but to me? That doesn’t add up.

I know my kids better this time around. I know myself better this time around. I know that this whole thing is a shitshow where everyone is trying their best and attempting to keep it together and staunch the tsunami of uncertainty we face each day (for reals, I just read that the moon’s orbit has a “wobble” to it, WTF, that will result in global coastal floods in ten years) and honestly? We are never going to run out of uncertainty.

What I know, in the face of and beyond that uncertainty, is what is true. I watch TK add huge sums in his head and LB read volumes and it warms the cold part of my heart that wants to buy into the metrics, then we go to the park and I watch TK talk to strangers and tell them our life story, and LB make friends in an instant. I see how they are similar to me and, thankfully, different. I know they are both fragile and impenetrable, that they are protected by me and a grace so much bigger than me.

I can actually relax, which feels so wrong and foreign to me. But when I do–when I let go and just see them and stop trying to fix the world the way I think it should be–that’s when that grace has space to move, to fill.

The other day we were at a secret garden and LB picked up a huge tree leaf from the gardener’s cuttings. “Look, Mom!” he shouted, waving it with his typical gusto, and I told him how cool it was then suggested maybe we weren’t supposed to take it. The gardener came around the corner then, pushing a wheelbarrow, and shook his head. “Let him have it,” he said.

I have never been a rule breaker. But now I’m getting a second chance. I’m seeing the magic that happens over mixing bowls and flour strewn across the bench top (GASP! I cleaned it up immediately); at playgrounds and on shorelines; in their books and my own. In their stories and my own. Grace instead of lists filling the pages. It’s a bit terrifying, mostly uncertain, and, I’m pretty sure, completely sacred.

Last week–our first in Lockdown Part 2 (or 3? I’m losing count; thankfully the New South Wales government is just going to keep this one going so as not to have us confused by popping in and out of it in the future)–I was fortified by a steely resolve to fill our mornings with activity. I had cracked the code, I felt: get out of the house in the morning, and feel less guilty about being there in the afternoon. The cool morning air was invigorating and the boys’ moods and mine were improved by it. I silently congratulated myself and poured a celebratory cocktail, smug that I had survived two days’ worth of semi-detention.

I did something else stupid as well: decided I would post our adventures to Instagram, citing “accountability” as a reason when it was actually “validation.” I was trying to prove something to myself and others: maybe I was the mother who enjoyed these outings, these explorations, these plans and the conquering of them.

It took me less than a week to make myself sick, returning begrudgingly to my multiple-photo-posting as though it were homework that was mocking me. I thought about it when I snapped pics of the boys: this one would look good online. Ugh. I thought I wasn’t one of those people, but here I was. Being one.

We’ve all benefited from, and even enjoyed, some structure to our days, some forced fresh air and exercise punctuating the Roblox and doom-scrolling and countdowns to wine o’clock. We’ve marvelled at the beaches we’ve never seen but were always there, waiting to be discovered in our backyard. We’ve also sighed with relief upon returning home to the couch and Netflix. We’re surviving by a greater margin than last lockdown–I wouldn’t go so far as to say thriving, but definitely “surviving better”–and now that we’ll be doing home learning for (at least?) a week, there’s a part of me that’s actually looking forward to implementing what I learned from last year’s hellish experience, which can be boiled down to a couple of simple ideas: try less and give fewer fucks.

The rule-follower, the performer, the approval-seeker within me, she is always waiting for the opportunity to pop back in and take over my life. She held the reins for the first few decades and I forget that she hasn’t been so much vanquished as quietened–this wasn’t a bloody overthrow a la the Revolutionary War as much as it was a referendum leading to affiliated independence (that’s America vs Australia, if you’re nasty). When there’s an opportunity to put on a show, to get that sweet hit of dopamine via a few online likes, she shows back up with her suitcase like she’s staying awhile, and it’s not until she’s put her toothbrush in my bathroom and turning on my hair straightener that I realise she’s trying to take over.

That’s when she gets asked (told) to take a hike (luckily, there are countless beautiful ones around here), because I know what happens if she stays: I start quantifying everything, turning life into a list to be fulfilled, a series of bullet points to achieve. My children wilt under the pressure and so do I, and we cross the finish line of each day bruised and resentful and not feeling safe at all. Well-being is sacrificed on the altar of accomplishment, and no one is the better for it.

Because it turns out you can teach an old dog new tricks, or as neurobiologists would put it: you can form new connections in the brain, reconnect synapses and lay neural pathways that weren’t there before, so altering your self-awareness that your life alters along with it. Generational patterns are broken and you are no longer a slave to your past. The new me that has been emerging from the debris of the old one for the past couple of decades is more aware of her faults and failures but free to express them, to shine a light on them, because she knows that grace shows up with forgiveness and redemption to make her safe.

She laughs more–often at her own expense. She’s calmer, less angry (or sometimes just angry at different things). She’s anxious but knows ways to deal with it. She likes jazz because she’s no longer afraid of meandering without a plan (for five-minute stints, at least–but it’s a start!). She doesn’t jump to defending everything she knows without also taking time to examine it. She’s more interesting, creative, and complicated than she was ever allowed to be before.

“Sometimes you need to take a few steps back and start somewhere else,” writes Katherine May in Wintering, my tour guide for these last few weeks. We’re starting somewhere different this time, and my kids have a new tour guide: she resembles the old one but she’s different, so different. I can’t wait for them to get to know her.

Yeah, I’m a streetlight!
Chillin’ in the heat!
I illuminate the stories of the people in the street
Some have happy endings
Some are bittersweet
But I know them all and that’s what makes my life complete

I was all set, as of a few days ago, to write a post about how our family makes its own traditions and how that is a beautiful thing. To wit, the way we bounce around at Christmastime and have only spent it away from a hotel once since we became Aussies, but that we have celebrated it for the past few years consistently in July by going to our favourite hotel in the mountains, where they display lights and trees and Santa roams a buffet waiting to take photos with families. We were meant to go there next week.

Then Covid showed back up.

First, The Husband was quarantined because of his job in the city, one of the current hotspots. Which didn’t really work for me, because without the rest of us isolated, that left chauffeuring and errands to me. Then, later that day came the news that we were all under lockdown, in fact, and not for the one week previously prescribed to TH and other citygoers, but for two.

No Blue Mountains for us.

We had been so close! Last year’s trip was lacking compared to the years prior–Covid hadn’t closed down the hotel but had rendered some of its best features–the arcade, the indoor pool–shuttered. But this year, fullness beckoned. Some close friends were booked in on days that overlapped with ours. The mulled cider and wine by the fireplace were within our reach. Until they weren’t.

Now, we’re back in lockdown, a year after the original version. It’s weird–Little Brother’s outdoor soccer camp made the cut, and plenty of shops are still open, but we’re otherwise stranded at home or to walks around it. Luckily, those walks can lead us in a matter of minutes to some of the most beautiful views and beaches on earth, and we’re not likely to get shot here, so it’s still sort of an “I’d rather be dead in California than alive in Arizona” situation, but it’s not what I’d call the best. My mental health, still fragile from the last time this shit went down, is currently on back-order, and while the rainbows brought by the rain are glorious, they’re still around because of…well, rain.

But there are all kinds of rain, aren’t there? Before the lockdown, back in those sweet summer-child days when we frolicked through the school gate and into cinemas, maskless, the boys’ classes both invited parents through for a showcase of all their work. LB’s writing included a description of the school’s fireworks night in which he described the explosions as “sparkling rain,” and I haven’t been able to get that image out of my head since.

So I’ve been measuring my days not with coffee spoons or big outings but by the liturgy, by reading several books at once, by consuming Netflix and Amazon recommendations. By walks and runs, quick grocery trips, text chains. By new recipes for old favourites, and the kids’ ideas for “clubs” like cooking, drawing, and dog-cuddling. By dropping LB off for soccer camp and heading out with The Kid for a bush walk with a view, during which I tell him the ways we’re alike so that I can clear the path a bit in sharing what took me decades to learn. By feeling how our stories get told and retold, a bit better each time.

“…a voiceless awe at the passing of time. The way everything changes. The way everything stays the same. The way those things are bigger than I am, and more than I can hold,” writes Katherine May in my current favourite, Wintering. The way that some days, “more than I can hold” feels like a curse, then later that same day, like a bigger gift than I could imagine.

The boys have been begging to listen (and re-listen…and re-listen) to the Moana soundtrack lately in the school-bound car, and a couple of verses into “How Far I’ll Go” always leads to a beautiful moment–the lyrics “I’ll be satisfied if I play along/But the voice inside sings a different song/What is wrong with me?” are belted out, and our chorus of three responds with a resounding, “NOTHING!”

This started after I felt the need to answer her question myself, to the boys, by emphasising that if Moana hadn’t been different from everyone around her, then she wouldn’t have been called to the sea and she wouldn’t have saved their island. Our ventures around here may be a bit less heroic and and epic, but it’s important to me nonetheless that my kids grow up knowing how beautiful, and important, and not-wrong, different can be–and not just in movies.

Because I grew up feeling different. Different from others, and even within myself–parts of me competing with each other constantly. The desire to please others, to play by the rules, to get everything right, pitted against an anger at those I wanted to please, an urgency to rebel, to escape. All of it leading to an identity crisis that sent me to New York, in what would become a life theme: all that breaks me is actually remaking me.

I guess we’re having a bit of a Lin-Manuel Mirenaissance around here, because in addition to listening to Moana, the four of us went with friends to see Hamilton onstage over the weekend, and the next day I went with a friend to watch In the Heights. I can’t think about it, especially the “Finale,” without crying.

There’s a breeze off the Hudson
And just when
You think you’re sick of living here the memory floods in
The morning light, off the fire escapes

From inside an Australian cinema, I was transported to New York City, a place where I was reborn at twenty-seven. And I–achingly, desperately–missed it. But then–

But I ain’t goin’ back because I’m telling your story
And I can say goodbye to you smilin’, I found my island
I been on it this whole time
I’m home!

I thought about how often Little Brother has said it, after his first term’s focus on Australia, that it’s a continent that’s also an island. About how a couple of times now, I’ve landed on islands that have turned into homes. About how I picked a leech off my foot last week and this morning as I ran, a wallaby bounded across the road ahead of me. All the beautiful insanity I never had the will or imagination to conceive that has nonetheless been a part of my story because grace hasn’t, won’t, let me go.

I grew up trying to live only from my left brain, black and white, right and wrong, safety, not knowing that there were stories waiting to be told from the other side–that I wasn’t half a person, or a scattered one, but a whole one waiting to be made whole.

In Wintering, Katherine May writes, “I clear the surface of my desk and make a pool of light with my lamp. I go off to fetch matches and light a candle. One light is steady and sure, the other uncertain and flickering. I open my notebook and work between these two poles. On balance, it’s where I prefer to be: somewhere in the middle. Certainty is a dead space, in which there’s no more room to grow. Wavering is painful. I’m glad to be travelling between the two.”

I am somewhere in the middle, too. In between my right and left brain, my reason and emotion, my logic and creativity. In between the religion of my youth and the mystic faith with fuzzier edges. In between hemispheres and continents and islands, a piece of me in each of these places that somehow adds up not to scattered bits but to a whole, because wherever I am, there grace is, and wherever grace is? Is home.

But with patience and faith
We remain unafraid
I’m home!
You hear that music in the air?
Take the train to the top of the world
And I’m there
I’m home!
We’re home

We’re home

We’re home

Home

We’re home

Home

Home

Home!

As the days grow shorter, we bring light into the house to repel the multiple darknesses that lurk there. I raid the cupboards for candles and hang fairy lights in the murkier corners, and I start to retell my own story again, if only to myself. That’s what humans do: we make and remake our stories, abandoning the ones that no longer fit and trying on new ones for size. –Katherine May, Wintering

Over the weekend, a friend from junior high and high school messaged me a photo from our junior high’s literary magazine, which I had forgotten even existed. It was a poem I had written, that I won’t inflict on you now, called “The Seasons.” Four stanzas of observations about each season–rhyming, natch.

The message arrived at the perfect time, as all things do (and we only eventually realise): I’ve been dwelling lately on seasonal thoughts as the days here are approaching their shortest and, so far this year, their coldest. Cold weather and the smell of smoke wafting through chimneys triggers a few things within me: increased running stamina, a desire to cook and bake, and the feeling that Christmas is imminent.

Except it’s not, here. Christmas that is. It’s still six months away, but try telling my body–or the Sonos speakers blasting Christmas music–that. So what I’ve decided is to observe the seasonal elements of Christmas this time of year. The spiritual stuff can happen in December, but for now? Bring on the Charlie Brown and mixing bowls.

I remember reading an Australian novel years ago that took place at Christmas, in the height of summer, and wondering how people Down Under could (mentally) survive both a hot Christmas and a cold season without it. To me, Christmas is the saving grace of winter, the thing that keeps the whole season afloat and legitimate, that prevents us all from wandering down to Florida for three months.

Now, I’m finding out how to survive it: by having winter for winter’s sake. Via the aforementioned music and baking. The longer runs and more brilliant sunrises and sunsets. Drinks on a lawn with live music before the sun goes down, and our kids and theirs playing nearby like this is the end scene from Notting Hill. Vivid, the city’s homage to keeping us all sane during the shorter days, lighting up the longer nights. Making soup without sweating into it over the stove. Needing–and sometimes getting–more sleep and realising this need is not necessarily pathological, but rhythmic in origin.

And, apparently, buying a legit wetsuit.

When I went to the surf shop last week, I had no idea that the fitting process would be a cardio session of its own. Strangely enough, this did not happen at Aldi when I bought my last suit. This time, I stretched my body into heretofore undiscovered shapes, feeling like I was stuffing a sausage into its casing and abandoning all modesty when the shop employee asked if I needed help. “Is it supposed to look like this?” I asked her uncertainly, and seemingly asthmatically since I was having trouble breathing, and she confirmed that it was. Huh, I thought. The old one didn’t.

No, the old one didn’t. Another thing it didn’t do? Adhere to my body like a second skin after I stepped into the wintry water. I must have looked like a small child, the wonder on my face growing as I grew more and more submerged, only my feet and hands feeling the cold, then my face as I finally stopped treading water and started swimming in it, farther and faster than before now that I had shed the wrong size and was wearing what actually fits me.

It’s June, and I’m sitting in our family room with the fire blazing, a hot tea beside me, and Charlie Brown Christmas music playing from the speakers. Kevin the Dog snoozes in front of the fire, balls intact for now but to be removed on Friday.

Somehow, life is as it should be. Not as I planned it, mind you–but as it should be.

The Husband got me a new phone, which arrived yesterday, much to The Kid and Little Brother’s delight, and they already know how to work it better than I do (my camera roll is full of TK’s artistic renderings of his self-constructed parking structures–apparently I now have access to something called stage lights within my camera). I was nearly stranded at Aldi this morning when I attempted to pay with my phone for the first time only to find that they don’t take the Amex card I have stored there. One frantic phone call to TH and some tinkering later, and I left the store a bit embarrassed (it’s okay; my phone’s facial recognition can see past shame) but with wine in hand.

This morning, we (I, then TH as I tapped my foot impatiently nearby) couldn’t get my headphones to pair with this new device so I used my old phone, which had no internet access and could only play the music currently downloaded to it. Therefore I listened mainly to the Teen Titans soundtrack for my run, which I credit for my quicker-than-usual time.

In all this, somehow, life is as it should be.

I ventured into a new-to-me part of the city on Monday and sat across from a man who checked my documents then sent me to another room, where I answered twenty questions about Australia–a country that, as of a few years ago, I’d never even visited, let alone planned on moving to–and got them all right (because they were easy). TH did the same thing an hour later, and now we’re waiting for the ceremony that will cement us as citizens of this country we somehow landed in, despite other plans.

As it should be.

After a pandemic-related year-hiatus, the boys’ school had their annual Fireworks Night last weekend, and we bounced around from the silent disco to the carnival rides to the food stalls before settling on blankets among friends. We took cheeky sips of wine from metal water bottles, ate Domino’s pizza, held babies, and groaned–but couldn’t stop watching–when one of the kids’ classmates lost his battle with sugar-related motion sickness and barfed all over the turf. Then we turned and watched something better: intentional explosions in the sky that rendered us all silent except for Ooohs and Aaahs (and TK’s complaining about the decibel level).

Then we went home–from one home, that is, to another. Which is something we seem to be doing a lot of lately.

I’ve found home in places I never expected, because of all I never planned. This home resides in the in-between, in the spaces between where I was and what I’d never known, this greyscale yet vividly-coloured territory of all I’d been vaguely aware of now coming to life: unchallenged and reconstructed faith, foreign and familiar countries, mental illness and health, privileged and marginalised communities, conservatism and progressivism. I can inhabit this space now because the in-between is, somehow, my home.

Somehow, as it should be.

“Aren’t we lucky,” I said to the boys from the car’s front seat as they sat in the back, “that we have friends here who are like family, and who know how to take care of you?”

I was sincere, and also trying to make a sale. The Husband and I were headed to a high school tour in the city, which required a change to our daily routine: I would not be taking the boys to school. Instead, we were dropping them with friends who would walk them there.

There were a lot of questions when this information was initially dropped: would their friends’ mum take them to their classes and wait there until the bell went like I do? Did she know that The Kid required a kiss on the lips before Little Brother was escorted across the grounds to his room? There were tears and shouts of denial. I didn’t sleep well the night before. I thought about–and TK suggested–backing out of the tour, sending TH on his own.

This was all yesterday, and we survived.

As TH and I fought traffic while crossing the Harbour Bridge, I thought for the millionth time about how insane this all is: the fact that we are thousands of miles from family; that we have overstayed our three-year assignment by a year and a half; that we are set to take our citizenship test next week; that we have friends I trust enough to walk my kids down the busiest of roads; that my kids trust these people too; that we are looking at high schools for TK to attend in two and a half years, and LB three years after that.

When I prayed for us to find our people here, I had no idea who would show up, or how. Now, we are embedded in deep community with people who feel like family. People who, when I ask them for help with my kids or if they want to go on holiday with us, say things like “leave it with me”–one of my favourite expressions, since I’m someone who tends to carry my baggage possessively and with more than a whiff of martyrdom even as my soul longs for relief.

There is relief. There is leaving it with those who have been faithful. With the grace that has held us and does still.

I don’t want to think about changes, about starting a new school and meeting new people and navigating more transitions. But even as I spurn the idea through anxiety, I have to laugh, because…look at how ridiculously grace-ridden our path has been so far. Like that’s going to suddenly change?

Our tour ended in a chapel with two students singing it alongside a pianist: Amazing Grace.

We were running Kevin the Dog down at the harbour the other day and I noticed LB positioning himself on a rock off to the side and gazing ahead through squinted eyes.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

He turned to me, grinning. “I’m watching our life movie,” he said. “It’s really good.”

The boys and I were watching Bluey recently, as we are wont to do when it appears on stage or screen, and per usual, the show ended with a moment I just loved. The kids were all playing together throughout the episode when one said she didn’t have to play a game a certain way because her parents told her she was special. Conflict ensued, parents were consulted, and her dad pulled her aside. To paraphrase, he said:

“Remember when mum and I told you that you’re special? Well…we lied. You’re special to us. You’re just not special to the rest of the world. All parents think their kids are the most special. But the world’s not going to think that.”

She runs off, joyful and free: “Dad says I’m not that special after all, so I can play the game!”

This is how therapy worked for me: by revealing that I wasn’t all that special. That my reactions–of anger, frustration, sadness, impatience–were actually pretty logical given the circumstances that had led to them throughout my life. That I wasn’t alone in feeling the way I felt. That I wasn’t the kind of person I thought I was–or had been pretending to be–and this was good news indeed. Freeing. I can’t tell you how many times I sat across my therapist and told him a story of how horribly I’d behaved, convinced this would be the one that would finally disgust him, and he’d listen, the expression on his face unchanging, before responding with some version of, “Yep. Makes sense.”

Did he leave me there? No, thank God. He would then explain why, given my story, my reaction made sense. And I’d know myself more because of that. But he didn’t define me by my horrible actions any more than by my (rarer) heroic ones. (There was one ultra-cringe moment when I started a story with, “I don’t know if you’ve read my blog recently” and he just sat there rather than kicking me out. Grace.) He took it all in without blinking, which allowed me to do the same. Now when someone tells me they’re “not that kind of person” I have to wonder if they know themselves at all, because we’re all that kind of person given the right alchemy of circumstance, mood, sleep, diet, and hormones. We’re all capable of awful depths and stunning glories. It’s breathtaking, really, how great and terrible each of us can be, and how freeing it is to realise that rather than be chained to some idea of who we should be. who we think we are.

Recently, after the boys each had…intestinal issues a few days apart, I told them about how I’ve shit my pants as an adult. Multiple times. Like, I’ve maybe led to the shutdown of two restaurants in NYC? (All I’m saying is the timing is suspicious.) And this morning, at my front gate while I cooled down from a run, I blasted a mega-fart before I saw a school-uniformed kid walking by (I should go check if he’s gotten up yet). I’m just saying–WE’RE ALL A MESS. And I’m much more interested in the mess than the mask.

Yesterday I went for a swim in the wintry waters nearby and ran into a friend as I finished. She was bobbing in the water as though she was relaxing in the hot springs; meanwhile I was frigid and desperate to get back to the car, where blasting heat and a travel mug of hot tea waited. She pointed out that my wetsuit may not be doing the job. Le scandale?! My Aldi-purchased, one-size-too-big bargain not good enough?! She showed me hers, that fit like a second skin. Then she bobbed around some more like this was the fucking Bahamas.

On the way to the car, I thought about how I’d been trying to make that wetsuit work for a year, how I’d convinced myself of the deal I’d gotten, only to find that it was probably the reason I injured my shoulder and was actually more cold with it than without it, as it trapped water inside the spaces where it didn’t cling to me. How much of my life I’ve spent wearing ill-fitting suits before realising, because of the grace that poured through others who told me, that I didn’t have to be that person, because the person I was? The one I am? Is already beloved, no matter what she does or doesn’t do, wears or doesn’t wear. No matter how many pants she shits.

I got into the car, but not before I–as the Aussies say–chucked that suit in the bin.

I feel like a failure every day.

I climbed into bed last night with this thought–far from the first time that’s happened–and sat with it awhile before uttering it aloud. The spectre of guilt chases me always, and sometimes it chases me down–particularly after days like yesterday, days that are full of sun and sweat and sports carnivals and early dismissals and more time at home and a late day at the office for The Husband. Days of the neighbour coming over to warn us that he found a snake in their driveway, followed by panicked questions from the boys about what it all means. Days of tennis following an already-long day, and homework following that, and never-ending laundry that does end, but not before I scream and slam the door while I’m doing it because the meditation (/medication?)? It has worn the fuck off.

Days when I, in bed, review the proceedings like I’m in a courtroom where I’m both the judge and the accused, recollecting how I gently encouraged The Kid to enter an event at the carnival and remained (perceptibly) unperturbed when he chose not to, but maybe some hidden frustration was transferred to Little Brother because when he chose not to enter the 50-metre novelty race with his age group after I not gently urged him to? I turned into an emotional ice queen. Days when all it takes for TK and I to meltdown and become adversaries is ten fractions questions. (Well, that’s not all it takes. There was also, oh, everything else.)

Motherhood’s ride-or-die, its constant companion, seems to be this singular guilt over not being everything to everyone, of inflicting less-than-perfect moments on our children that (we fear) they will carry around forever, or at least through therapy, and there are days when I cannot see around or through or beyond it to any greater truth. And on these days, I am defeated.

The boys’ current movie-on-repeat is Soul, for which I am utterly grateful, because I need it too. I need the reminder that there are no mistakes in jazz, only notes that lead somewhere unexpected. I need to remember that “the tune is just an excuse to bring out the you,” and that this is why every tune is different–and valuable. I need to hang onto the truth that life is not about long, purposeful, public strides to some finish line but is actually found in the failing, the flailing, the falling, the defeats that lead us to the bigger truths: to the melody behind it all.

Little Brother’s class, at last week’s Mother’s Day assembly, performed a song that included the words:

So let it play play play your way

Chase the blues away

With music all around

Surround yourself with sound

And the melody that we found

Nobody can bring us down

With music all around

Simplistic? Sure. But I find myself singing it all the time, and when LB is around he’ll join in, and then baby, you got a song going.

Which is the point, I think.

Not to create a perfect narrative out of life, or gloss over our mistakes so that we don’t have to feel the hard stuff, or publicly rehabilitate ourselves through revisionist-history social media posts–but to descend, unblinking (or maybe blinking a bit) into the mire of our daily lives and face it, so that we can see, embedded there, the other moments, the ones where we forgave each other and sat on the couch with our legs all tied together and told each other we (still) love each other. To see it all.

And, in so doing, to not create, but to witness the making of the song–not the one we thought we’d get, but the one we actually did. Because in grace, like in jazz, there are no mistakes.

I’m pretty sure I say this every year, but I retell a lot of stories so here it is anyway: Mother’s Day at the boys’ school is celebrated with a stall where the kids can hand over a $2 coin and, in return, gain access to a treasure trove of mum-related gift items. The presents are, naturally, donated by the mothers themselves, who are encouraged to provide something they would like to receive themselves. This doesn’t stop people from donating things like used and unwashed coffee mugs or packets of tissues, apparently, but luckily I didn’t receive either of those hot-ticket items.

One friend of mine was given a mug with #mumlife printed on it. Another was given a (hideous) necklace, and the winner this year may have been the mom whose son gave her an obviously-regifted-from-a-kid’s-birthday party unicorn and mermaid face-painting set.

In comparison, I lucked out, receiving two mugs, one with pastel leopard print and one with a sweet message, both smaller than the amount of caffeine I need but chosen and given with love. After I opened them, we headed to lunch at the local chicken schnitzel chain, where I had a glass of champagne. Doesn’t get much better than that, I suppose.

The day before, I’d gone to the ballet matinee with some friends and took the ferry back–the ferry that sells drinks–and enjoyed some cheap sparkling on the top of the boat. I watched the sun set behind me and the water lap beside me and thought, again, of how ridiculous it is that this is our life. Ridiculous that we live surrounded by this beauty every day. Ridiculous that we are touring high schools for The Kid (and, eventually, Little Brother) because when you live as a dual citizen, you have to plan for everything.

Ridiculous that we’re about to be dual citizens–if The Husband and I pass the test and interview we just received an email notification for, that now has us studying a booklet of Australian history.

Ridiculous that as I climbed off that ferry, I traversed in heels the same path I’d pounded in running shoes that morning. Ridiculous that a smaller amount of coffee in a smaller mug actually tastes stronger–and better. Ridiculous that the Mother’s Day event at their school left me claustrophobic in the crowd while it lasted, and catatonic on the couch afterward as I recovered. Ridiculous that the show-stopping song performed at the end stayed in my head all day long. And the day after. And the day after.

Ridiculous that little expressions of ours tend to seep into the boys’ language–foul and otherwise–and that, in a frustrated moment the other day, TK said “fucking” and LB said “I can’t handle this” and honestly? I’m pretty sure there’s a time and a place for both so I’m not sweating it too much. Because I can’t handle it–the ups and downs, the crowds, the demands, the hormones, the emotions. I can’t handle, either, the joys, the love, the sunlight that pierced the windshield and nearly blinded me on our way to school this morning.

That mug that one of the boys brought home from the stall? Printed on it was another expression the boys commonly hear from me: “YOU ARE LOVED.” I can’t even handle it.