The Husband has been feeling better and, with his improvement, has put us on a schedule (timetable if you’re Australian/nasty).

I rolled my eyes the first morning this occurred, as I came downstairs and saw that he was at the kitchen counter instead of behind the bathroom door. He was talking to the boys about Our Day, and I thought to myself how ridiculous it was to have “standards” during the holidays and how breezy I am and how we should all just RELAX.

It turns out that the schedule has kind of saved us.

Gone are the screen-filled days of my tenure and TH’s sickness, the meandering hours with rare, pop-up, complained-about activities like “book-reading” that punctuated the otherwise Roblox-dominated hours. Now the kids are thriving in their workouts and soccer games and (eye-roll/gasp combo) maths sessions with Dad.

And I’m sitting here writing this, so…we all win?

I’ve discovered over the last near-decade that I’m the same thing a friend recently called herself–A Lazy Parent. I do not like to craft, I shudder when the kids want to “help” me bake, and wrestling is a trauma trigger. I have panic attacks during homeschool sessions. If it’s not quiet reading on the couch or, even better, Netflix piled on the bed, I start to feel an itchy urge for my phone. I like to read books about parenting. Parenting itself? It’s a mixed bag.

To quote a friend: “I DON’T WANT TO FUCKING ‘WATCH THIS’ ANYMORE TODAY.”

I love my kids desperately, am consumed with their healthy development and well-being, and if I have to sit through another dinosaur video I may jump off a cliff. All these things are not mutually exclusive; it’s just complicated, being more than one thing. Having kids and a husband who are more than one thing.

The Kid doesn’t love eye contact, but Little Brother positively thrives on someone (me) staring deeply into his eyes every time we speak. This same LB would climb inside my skin if he could, but settles for tangling himself around me like a pretzel, while TK is happy to study his rock collection on the other side of the room without any physical contact for hours (#livingthedream). And TH can’t cook, and is just learning to clean, but his presence brings the boys to life (and his milkshake, to the yard), and he saves me daily in all the ways I didn’t ask for or know I needed.

You learn these things about each other when you move across the world together, when you survive lockdown together, when you get through the holidays together. You learn the twists and turns of each others’ personalities, and flaws, and forgivenesses.

You learn through the redemptive conversations that my therapist mentioned this week–the ones that happen even more often when you’re stuck together and you know your own need for grace–that life is not a straight line but a curving, doubling-back and shooting-forward one, which is much more chaotic and beautiful. You learn that there are parts of you that are brought to life by your family’s mercies (and parts that will likely die if your kid asks you to “watch him watching this video” one more time). You learn that Christmas lasts longer than a day, and not just because you’re too lazy to take the tree down, but because of what it means.

And you learn that sometimes the too-close one wants space, and sometimes the one who doesn’t like eye contact looks so deeply into yours that you swear he can see your soul.

You learn to be surprised, and to see the surprises not as weapons formed against you but as gifts of grace that call you to be more than you were–and then make you into just that.

Christmas is pressing on me.

What I mean is that the pressure of Christmas is getting to me, but upon closer examination (and, as an introspective, navel-gazing type, I love closer examinations, though I need reading glasses for them these days) I can see that I’m the one creating the pressure, grasping Christmas with both hands and pulling it to myself then complaining that it’s all too much.

I remember Christmases filled with presents, family, and joy. The space just before Christmas, on Christmas Eve (the holiest night of the year, IMHO), became a sacred and still one, pregnant with anticipation. Appropriately, I suppose.

Now I want to recreate that magic and sacredness for The Kid and Little Brother (and even Kevin the Dog, about whom I just stressed as I came home from The Final Shop, fretting over whether the four bags of treats I bought for his stocking would be enough to make him happy. Someone help me). And seeing as how, the last few years, we’ve dragged them all over the globe at Christmastime, and spent most of our Christmas Eves in hotel rooms, the sacredness and stillness have been sorely lacking.

But this year we will wake up in our own home. To our own tree. And they will run down their own stairs, and I want the scene that greets them to be…everything.

It won’t be, of course. Like the hot chocolate LB has been begging to have for breakfast, it will disappoint in one way or another, will be something other than expected in some manner. Expectations are just unfulfilled disappointments, right? But that hasn’t stopped me from trying.

Trying, and tiring.

The week before Christmas that began with surgery has continued with sickness: The Husband’s, and that of a gastric variety, which has left me resentful of the shared-load-changed-to-my-load, and thinking things (or possibly saying them under my breath) like “Two C-sections and I was up the next day, nobody gave ME a break” or “Must be nice to not have to parent with the flu, I WOULDN’T KNOW.” I’ve been resentful and bitter and exhausted, and at times the mood has been…tense.

Oh, and also? We’ve been in lockdown. Again. Because an Australian version of a COVID outbreak is a dozen cases, and an Australian response to such an outbreak is swift and, hopefully, effective.

It’s sort of like being stuck in a hotel room.

So here I am, face-to-face with all my limitations and those of the world around me, and isn’t that the perfect time for Christmas to show up and tell me that I can’t make it happen? Because Christmas, like grace, happens on its own and in its own way and through no effort of mine–the parts of it that matter most, at least. And they happen better.

Because scattered throughout the limitations are the unforced moments of magic: the piling up of the four of us in one bed to watch a Christmas movie; the proclamation by LB that “Jesus looks like a girl but she’s a man;” the initially-impromptu-but-now-oft-repeated water balloon attack on the boys; the moments I get to sneak away downstairs with a glass of wine and watch White Christmas. And, you know, whatever else is in store…she wrote, as her husband drove to the doctor’s office to drop off a shit sample.

I’ve found myself hanging by a thread and come to realise that I don’t have to hang because I am carried by Christmas. I come with my limitations, and it comes with its grace. With its unexpectedness. This Christmas will not look like the others–it wasn’t meant to.

And so we wait, with trepidation and anticipation, in grief and and love, to find out what that means.

I’m not a big fan of the word lucky. Believing as I do in a divine hand in our stories, I find that luck leaves it all a bit too anonymous and chance-y. But The Kid likes to describe himself as lucky, and who am I to disagree with that?

“I’m so lucky,” he said the other day after we dropped Little Brother off at school. “I get to stay home and have a surgery instead of go to school today.” Wouldn’t have been how I narrated it, but he was right on the logistics at least: he was staying home, and he was having a (minor) surgery: a tongue-tie release, his second.

Apparently the absence of a move and trans-world flights this year left some empty spots in our schedule, so The Husband decided to leave his company of a decade for a new job, and I decided to finally book TK in for what his speech therapist has been recommending for months/years, this tongue clipping. On the day he had it, the rest of the school went on excursions: LB with the younger kids to a cinema and park picnic, and the older kids, minus TK, to a local water-slide park (site of a couple of recent existential crises/birthday parties).

So he was okay with missing the slides and staying home. Okay, at least, until the fasting went on too long and the waiting rooms were too numerous and, finally, the mask came for him as I held his hands in the operating room. He fought it, and I held him, in that counter-intuitive thing we do as mothers, parents, humans: hurting to heal.

It sucks.

And, not for nothing, it’s always harder, these choices we have to enforce, at this time of year: this month when school is ending and presents are to be distributed among teachers and friends and family and emotions, high and low, are meant to be given space, and this season of Advent that means waiting turns into the busiest, somehow, of them all.

And mothers get so much of the brunt of it.

There is a pile of Christmas presents for the boys in my closet that I’ve been collecting for weeks or months or decades, not sure which, and I’ll need to go through them with TH one of these days so he’ll know what they got (that was always the joke on Christmas at my house growing up–The Dad would ask what we got). So to prevent that stumbling-in, wild-eyed, confused, “how did I get here and who are these people?” look of TH’s that makes me want to go on a murderous rampage, we’ll catalogue the gifts together. Hopefully.*

This is after the distribution of presents at the boys’ school this morning, a chaotic, rain-soaked affair that skirted (broke) Covid recommendations and left me sweating in 90% humidity, ready for a drink at 9 am. After the online orders sent to family back home that we haven’t seen in a year, after TK’s (very small) birthday party in a seizure-inducing mall arcade with a grocery-store cake (when I go half-ass, I go full half-ass). After a year that has not been quite as busy but somehow still busy enough.

After the surgery, the holding him down and the post-anaesthesia grumpiness and the five hours at the hospital, just me and him. After the resentment that I’m always the one to do these things, to bear these loads.

Then I get glimpses.

I read about the first Christmas and what could easily be written off as fairy tale or credulity befitting another age, this girl’s acceptance of an impossible message, a birth and calling defying reason, and I find that her story befits me because I can see myself, however small, within it: facing impossible moments, mine in an operating room rather than a stable, put-upon by a divine writer whose plan is hard and unexpected and, eventually and at glimpses, wonderful.

“You get to come with me,” TK said as we walked, hands clasped, through another hospital, to another operating room. “You get to see the room too.”

And I do. I have to, and I get to, see so many things I wouldn’t have, and sometimes those two words feel very far apart. But sometimes they don’t, and an operating room can be a chapel, an operating table can be an altar, and I am bent beside it, in this season that makes no sense but somehow also, completely, does.

*Jason is a great dad and husband, blah blah blah, but this look is real and y’all know it.

Is there anything more mind-bendingly contradictory than Christmas shopping in the middle of summer as “Winter Wonderland” plays in the background of the toy store?

This is our life now, and this is our Christmas this year: staying put in the sweltering Sydney heat, waking up in our own beds (read: our own bed, as the kids will assuredly end up in ours, with the dog on the floor next to us all) instead of in a hotel, running down our own stairs to our own tree, half a world away from the place where this happened last.

It is crazy, and beautiful, and makes no sense, and–like so much else in our story–this is how I know it is right and true.

Tomorrow (today, when you’re reading this) is The Kid’s ninth birthday, nearly a decade of him, of being a mother. Impossible and nonsensical and true. Last weekend, though, we went to someone else’s birthday party, and as is his custom, he rued going. And so did I, with his constant query–Why–from the backseat, but I know that if he and I only ever left the house when we wanted to, we would never leave it. We were great at lockdown, not so much at regular life, and so I forced us both to attend a celebration to which we had been generously invited.

It was a soccer party, so we watched. We sat together, argued, observed, negotiated, expressed our gratitude, and left. I could feel his anxiety lift as we climbed into the car, and I knew that for him–just like for me–it’s not about not caring, but about caring too much, about being overwhelmed too easily, about feeling all the feelings. And this is why I push him, why I push myself, with compromises and limits and boundaries in place to keep us safe, but push nonetheless: to show us both that we can do hard things.

And then we can come home.

And, as always, the points of grace in it all: expressions of understanding, waves he gives his friends and the way they interrupt their rough play to wave back, as though he could even be their point of grace in the midst of a mayhem he’d rather avoid. What a gift he is, has been for nearly a decade.

And Little Brother? Well, he had a playdate on the weekend that was just all kinds of too easy, and as I heard him play Mario Kart downstairs with his friend, TK joining them to–don’t I love it–watch, I wondered what I should be doing? How I should be facilitating? And grace whispered, “Stop. Enjoy.” So I did. I read, and listened to Christmas music, and just sat. At the party, my place was on a bench beside TK. At the playdate, it was on the couch by myself.

We keep finding our places.

Even as I look for kitchen gadgets shipped over from America and hidden in the backs of drawers, or try to hunt down the still-missing beloved Betty Crocker Cooky Book from YM so I can get my bake on, or Annie Dillard’s A Writing Life that hasn’t materialised from the boxes that arrived a year ago, we find so much else: we find ourselves on the street in front of our house meeting neighbours at a Christmas party, the kids eating fairy bread and The Husband and me doing our best impression of sociable people and the guy who lives next door returning Kevin to us (“Kev” to all the neighbours) after he’s snuck out.

The kids find themselves in a beloved school, a second home of many, among friends who truly know them. I find myself in an online group that started as a joke–Suburban Housewives Against Trump–but has somehow turned into a joyful encouragement over the last few months. TH finds himself headed toward a new job, Sydney-based. I find myself running alongside the water, in awe of how we got here. That we got here. To our place.

I almost died last weekend.

Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But it is what I sent in a text to The Husband after I attempted an ocean swim and barely made it out alive. I’ve been doing “ocean” swims for awhile now, calling them that at least, even though they’ve occurred in the water on relatively calm harbour beaches where I can swim parallel to, and not far from, the shore.

But I’ve been wanting to try on more of a challenge, so when a friend offered her husband to accompany me on my maiden voyage from Manly to Shelly Beach–a trek through surf-level waves and (harmless) shark-populated waters–I assented, and we gathered there Sunday morning for a new kind of church. The kind where you almost die but then survive, and get gratitude and a blog post out of it.

The water was choppy, and my guide told me that if I could make the swim on this day, I could make it any day. Well, I’ve lived in New York and therefore can make it anywhere but this apparently does not include the Manly to Shelly swim because I did not make it. Less than halfway through, battered by waves and panicking breathlessly, I told my now-rescuer that I wanted to turn around and also, could I hold his hand the whole way back LIKE A SMALL CHILD?

It was humiliating, naturally, but also, these are friends who have seen me in bad shape before (and I’ve returned the favour) so I knew it would live on as a comedic memory in our shared history. But more than humiliating, it was scary. And I think it’s helpful to, every now and then, be reminded of how easy it is to sink, to drown, to die, if only to be simultaneously reminded of our need, always, to be rescued.

This same friend enlisted her daughter, who has a sewing machine, to rescue me when my volunteering to stitch an accessory onto the kindergarteners’ dance costumes met with a dead end (I remembered that I can’t sew, and when I try, I want to kill everyone around me). TH has rescued me countless times, most recently by not losing it when I got a speeding ticket in a school zone like I definitely would have if the roles were reversed (or at the very least I would have harangued him mercilessly, per what a friend and I recently rued as both our husbands’ bad luck in marrying people not nearly as nice as they are). My children rescue me with their forgiveness on the daily (one morning last week in the getting-ready-for-school madness, aka My Worst Self Come to Life at Eight O’Clock Every Day, Little Brother told TH in the face of his harmless ribbing of me to “stop judging Mom–she’s doing her best”).

We have to sink to know we need help, and the best way to be rescued is to need help in the first place. And recognising we need help? Recognising we’re sinking? It happens when we give up. When we allow ourselves to look around and see that darkness is enveloping us, and letting ourselves feel that: feel the grief of not seeing family at the holidays rather than wiping it away with a plane ticket; feel the grief of the still-wounded Inner Child and taking her to therapy; feel the insufficiency of our own efforts to Just Be Better and recognise that in that insufficiency is where we meet rescue. Forgiveness. Grace.

Which, metaphorically or if you’re really lucky (dumb), looks like a hand pulling your ass to shore.

I don’t like mandates. Parties that have forced games? No thank you. Ice breakers at training or social events? Gross. Conversations proctored with required input? Even worse than small talk.

I also don’t like (yes, I’m talking about things I don’t like right now; I never said this blog was a bastion of positivity) bullshit holidays. International Men’s Day, for example, can kiss my ass. Valentine’s Day is just commercialism on steroids. And Thanksgiving? Well let’s ask Native Americans how they feel about that.

I do a gratitude journal daily, not because someone told me to (that was the reason when I was younger) but for the more self-motivated reason that it’s been proven good for mental health, and, along with Lexapro, I need that kind of help. In the process, I’ve learned that Thanksgiving can be just a fun time to stuff my face if I’m already acquainted with gratitude, because here’s the secret of it: it’s not an attitude, like needlepointed throw pillows may have you believe, but a way of, simply, looking. Gratitude is looking. You heard it here.

Last weekend we had three other families over to celebrate not colonialism, but food with us, and in the process started some traditions: pelting the kids with water balloons, allowing them to get us back with water guns (so American!), and passing turkey around an outdoor table while the men talked about I-don’t-know-what and the women discussed The Crown. It was wonderful.

There was no Macy’s parade, no dog show, no dressing/stuffing even (!), but there was friendship and home, and I didn’t throw up this year. And that’s a lot.

It turns out that, as previously discussed, there is always a lot. And sometimes that’s oppressive. But this week it’s been pretty gorgeous.

There’s been my solo ride on the Manly Ferry to Circular Quay, where I met girlfriends at the Opera House for a play.

There’s been the loss of Little Brother’s first tooth, a milestone he allowed me to assist, and his pride afterward.

There was the afternoon I collected the boys early and one of The Kid’s classmates said to me, “You’re picking up the best kid in school. James is so kind.”

There was the orthodontic evaluation that I was anxious over but that TK charmed his way through, and afterward the three of us got ice cream and walked on the beach.

There is the hope instilled by a new political beginning, by the breathing room made possible by an impending absence of vitriol and hatred coming from leadership.

There are the countless moments of home here, of going from place to place with a real sense of belonging: friends’ homes, the boys’ school, knowing people and being known, and while the world is in flux this is a gift indeed.

I don’t have to be grateful. I am, however, free to be. And why not? I mean, just look.

I also knew that the way forward wasn’t any less complicated, but no one ever promised me less complication. If anything, it’s always going to become more complicated. Better but more. Better and more. –R. Eric Thomas, Here For It

Three years ago, my brother-friend was in Sydney from New York and we decided the timing was perfect to celebrate with Thanksgiving at my house. He brought a friend and I invited some, and we got to work on the food: he did everything, and I did the turkey–my first. It was a breast (that’s what she said). And it was good.

The evening ended in kid tears and an explosion of red wine from my mouth in my bathroom that rendered it worthy of crime-scene status, but overall it was a success. So now, three years later and in a home we own, I thought it would be a good idea to have a couple of friends over and try again. I even set my sights higher (when I couldn’t find a turkey breast at the grocery store) and decided to go whole-hog or, in this case, whole-turkey. I bought the bird and brought it home for a practice run on Saturday.

It did NOT GO WELL. Both of the boys were gagging as I reached inside “the hole” looking for all the crap that’s supposed to be in there, and trying to tie the bitch’s legs together and push the wings underneath it was a comedy of errors that was not funny at all. Finally, I shoved the thing into the oven. After a couple of hours, I found that somebody lied on the packaging because when The Husband cut into it, that bird was. not. done.

All the while, the soundtrack for this endeavour was a party in the backyard of our neighbours’ house (a small, under-20-in-attendance affair because we’re actually trying to not get Covid here) celebrating the daughter’s impending graduation. I saw the twinkle lights and heard the music and I felt a deep, seething hatred for all of it. For all of those young people with their lives and choices ahead of them. For their dearth of responsibilities and their long, untrodden pathways. All while I kept checking on a nasty turkey that would not cook as my children screamed at me to make them stop looking at it and the dog pissed in the corner.

Enjoy it for now, fuckers, I thought as I wiped urine off the floor and shoved a thermometer in some poultry tit.

We threw the turkey out. After drowning my sorrows in a few glasses of red (a theme) and Pride and Prejudice, I slept fitfully among nightmares of turkey. The next morning I panic-texted an American friend, who told me to just order a roasted chicken from a nearby place, and I breathed again. Then I ruefully cleaned toilets as Christmas music played in the background, Mariah attempting to cheer me out of my suburban ennui, this dead-end existence of those whose every dream has come true.

Seriously. They have. I’ve got the husband, the house, the two boys and the dog. We can walk five minutes to the beach. The Long Orange Nightmare is almost over. Life is good! It is also, well, still life.

And there is a lot of life here. There is the turkey breast I ended up finding and cooking last night that smelled and tastes amazing–and there’s the roasting pan I have to clean after. There are the swims I get to have in the ocean every week–and the shoulder pain I’m staving off with physiotherapy. There’s the gloriously unique view of the world from the spectrum–and the resistance to change that comes with it. There’s the moment with the dance teacher before school when she tells me how much joy The Kid brings to her class–and there’s the moment enfolded in it, when Little Brother says hi to her, with a look on his face that is desperate to be acknowledged too (he was).

There was the scarcity of the loaves and fishes to start with, and the twelve extra baskets left over after, and I know I would have been the one wondering why Mr. “Son of God” couldn’t have estimated more accurately because WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO WITH ALL THIS EXTRA FISH WHEN THERE ARE NO BINS ANYWHERE NEARBY?

There is so much. Ugh. There is so much. Wow.

long live our avoidance
of the quadrillion probabilities
of our non-existence

i am not who i was
i am not going to be who i was going to be
you changed all that

you are not who you were
you are not going to be who you were going to be
i changed all that

what is, is… and cannot at the same time, not be.
what was, was… and cannot,
not have been. so you see my love

we are us
we are us now and we shall never have been
not us.

who are we going to be?
we are going to be who we never would have been
without each other.

–Joseph Pintauro

Last night, the four of us–excuse me, the five of us–walked to the park around the corner from our house, as we’ve been doing nearly nightly since we got the dog. It’s a rectangular space between two rows of houses, with grass on either side and a small playground in the middle. The boys (all three of them) love to dart past the two massive jacarandas marking the space’s unofficial entrance and toward the park, beating us there every time. So far, we’ve had this area to ourselves, but last night a group of kids from two families were there with one parent each.

I watched my (human) boys as they reacted to this new blood in their unique ways: Little Brother, arms crossed, circled the boy who looked about his age, staring him up and down before finally asking him–in the modulated, deeper voice he uses when he’s trying to meet/impress someone new–if he wanted to play tip. The Kid stuck close to me but warmed up gradually, eventually joining the game, his characteristic sign of excitement on display: mouth to hand, and continuous laughter.

And I watched the other kids. In particular, I saw one girl staring at TK, studying him as I, always, fruitlessly, wondered what was on her mind. I wondered if she was appraising him as different or just noticing him as a person. Then I watched as her face broke out into a grin. This is, commonly, the effect he has on people: expressions of warmth. But you never know. And I reside so often in that space of not knowing, of waiting for reactions to the slight differences that play into making him, him. Into making me, me.

When the other kids had to leave, mine reacted each in their own way again. LB waved, saying, “Goodbye! If I see you again I’ll be very happy!” And TK turned to me, saying, “They were so much fun!”

And our canine companion? He sniffed around the whole area, occasionally chasing sticks and trying to jump up on kids.

They each have their own way, and part of the trickiness of parenting is making space for them to be who they’re made to be while also helping them navigate the world without working against themselves. So I’m left wondering if I should work on getting TK not to do the hand-to-mouth thing, because it looks a bit different but we all have things we do to help calm ourselves down: you bite your nails, I pick my nose, etc. And I try to figure out how to preserve LB’s accessibility and desire for company while teaching him to stand up for himself in a crowd.

Generally, though, I feel we don’t make enough room for the different and unique. For what shines about each of us before we reassess it as something that needs to be dulled down to conformity.

Kevin the Dog has a short tail with a hairless patch on it. The breeder sent us photos of this anomaly before we brought him home, which we showed to the vet to make sure we weren’t being scammed, and now we field questions about it by answering that he was just born with it: “it’s his thing.” LB often talks about the “ear surgery” (tubes) he had, equating it to the spinal surgery TK endured, as being “his thing.” And recently, TK asked me to take a photo of the scar on his neck because he wanted to see up-close what it looked like. His thing.

And the other day, they both ran out of the school gate at pick-up bursting with the news that one of their friends had just been diagnosed with colour-blindness. For a moment I considered a parallel universe where they hadn’t been raised with an understanding of how what is different can be damn glorious, where this development was “weird,” then I reverted back to reality, in which we were all saying how cool it is that he sees colours in his own way and can tell us about it.

The Aussies say with regularity a phrase that Americans don’t use as much: “if it suits.” It goes beyond whether you like or want something and into the realm of whether it fits. And I’m finding, thanks to my children and our home here and grace, that all sorts of things suit me that I never expected or considered.

This morning, I swam in the warming ocean as the wind whipped the water from its original calm state. I started to feel like a seal floundering to find purchase on a rock, whipped about myself, then for a few minutes something clicked and I was moving with the water, not against it, hearing the strains of mermaid music in my head, like I was made for this.

I should know, after all these years inside my own mind. I should know that a week of rose-smelling and gratitude moments and cozy joy would be followed by this week. This week of anger, of ruing my own station in life, of walking across the Harbour Bridge and wondering what a fall from that height would feel like.

Do not be alarmed: these are just the ramblings of a mind that deals in extremes (in case you’re new here or just prone to panicking. What’s that like?). My highs are high and my lows are low, and Lexapro helps even them out but that still only gets them within several standard deviations of normal (a word I’m growing convinced does not need to exist due to lack of evidence).

Last week, I dropped the boys off at the gate one morning and stayed, as I always do, to creepily watch them through the trees. They ran off to their classes, as they always do, then ran back out and met in the middle of the playground: The Kid in his baseball cap with the neck-protecting fabric panel, Little Brother with his flouncy cap because he lost the baseball cap earlier this year and I Just Can’t Even. I watched as they cased the joint, walking around and looking for their friends and talking, and the sight of the two of them together like that–brothers on an ordinary day, sharing life–washed over me in a flood of joy. I remembered when they were babies, I imagined them as adults, I thought about how lucky (#blessed) they are to have each other and we, them. And I floated away.

Later that week, LB grabbed a blanket, sat on the couch, and requested for us all to join him. And we did, for a solid five minutes–a bit of a record considering there are two anxious types among us–and even the dog joined on the floor beneath us, and as I felt their warmth around me and the safe harbour that is our family, I felt overcome again with joy.

Then this week happened.

I’m thinking about looking into my diet, and hormones, but really? I think this is just me. Forty-three years and therapy tell me so. I feel all the things, deeply, and this can seem like a curse which, when grace is involved, turns into the same thing as a blessing. Cut to me gritting my teeth through parenting and coming off the Harbour Bridge by foot…barely.

But then, cut back to spending an hour of Election Day on the beach, walking and swimming in the sun. To chance encounters with like-minded friends on the path outside school and the ensuing laughs. To finally getting this in the mail the day before the election because coincidences are God’s way of remaining anonymous. To, in a year nearly devoid of celebrations, a weekend with three of them for Halloween (even though LB hijacked one of them into a birthday celebration for himself).

I ride all of these like the waves they are to my super-sensitive heart, which often leaves me more windblown and exhausted than the next guy. But would I trade it?

There are people who can’t even cry over shit that deserves to be cried over because of their distance from their own feelings. As I put it to a friend–so profoundly I thought (joke’s on her; I stole it from my therapist)–I really that believe that most people’s inability to grieve well causes so many of society’s problems. People aren’t comfortable in that uncertain space, that tension between knowing and not knowing, that proximity to depth of emotion that renders us fully aware of our lack of control. I’m trying to teach the kids, and myself, that this is where life and grace show up the most.

That hiding your emotion doesn’t make you more brave, but less human. And also, less protected. And more vulnerable. Which makes me hope, and believe, that someone beyond me is keeping us all safe.

So I’m writing this on Election Day, before we know what’s going to happen, from that tension blown up a thousand times and turned up a hundred degrees. I write it from my children’s childhoods, before we know “how they’re going to turn out” and “if they end up happy” and what all that will look like. I write it from the month before Christmas, when we’re looking for someone to show up and save us from this mess and that someone shows up as a crying baby?!

Whether you believe that last part or not, you have to admit it would make a pretty good twist. And I’m all about twist endings that actually turn out to be beginnings.

I feel like I’ve been writing protectively lately.

What I mean is that, when the central theme of one’s writing, of one’s life, is one thing–which, for me, is grace–it can be easy to slip into autopilot: packaging and repackaging the story tidily and on-point, without delving deeper into the darker parts of the chapters. Of myself.

I mean, I write for a website called Mockingbird, so named because that’s what we do: tell and retell the message of grace, over and over. So…it’s kind of my (ugh) brand? When I fall into rote retelling, though, it’s not because of the limitations of the message, but of the messenger.

Which is not to say that I’ve written anything untrue or not from-the-heart. Just that there are deeper levels to my heart, and that I’ve fallen lately into keeping them shrouded in secrecy. Most people do this–it’s human nature. Most people don’t, after all, have a blog where they (over)share every detail of their lives. But I do, because it bursts within me if I don’t, and because writing is my therapy and oxygen, and because stories are my life, and I know that shame only needs a lack of light to grow–so when I’m not sharing, or at least examining those dark spots, there can be hell to pay.

All of this has a point, and it is this: on Saturday I told The Kid that he was embarrassing me.

It was a rough morning, and for two people struggling with anxiety, it was even rougher. TK is navigating a year of changes, of unpredictability. We all are, but his year has been particularly discombobulating, and he grasps for control wherever he can (he comes by that honestly). And “wherever he can” usually means in the places and ways that pierce my own sensitivities: in moans and groans, in shouts and demands, in public and private, in rule-making and gauntlet-throwing.

On this particular morning, we had a full day in front of us: tennis lesson and two birthday parties. The second one was Little Brother’s, which ended up being cancelled due to weather and shape-shifted into something different but still existent. The first was a waterslide park party for a friend.

He did not want to go to tennis or the waterpark. And he made this clear with a shitty attitude compounded by brain differences that often make it feel impossible for me to understand what, exactly, he is experiencing. So I walk into these moments feelings underprepared and unequipped, which is really how we walk into every moment but we’re usually able to gird and fool ourselves into thinking otherwise.

But on this day, just like he was feeling All the Stuff, I was too, and my fuse was…nonexistent. After a tennis lesson filled with great shots but incessant moans, we came home and put on his swimmers, each step punctuated with wails of not wanting to go. But we had committed, and these were friends–his and mine–and it felt like a battle that was important to choose.

Which meant that, ten minutes before the party started, he and I were in tears on the floor and I was telling The Husband that I couldn’t do this anymore, not for one more second, that it was all too hard, and TK asked why he had to go with me, and I told him that he could not be negative like this in front of his friend or it would hurt her feelings and embarrass me.

I regret that choice of words so deeply. I know how close embarrassment and shame lie on the feelings spectrum, and if there’s one thing I want to spare my kids–to teach them to spare themselves–it’s unwarranted shame; walking through the world as though they have to apologise for being themselves. I lived with that setup for way too long and I am not looking to bequeath it to them, not now or ever.

Somehow we managed to get into the car, and on the way I breathed, and told him, in calmer and more measured tones, why we were doing this and how we would do it. How we would do it together. He wasn’t hearing any of it. The behemoth of the awaiting social interaction hung too heavily.

We arrived at the waterpark and stood outside, in view of the party, for one final conversation. We negotiated and compromised. We summarised. Two of the dads came out because they are kind and wanted to help. We all went in.

Over the next forty-five minutes–because I am a person who leaves parties early and now I have a kid who does too and this is okay–I talked to park employees and we figured out a way for TK to go up to the slide with me and go down it with an employee. Twice. I got a picture. He got a party bag. And in that bag was the coolest, most perfect-for-him toy: a clear bouncy ball filled with sparkles, bubbles, a rocket, and the moon. He was elated. I learned how to unclench and breathe deeply again.

“You can do hard things,” I told him, and for good measure I revised my earlier comments. “You don’t embarrass me, you make me so proud.” I said this so many times he rolled his eyes. And smiled.

There’s all this exhaustion that comes with avoiding shame by pretending. TK has no time for that nonsense, but I seem to have all the time in the world, showing my worst self to my family and pulling it together so that I meet school drop-off and pickup with a warm smile and a few jokes even though I was seething seconds earlier. Shame is a place to visit, and then get the hell out of: it reveals to me the wrong thing I’ve been holding too tightly–my pride, my appearance–and what I can get instead if I let it go. A sparkly toy, a day with my boy, a story to tell and retell, and a smile–and grace–that never gets old.