“My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.” –CS Lewis

In his heartbreaking and life-giving memoir on grief, CS Lewis described it–grief, that is–as not a circle but a spiral. It may feel like you are revisiting the same spots over and over, but you are seeing them from a different vantage point each time. A point further along in the process, hopefully, which is progress, even though it may not seem to be.

This describes life, too, I think. It describes us.

Earlier this week, The Kid left his water bottle at his speech therapist’s office. We were a few blocks away, at Little Brother’s soccer practice, when we (I) realized this. Did I stop myself from rolling my eyes this time? No. Did I prevent the frustration from rising up within me like a volcano at this new multi-step problem thrown into our already-hectic afternoon? No, I did not.

But. I told him it was okay. And once LB was settled into practice, TK and I trotted over to the office to retrieve the bottle, and somehow we were both smiling.

(Then we got there, and his therapist–and the bottle–were shut in with another client, and we waited fifteen minutes before we had to leave to get back to LB so he wouldn’t notice we’d left, and TK and I both got lost in our own anxiety and definitely did not smile on our way back. So. Spirals.)

Last weekend I put on my heels and headed with a friend into the city, where we watched Hamilton. I’d seen it once more in person, on Broadway five years ago, back when I was a US resident and we were all allowed to travel around the world and theatre in America still existed. At the time, I was struggling through a stomach virus that was erupting from my rear and I had been reduced to simply hoping to get out of there without causing a scene, so my recollections beyond that are limited. But I do retain an overall feeling: of exhilaration at seeing the show with its (mostly) original cast, of watching this story come to life, of being a part of something bigger than myself, a part of our collective past and my own story.

This time, I (thankfully) was not encumbered by GI issues, just by a mandated mask that I pulled down to sip on beverages. This time, I sat next to a constant friend who didn’t exist to me a half-decade ago. This time, I watched this American story through the eyes of an Australian resident. I noticed that the audience missed the Sally Hemmings reference but not much else. That the cast was different but incredibly skilled. That the story was the same, but different. I was different.

I am different, and the same. I still fly off the handle, disappoint myself, get angry and irrational. But I also love more deeply, tell the truth more frequently, and ask for–and receive–forgiveness more readily. Spirals.

The only stories that remain static are the ones where we don’t tell the truth, where we skip the hard parts, where we elevate fear over love. I’ve just finished writing a middle-grade novel and in submitting it for publication, I’m finding that rejection (the one I’ve received so far, at least, though many more will come) hits the same, and different. I’m still offended, and I still battle shame, but now? I know something deeper than both. And that is the story where I live.

Yesterday morning I finally retrieved the water bottle. It was waiting in the car when the boys hopped in, these boys who have, through grace’s direction, shattered and remade me, who have lived the hard parts and told the truth with me. Who have lived and are living their own spirals–these stories where you can’t have bridges without barbed wire, or new life without grief, or an old cast without a new.

The Kid and Little Brother were baptised as babies. (This is because we believe in baptism not as a ticket into heaven/result of a personal decision but as the fulfilment of a promise; I’ll skip the unending controversy over this issue because I suspect a lack of interest among my readers.) TK’s sprinkling was delayed several weeks because, the night before that Sunday, he came down with a fever that led us to the emergency room and a penile catheter, among other disturbances. It wasn’t the first, or last, time he’s made us wait for something totally worth it.

LB’s baptism was on-schedule and uneventful other than the divine import of it all. For my part, I remember being baptised as a young teen, wearing a white robe (creepy) and stepping into a cold pool. I felt terror, along with the suspicion that this had not been sufficiently explained to me.

I experience those feelings still, often. Every day, probably. Which makes me wonder whether there aren’t thousands of tiny baptisms throughout our lives, separating the before from the after, the born from the reborn.

When TK was about two, we were at his speech therapist’s office waiting for her to collect him for their appointment, and he was running around the room smiling, and another mom asked me if he was autistic. This was pre-diagnosis. It was pre- a lot of things, and I told her–defensively, I imagine–that no, he was not. Now I am post- that particular defensiveness. I am post-giving a shit about a label and post-seeing it as an albatross around his (and my) neck. I am post-terrified (most days) about what other people think.

I’ve been washed in the water of things I thought could end me, and survived.

Fast forward about seven years, and add a supreme amount of self-awareness into TK’s repertoire, and you have the two of us at bedtime. He asks me why he was to repeat himself all the time when no one else does. He asks why speech has to be “his thing” and why his brother doesn’t seem to have a thing. He tells me he hates his speech.

My heart breaks, and then I remember what I learned from nearly-but-not drowning: that the people who ask him to repeat himself really care about what he has to say. That everyone has a thing, even if it hasn’t shown up yet. That I treasure all the moments his speech and its ensuing therapy visits have given us together that we wouldn’t have had otherwise.

He falls asleep somewhat at peace, somewhat unsettled still. Don’t we all.

A few days later, his school (years 2-6) has a cross-country event and don’t you know that he is not here for it. So I meet him there, along with a few other parents, though I turn out to be the only one who runs/walks alongside her kid–and the only one who is cheered for alongside her kid. I am still a member of The Society of I Didn’t Sign Up for This, but now that card sits in my wallet alongside the one for The Fellowship of All Out of Fucks, and when one of the dads monitoring the race (that we end in second-to-last place) jokingly asks if I need a coffee, I tell him I’d prefer a wine, and it turns out to be the best morning I’ve had in awhile.

On a family dog walk a few days later, a woman stops us and tells TK how great he did in the race. Turns out she’s the grandmother of one of the boys in his class. And as she praises him, I feel LB tug on my arm. “Introduce me,” he stage-whispers, so I do, and he follows up with how many goals he scored at soccer last week–a number he tripled at practice a few days later–and I am washed in the water, overcome by the waves, of two people who need to be seen in their own ways, on their own terms. The differences can be minimal, or stark, but they are always beautiful.

Because while LB scored those goals, his big brother asked one of the dads of the kids on the team why he had such a nice suit and haircut that made him look like a millionaire. He was basically running an improv show on the sideline, which is usually LB’s thing, but he was busy soccer rocker-ing. And I’m standing on the sideline, my view split between two boys, a little unsettled and a little at peace, exhausted and buffeted by the waves that keep somehow both knocking us down and lifting us up.

Derek Chauvin was just found guilty on all counts for George Floyd’s murder. I can remember a time, not long enough ago, when I would’ve interpreted this as a miscarriage of justice. Now I see it as anything but.

I am not who I used to be, though I will always be me. Does this make sense? Somehow, yes: we can travel the world and arrive where we started, which is to say, home, even if home is in a different place. We can be changed by the journey while still being who we were. I like to think of it (and complain to The Husband about it) as what happens to women who become mothers: we change physically, mentally, chemically, neurologically, hormonally, emotionally, though there are things about us (often reflected back by our children, and our marriages) that never do a full 180. Or anywhere close to a 180.

I started in Alabama. I’m now in Australia. I was single; I am no longer. I was childless and now am not. I was on one side of the political spectrum and now I’ve migrated positions. There are causes that I care about now that were once never on my radar; differences I didn’t knew existed that I now hope to champion. So much has changed.

The other day, a friend asked how my faith was going. It irritated me; then again, I’m easily irritated. But after I gave it some thought, I understood why I was irritated: because what ultimately matters is not how my faith is going (it’s forever intact yet all over the place on any given day, thanks), but the state of the One in whom my faith rests. And that One never changes.

Bear with me as I mention a niche but growing category called Exvangelicals, who have left the faith of their youth (American Evangelicalism/fundamentalism) in favour of no faith at all, or a very different one. I’d consider myself in the latter camp, as over the years I’ve come to see what I was taught as little more than Self-Improvement and Behaviour-Management dressed in church clothes, and I need so much more than what I can buy from Amazon’s “inspirational” section to cure what ails me. These people discuss “deconstructing” their faith, and I am here for it. Mainly because I’m no longer afraid of deconstruction, of closer examination, of confrontation and tension.

It’s why I teach ethics at the boys’ school now, whereas they were enrolled in Scripture: I like the curriculum of critical thinking ethics provides, and I know they’ll hear plenty about Jesus from me. It’s why we can accept a church here (and skip some weeks) even though I long for the more grace-driven preaching back in Atlanta and New York; grace will always find us. It’s why I can face the racism I used to practice; I know that there is such a thing as redemption and healing, though it often lies on the other side of hard realities.

This is what freedom often looks like: a process of deconstruction, which is really just a part of reconstruction, or even resurrection. The same, but so different. The way to becoming the truest versions of ourselves: who we were made to be.

I remember thinking, as a child, that nothing ever happened to me.

I begged for glasses a year before I got them, leaving the ophthalmologist’s office that first year without them in tears. In sixth grade, I tripped over a crevice in the dirt and when I hoped for a dramatic diagnosis of, short of an actual break, then some sort of serious sprain, I was informed, instead, that this was a strain (not a ligamental tear, but a stretch) and left without the crutches I’d longed to bring to school that would undoubtedly elicit questions and sympathy.

My family–what I knew of it, at least–remained largely untouched by death until the loss of my great-aunt when I was in high school (and our beloved dog around the same time).

Most people would call such an existence blessed. I called it boring.

So I got used to a life that remained decidedly on the tracks. Until it didn’t, and all hell broke loose, and I wanted the predictable life I’d once rued.

Yes, there was a time when my imagination didn’t stretch beyond Alabama. Thank God that grace’s did.

Derailments to my plans sent me to New York, then Atlanta (I swore I’d never live there–#traffic), then Australia. I’ve set up camp in Marriage, and Motherhood, and the Autism Spectrum, and Depression and Anxiety. I’ve relocated from one political party to sort of another, from American Evangelicalism to Anything But. I’ve nearly drowned trying to swim in an ocean I’d never dreamed of seeing. I’ve fallen as many (more) times as I’ve risen and I’ve crawled as much as I’ve run.

I’ve wiped a few asses many times and cleaned up a lot of dog vomit.

And now, as the sun sets, I’m writing this outside a hotel room on Australia’s Gold Coast (which is like America’s Gulf Shores, so…amazing). The Husband and Little Brother are playing soccer on one side of me and The Kid is setting up an airport on the table on the other. I’m drinking some kind of spritz and I’m five pounds (a couple of kilos) heavier than I’d like to be and a mosquito just bit the shit out of my arm.

Nothing is happening. Everything is.

This morning, TK wanted to return to the familiarity of the hotel room after an express breakfast, but instead the cashier at our cafe offered us bread to feed the ducks. The ducks didn’t show, but the seagulls did. I told him, on the way back to the hotel, that if we hadn’t stretched to allow the unplanned, we would have missed that.

It’s a lesson I keep repeating, and learning, and living.

I hope nothing keeps happening.

“Not knowing is a good place to start.” –Fredrik Bakman, Anxious People

It would seem as though I learn the most when I do the least.

I am not in love with hustle culture, with toxic “to-do” lists, with busyness as a badge of honour. This is partly because I’m a homebody and an introvert but also? Because I know that shit doesn’t work.

I know that goal-orientation as a lifestyle has an expiration date, and usually ends in one form or another of drowning: drowning in anxiety, drowning in frustration, drowning in your own and/or others’ ineptitude; just hitting a wall and flailing your way to submersion.

The drowning is either the end or the beginning.

I’ve been in fear of drowning twice in my life: once in a river in Alabama, and more recently (and beautifully) in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Manly. In both instances, I was flailing and fighting before I realised I couldn’t save myself. In Alabama, the river carried me to shore. In Manly, it was the hand of a friend. This past weekend, I attempted that same swim with the same friend. This time, the water was calmer–and so was I. Instead of tackling the waves, I rode them. I floated more. I did less. And I made it there–and back. And afterward, I had champagne.

This time, the water was calmer, yes, but it was also murkier due to recent rainstorms. But I had more time to look. I saw a stingray and massive fish, along with schools of tiny ones. There’s more time to enjoy the view when you’re not fighting to maintain it.

I think stillness is a secret we’re still not letting ourselves in on.

The day after my swim, while Little Brother shot for nothing but net at a basketball camp, The Kid and I went to the local water park and slid for an hour. He wanted to go on the fast one, so I told him to go for it, then he made it clear that he meant not solo, so I sat behind him on the mat and pushed us off, and for about twenty seconds–ten times in a row–we screamed and laughed our way through a blue flume, speeding around its curves and splashing into the pool at the end.

His delight was pure. So was mine. There was nothing we could control once we pushed off, and the freedom was terrifying and exhilarating.

I’ve seen the video. I was disgusted, but not surprised. This sort of eruption is a natural result of an identity built on the sinking sand of personal achievement, hustle culture, toxic busyness, and “drink more water”-type philosophies that avoid the danger of deeper water for the shallow safety of the shoreline. You don’t value life more by mastering it (as if that’s possible), but by failing and flailing and, repeatedly, being saved by a grace bigger than yourself.

People who have seen crazy things can believe crazy things. People who have stopped trying to maintain beauty are the ones who can truly behold it. There was a time, for example, when a bunch of women told a bunch of men a story, and (typically) the men didn’t believe the women because their tale sounded like nonsense. Well, almost all the men didn’t believe. One did–the one who had briefly tiptoed across water; the one who had disappointed himself by doing a thing he’d never thought himself capable of. People who have sunk to depths they never knew existed? They’re the ones with the best views, the best stories.

The wall-hittings, and the drownings–these are invitations. Invitations to deeper water, where toes can’t touch bottom but grace can–and it holds.

One of my children is a human lie detector who is incapable of lying himself, and he’s teaching his younger brother all his tricks.

Life on the spectrum often brings with it a complete lack of deceit. I won’t say that The Kid has never uttered a falsehood, but I will say that when he has, he has immediately followed it up with an admission of truth. And he demands that level of truth from others: when the kids ask what we’re having for dinner and I tell them “platefuls of broccoli,” he immediately tells me that’s not true; when I say I’ll be “just a second” he corrects me, shouting, “Don’t say that! It’s always MORE THAN A SECOND!” And since I’ve taught him and Little Brother sarcasm, one of their favourite phrases is “thank you” in a sickly sweet tone. TK likes to follow it up with, “That was sarcasm.”

LB is slightly more adept at maintaining a mask than TK, but it falls too. When I ask him if he snuck a chocolate egg from the silver pitcher on the counter, he’ll shake his head momentarily before a grin starts pulling at the corners of his mouth and his signature right-cheek dimple–the one that showed up in the 3D ultrasound–appears. But TK, his face–and the rest of him–is an open book. There simply is no falseness there.

If you want to know how you truly look today, ask him–but be prepared not to love the answer. If you ask him how his day was when it was not good, don’t expect a “fine.” This kind of honesty can be brutal, and it has led to some blow-out fights over toenail clipping that I’d just as soon forget because I’m still apologising for them. But I’m starting to see the beauty of it, the freedom in its wake.

When I first got to Sydney and had a short-lived relationship with a therapist here, she commented that I didn’t look depressed; I was wearing makeup and regular clothes. I wanted to scream at her that I’d rather not look like an elderly gentleman when I take my kids to school. I’ve also heard “but you make jokes all the time” in response to admissions of my struggles, and I want to reply that anxiety doesn’t mean I don’t have a bitchin’ sense of humour. But these things, these efforts, are forms of masks (the only kind that some Americans like to wear, apparently). They are ways we protect ourselves from revealing too much of ourselves, to opening ourselves to scrutiny and judgment.

One of my friends recently wrote (in a book I contributed to, NBD) about how many of us are living like crabs in stock pots:

“Your day-to-day life is one of the slyest ways to lose sight of what matters. You do not need a family crisis to increase the temperature of your stock pot; you can do that all on your own. All you need is a free weekend and a to-do list. It feels good to cross each item out, to take care of business. But the thrill of your own competence easily becomes addictive and, as an over functioning crustacean, you lose your feeling for the waters you were meant for. Life in the boiling pot becomes the only life you know.”

I’ve thought about this a lot lately, about how the masks we wear are similar to the pots we can get stuck in; how we were meant for more freedom, for people who can handle our truths and for waters that are open. How constricted we can be by our own fears of what others think; how we often construct our own narratives or or need to cling to fairy tales/monarchies to feel better about how things are. Just clambering around in those pots while the mighty, unpredictable ocean waits.

“Can you imagine ever going back?” some friends asked us over dinner last weekend, and while they were talking about America, I think of it in other terms too. Can I imagine going back to who I was before New York, before motherhood, before autism, before Sydney? No, I cannot. Thank God. There is brutality here, and beauty. There is sorrow, and bliss. There are riptides, and there are cradling waves. Out here is the ocean. It is sacred, and true.

I was speaking to some friends recently about post-Covid anxiety. How this return to “normal” life (which, apparently in America, includes a return to mass shootings; don’t even get me started) brings with it all the unprocessed baggage from lockdowns and quarantines and social distancing. I confessed my own hesitation to jump back into the busyness–and business–of regular life, of cluttered diaries (that’s “calendars” in Australian) and packed schedules.

One of my friends leaned forward and looked me in the eye. “I’m not trying to problem-solve here,” she said, “but trust that you are not alone.”

It helped, this acknowledgement, this recognition. And I’ve suspected as much is true, as I’ve commiserated with people over the fact that theatre tickets now require us to sit right next to strangers once again; that we’ve entered the phase of reentry wherein we feel a nostalgia for those quiet hours spent trapped inside our own homes (but not for homeschool. Never for homeschool).

True to the principles of reentry, birthday parties have once again joined the group chat, and last weekend was The Kid’s turn. The party had been rescheduled from the day before, meant as it had been to take place outside and there were torrential downpours, but the next day’s weather wasn’t much better so we headed inside his friend’s apartment for the festivities.

On the way up the stairs, TK came to a halt beside me. “No,” he said. “I’m not going. Let’s go home.” No stranger to picking battles or to having social anxiety, I explained to him that I knew it was hard but that we had said we would be there, so we were going. And that I would (sigh) stay the whole time.

We went. And I sat on the couch like a creeper while he navigated his way through games (to which he RSVPed no), dancing (same), and photos (he actually gave in for that). He asked the parents why they had such a small apartment and how much the rent cost, and I tried to steer us away from those topics which I had clearly said in the car on the way over were off-limits. I was at turns mortified, sad, and frustrated. But also? I was wonderfully overwhelmed.

He is only ever himself, and those who know him know that, and accept him as he is. When I texted the mom a thank you (for the party and letting me crash it), she texted back that her daughter loves James and couldn’t imagine having a party without him. (Did I mention he was the only boy there?) These moments, they bring the tears but they also bring so much beauty that never would have happened without them. So many people who turn out to be Our People, more deeply so than any typical birthday experience would have revealed.

We did a role-playing game later called “Things We Can Say and Things We Should Just Think, or Say Only at Home” and after giving examples like “your house is lovely” or “why does your house smell so bad?”, Little Brother wanted to provide his own: “Why is your house a fucking house?” And this is how stories are born.

This afternoon, TK will get the highest award his school offers, a banner, and he told me last night that he’s a bit nervous. Then he grabbed a toy plane and called it the Feelings Plane and talked about how it was flying into nervous territory and I rejoiced in a victory, in this articulation of feelings that I didn’t master until, like, last year but that he is all over at age nine.

The sun came out today for the first time in over a week, and while the rest of us marvel at our improved moods, there are those around the state who have lost homes and livestock and so much. There is rejoicing and grieving. There is loss and gain. There is mortification and beauty. And as we sit in the school hall this afternoon watching TK stand proudly and nervously in front of his peers, I will remember that it all counts.

There are moments that the words don’t reach
There’s a grace too powerful to name
We push away what we can never understand
We push away the unimaginable

I have declared my hatred of camping in prose, verse, and rhyme for years now, but recently, despite knowing this, some friends invited our family along on their rustic getaways. We were actually welcomed on two different trips because all my friends want to see me suffer but since they were on consecutive weekends, we went with the friends who asked first (and, totally coincidentally, those whose plans included a glamping option). So it was that last weekend, the four of us (sorry, Kevin the Dog) drove an hour outside Sydney and set up shop for the weekend in the outdoors.

In short, we survived. Smelly and tired and in need of showers and another weekend to recover, but alive nonetheless. And it actually turned out to be a pretty magical time.

How could it not be, when along with the shared toilets, lack of attending to personal hygiene, gigantic lizards, and occasional meltdowns, there were campfires, champagne in plastic cups, barbecues, laser tag fights, and seamless blending of four families (that left The Kid, on Sunday morning, asking why “everyone” had to be in our tent). There were no devices; there was creek swimming; there was no makeup; no room for artifice; there were meandering walks and conversations. There was understanding.

When TK woke up both days and marched around our campsite giving off his signature voice alarm, there were smiles. There was one of his friends, in her sleepy half-consciousness, saying, “I love James’s positivity.” There was Little Brother “crushing” his three-years-older friend at soccer and talking about it still. There was laughter and good-natured ridicule. There was being seen, and known.

There was discomfort. There was TK holding it in until he couldn’t then erupting prior to laser tag. There was my own anxiety, kept in check by the presence of families besides our own but always reminding me of its presence in early-morning wake-ups and body tension. There were mosquito bites.

There was also seeing. There was getting to know myself and my own family better. When TK admitted that he was upset because he had counted on being on the red team, there was my awareness of all the discomfort that’d been tamped down to reach that point of explosion, and there was my chance to help others see that too. And my chance to see the way I do it myself. How he comes by it not just diagnostically, but honestly.

Because that is the purity of the neurodiverse: their honesty. Not this outdated lack-of-empathy BS but their, his, total immersion in empathy; this consuming feeling-it-all and having to learn what to do with that. And somehow, there is how I was recruited to be a teacher for that, I in all my own feeling-it-all-ness, the irony and anxiety and emotions all running deep, where things are most true.

Honest people reveal our insecurities; they reflect who we aren’t yet, what we aren’t yet. Every time TK smacks another adult’s ass and runs away, laughing, I watch for reactions at such wonderfully inappropriate behaviour and find that so many don’t know what to do with it; the discomfort is too great and there’s no space for it. But. There are those who have been given the space to find out who they are, and therefore are able to give that space to others. They laugh, they play, they ask questions. I’m becoming one of them, I hope. I know.

Lest I forget, though, my children are not me. They are a mysterious mix of The Husband, and me, and another magical element called Themselves, and I’m reminded of this every time LB stands up proudly in front of his class to tell a joke, or when TK announces to TH on a walk, “I love interacting with people,” and I think, who are you?

My friend tells me that on the way home from camping, her daughter, apropos of nothing, said that whoever ends up with TK is going to be so lucky. I look at him, and at LB, and I think about how, for now, that person is me. Who are you? I think again, in the quiet of camp and the other still moments life provides, in the midst of discomfort and anxiety and the hard and the true, and the answer comes back in each moment, that that’s what we’re finding out.

Fifteen years ago, I walked into my counselor’s office for one of our weekly sessions and opened by telling him, “I feel like a loser.” Over the next hour, we talked through what was going on in my life to lead to this utterance, and by the end of the hour he had gently steered me to the realization that the derogatory term I’d assigned myself belied a deeper truth: I was experiencing loss that was hacking away at my heart, and I didn’t know what to do with it.

No one had died. Nothing monumental had happened. Rather, it was more about things that weren’t happening. But the pain was real, and over the next decade and a half (and still), he taught me to recognize the space between what things are and what they should be, and to grieve it. 

Read the rest over at Mockingbird!

I need to remember this.

It’s happened before: weeks after school has started back, once the kids are settled and no longer crying at drop-off or overtired at pick-up, when things seem to have all calmed down and the sailing is smooth…this is when my brain clicks out of Survival Mode and switches to High-Anxiety Mode. Also known as Exhaustion Mode. Also known as Struggling for No Apparent Reason Mode.

But there is a reason, isn’t there? There always is. There is brain chemistry, and hormones, and hypersensitivity, and this year, there is sensory overload after a year of relative quiet. There is a vital but triggering interview that shows that #starsandduchesses are #justlikeus! There is the latent that rises to the surface once the kids are sorted. There is anxiety and depression, and they always. Come. Back.

Or maybe just never leave. Constant companions, and I prefer to work alone, thank you. But the depression that is expressed as anxiety, and the anxiety that erupts as anger, they are not medicated or meditated or prayed away–that’s not how this works. They are there–they are managed, but they are there.

Also there? The Husband, the children, the dog, who never leave me!…and also never leave me. There are the dog’s snores waking me in the night, the sound of little feet padding up to my bed, the narration that persists from sunup to sundown. There is the boys’ relentless fighting and loyalty. Their relentless need despite my best-laid plans to procure small containers so they can make their own breakfast and not contend with my barely-concealed rage over having to make a tenth snack. The hours that fly by only to prove there are not enough of them.

When it hits–this prickliness, this inordinate frustration, this anxiety and depression–I know it now. I know it as separate to my soul, separate to circumstances, separate to reason. I know, now (#thankstherapy) about neurological regulation and integration. I know tricks and strategies. I know me.

But sometimes I need to see myself through different eyes. The way I go through photos on my phone and see the ones the boys have taken: the videos of adults’ conversations, the still-lifes of cars, the close-ups of faces. The way, when I sneak into Little Brother’s room to give him a goodnight kiss after putting The Kid to bed, he surprises me by being awake and grinning at me in the dark, a secret for just the two of us. The way he calls me “the loveliest mommy,” and how TK says I’m the best mom he could ever have, and I nearly choke on laughter and tears because God help us but somehow it’s still true–somehow, because of patterns of forgiveness and grace.

I’ve been diving into nostalgia lately because why not, and when Felicity said it she was talking about New York which I also feel, but then it sort of works across life: “I swear, when you least expect it this city is so beautiful. You could never describe it to someone who wasn’t here.”

I’m trying to describe my city, how it’s hard and exhausting and beautiful. How it’s joy and grief and all the things. How it will always be complicated, how it will always be “a thing passing strange to me, that the healing hand should also wield the sword.” How all of life comes wrapped up together, connected. How the hardest things to say out loud somehow come pouring out of a keyboard. How this anxiety, this “flaw,” brings with it an ability to so deeply feel as to see what wasn’t seen without it: the song on the way to school that makes me cry, the verse that tells me how I am seen.

“Would you love me more than God does if you could?” LB asks me as he’s drifting off to sleep, and of course I tell him yes, even as I know that the grace that holds us both is bigger than either of us can imagine. That these are the eyes through which we are seen.

I need to remember this.