We’re one of a kind, no category

Too many years lost in his story

We’re free to take our crowning glory

The last live performance I saw before the lockdown in March–the last time I ventured through the doors of the Opera House–was with two friends for the show Six. I had little to no expectations, having read no reviews of the show from London or New York; I just knew that if Philippa Gregory and Hilary Mantel had not managed to quench my appetite for Tudor drama over their thousands of pages, that I’d sure as hell be able to sit still for an hour to watch a musical starring the half-dozen ex-wives.

I did, glass of champagne in hand and friends by my side, and the story and show have endured well past that night, thanks to the soundtrack’s inclusion on Amazon music and its accompaniment to many of my runs since March. I listened to the women’s anthems on repeat so often that it took awhile for me to finally get to the finale: a rousing revisionist history that celebrated the women’s spirits and all they could–maybe should–have been.

It made me cry, the what-if, could-have-been of it all, the unfairness of six women’s stories being lost in one man’s. It made me think of how often I’ve defined my life, myself, by others, polling for opinions rather than sitting still and listening to my own inner spirit; looking for a role or title to bestow the meaning I crave; waiting for a relationship to fulfill me or a project to bring me to life.

Now I know what is true: that there is a grace big enough, loving enough, to write us not as footnotes to someone else’s story or as a hesitating, ellipsis-laden, brief mention in time, but to write a story for each of us, all of these individual circles growing outward and bumping into others, sometimes coalescing, defined by all this becoming that contributes to the greater picture. And each of us needs space for that becoming.

It’s not lost on me that two of the central relationships of my life–my connection to each of my kids–is meant to free them of a need to be defined by me or our family; that we are their home now, and their launching pad eventually, and then, God willing, their lives will include but grow beyond us. That it’s my job to teach them not to need me one day as much as they do today.

In that vein, I toured a high school last week and imagined them there. I imagined legs even longer than they are now, histories more detailed, stories bigger, independence greater. I sat in an office with a registrar and engaged in that lifelong battle I’ve had with self-consciousness, and caught myself wondering if I was behaving appropriately, asking the right questions, if my face had the look that fit the conversation.

Which is so exhausting. Trust me.

So instead, I told myself to stop all that and just listen and be, and let this unfold. Then the next day, when we ventured back to church for the first time in months and the boys (well, one of them–the introvert) didn’t want me to leave, and I wondered whether it would be appropriate for me to be the only parent who stayed and what would the teachers think and–oh, just fuck it I thought, and sat next to them before gradually distancing myself and eventually moving to the next room, an unlit sanctuary of aloneness, where I just sat and thought and was, and gave it all the space to unfold. And it was the most peaceful hour I’ve had in awhile. Or at least since we’ve gotten the dog.

Because it turns out that, sometimes, the neediest person I know is me, and sometimes what she really needs to hear is that she doesn’t have to do contortions to fit into what other people might think is “right” but that she can spread out–she can take up space in this world that teaches so many of us, especially women, that we should be more compact, more agreeable. We each need that space to grow, to fail, to become. To let the story unfold alongside everyone else’s.

Shall I write it in a letter?
Shall I try to get it down?
Oh, you fill my head with pieces
Of a song I can’t get out

Can I be close to you?
–The Paper Kites, “Bloom”

That song was the one playing when The Kid walked down the aisle for his therapist/friend’s wedding last month, and every time I hear it I am brought to tears by the beauty of the music and the moment. At the same time, I’m struck by the profundity of how who he is got us to that moment–how we never would have arrived there any other way–and that now this means we’re all humming along to this tune: Little Brother in the backseat singing “Can I be close to you?” and telling me it’s his favourite part.

Speaking of LB, his summer soccer season starts today, and considering he loved it so much last term, it was a no-brainer to sign him up again. Less of a no-brainer was whether to sign up The Kid, who has never played soccer as up until last year his afternoons were dominated by therapy appointments. And this year, as he’s sat on the sidelines of his brother’s practices and games, I’ve thought I needed to give him the same opportunity. So when a fellow mom asked if TK would want to play with their team, I jumped at the opportunity. Without asking him.

He, however, did not jump.

“I DON’T WANT TO DO IT!” he told me every time it came up, as the first practice approached, and I negotiated with him to just watch that first training session before he formed an opinion. So, last week, we drove down to the field and he hated every minute of it, urging me to leave as I talked to a friend. After half an hour, and fresh off a visit the previous day with a friend who voiced her child’s hatred of team sports, I wondered why I was putting us through this–and we went home.

There are moments when I realise I’m trying to turn him into a kid he is not. My motives at the beginning were, I think, pure–I didn’t want him to feel excluded from something his brother enjoyed so much. But what I missed along the way was that he didn’t feel excluded because he already knows who he is, and one of the things he is? Is a kid who doesn’t want to play soccer. And that is fine. I just have to let it be.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. It’s also littered with parents who decide in advance who their kids are going to be, then make every decision in accordance with that preordained narrative. My own kids have shattered the molds I made for them; why would I rob myself of that adventure, of those surprises?

I’ll tell you why, because I know from experience: it’s because that road feels safer and more predictable. The landscaping on the other road is wilder, the pathway often impeded by branches you have to swat out of the way before you can take the next step. There are more rises and falls, more twists and turns. It’s harder and it takes more energy and time. But the views? Are beyond what you could have ever predicted.

Before I had a kid whose brain worked differently, I wasn’t very accepting of different. This was because, deep down, I knew I was different too, and I didn’t like it. I wanted to blend in: to not get anxious before every social interaction, to not agonise over what I’d said after every verbal exchange; to not feel so worked up all the time. Now I know that the things that make me different are also the things that make me a writer, that make me the particular mother I am to my children and wife I am to my husband and friend I am to my friends.

This morning, LB cried on the way to school, and only because of the road I’ve been on was I able to say anything that helped him even a little. And yesterday, TK returned to me at the gate after I dropped him off, rattled to tears by a change in the day’s schedule that did not meet to his liking. We sat right there on the ground and talked about it, and I was able to meet him where he was only because of where he’s led me. Both of them, they create universes of their own, and I”m called not to force them back into the safe and predictable one that most people are comfortable with, but to expand that one to connect to theirs. This is life, and it’s love, and it’s grace.

After our ground-level meeting, I told TK goodbye and a friend who knows our story and saw the whole thing put her arm around me as we left. When I got to the car, I cried and prayed, and I felt a weight bearing down upon me. But it wasn’t a burden; it was the weight of presence. Of knowing I’m not alone, that my prayers do not go unheard, that my story–our story–is being written by loving hands. I felt that weight, and I collapsed into it, and I went forward on that road.

“You’re Black,” The Kid said to the woman behind the cash register at Target last week, pointing in her direction and looking at me for confirmation. “They’re not nice to you in America.”

She smiled warmly as I died a little inside, and told him, “They’re not always nice to me here, either.”

My children are growing up with an awareness of issues that I never possessed at their age. One night when we turned on the news, coverage of the Black Lives Matter protests (ignited by the murder of George Floyd) led to questions that still persist. And just last week, I turned on the debate only to hear the kids ask, “Why are they so mean to each other?”

There is one road that avoids these conversations; that sees them as detours to rush past. Celebrities who write books on how to entertain that include admonishments like “don’t talk about politics at the table with family.” Friends who go on social media to bemoan political posts because they’d rather see photos of dinner. Be positive may as well be the Eleventh Commandment in some circles; it could be argued that Hitler himself was a fan of the idea.

In other words? Bitch, I’ll pass.

If you want to talk about hard stuff, come sit by me. If you want to talk about fearful stuff, come sit by me. If you want to talk about unfair stuff, come sit by me. I’ll likely be there with my kids, clumsily but honestly having those conversations already.

Because I’m tired. I’m tired of a dearth of self-reflection, an absence of curiosity, an unwillingness to venture from the known and comfortable to the new and challenging. I’m tired of that response to inequality that jumps to consternation rather than introspection. I’m tired of an over-reliance on memes when therapy is available. Hard, but available. I’m tired of people not doing the work.

I should be empathetic; I went for years without doing the work. Reading and watching and listening to only people who agreed with me. Maintaining relationships with only people who looked like me or lived near me. Then I got my ass kicked to New York, then Australia, and grace does not provide round-trip tickets, so predictability fell by the wayside and safety could no longer be found in my own plans.

If the Me that is reflected in some of my Facebook memories found out that I’d be voting for a Democrat for president one day, she would fly into a tailspin. And you know what? I love that.

I love that grace has not seen fit to leave me on the well-worn path that I already knew and could navigate without help. I love that grace has sent me all over the spectrum (neurologically, politically, geographically, every other way) rather than leaving me in one spot to grow old and die there. I love that, though my student loans keep me from totally giving up on a career that I would never choose a second time around, I was driven to my true passion–and to the people and website who indulge it and support it and even publish it–because I was fired from a job.

I love that our story is messy and ongoing and real and that it’s full of twists I didn’t see coming, that I raged about at the time and now see as utter beauty. And I love that my kids get to see that and know there is more than one way to live a life, there is more than one skin colour that matters, there is more than one history of a nation, there is more than one party on the ballot, and there are countless paths to take–but all of them, my dears, lead straight home.

i am will/ and i have a dog named kevin he is so cute and tommrrw is my birthday

and I’m turning 6 and I’m watching oddbods and it is so fun and funny

and james is playing roblox on his iPad

–Will, the day before his 6th birthday, in a guest intro for the blog

When I was about to start my pediatric dental residency, I decided it was time for me to get a dog.

I was horribly wrong.

The eighteen hours I had Max the beagle pup were painful for both of us. I did no prep work on how to train a dog, what toys to buy him, etc. I just knew that I was single and seemed to be staying that way, and I wanted someone to love–someone to take the edge off the loneliness I felt. So I picked up my puppy and brought him home, and the next morning at 8 am I called the breeder and said, through guttural sobs, that I was bringing him back.

Fast forward seventeen years, and a lot has changed: I live in Sydney, Australia, not Birmingham, Alabama. I’m no longer single, but married with two boys. And we just got a lab puppy named Kevin whom we are not taking back, even though he won’t stop biting everything in sight, and this morning he shat the floor and a pillow rolled over and through it and spread it around like butter on a pancake and one of my kids threw up.’

And somehow, this is actually the life I always dreamed of.

But prior to this morning’s shitstorm, prior to the two kids being pulled from my abdomen and the beach wedding, were a couple of occurrences that changed the game for me so much that I can’t seem to stop doing them:

I got help, and I changed my address.

The first, in the form of counselling/therapy, can be seen by naysayers as dwelling on the past. The second can be seen as running away. But for me, a decidedly (previously) un-brave rule-following careful and cautious planner, they are the bravest things imaginable.

Of course, I had to be pushed into both.

The circumstances of seeking therapy hinged on an ultimatum I’d issued God regarding my single status; I didn’t think he’d call my bluff. The circumstances of leaving home the first time–for New York–were pure desperation. The second–this time Australia–God, again, called my bluff. Since each of these compellings-disguised-as-choices, I’ve had the opportunity to repeat them on a smaller scale in myriad life moments: stepping away from what is comfortable and familiar, and recognising that I need help–and asking for it.

All of which has led me to a place of deeper safety, of being truly known, of walking unafraid. I’ve had the option throughout my life of scrambling to preserve a fragile but appealing narrative, or falling apart to make way for a truer one. The first half of my life I chose the former.

That no longer works for me.

Which is why I spend a lot more time now than I did then on the over- and over-ness of life: on being up close and personal with all the feelings,;with anger and grief and frustration and anxiety, and with elation and joy and victory and awe. It’s why having a dog will last longer this time around and be even more fraught, more exhausting (and much messier). It’s why there is more conflict, more forgiveness, more truth. Why friendships are deeper and rawer and get to the real stuff much sooner (or go nowhere fast).

It’s why, in between my own check-ins with a therapist, I sit in the waiting room while my son sees his; and it’s why I’m not afraid of what will come out of those sessions, be it now or when he’s my age, because making space for truth is never inconvenient or regrettable.

The other night I was lying beside him as he fell asleep. He was angry that he’d missed free time at school to go to one of those sessions, and he would. not. shut. up. about. it.

Finally, after a few moments of blessed silence, something even better:

“I just love you,” he said. “But there are things that are important to you, and things that are important to me, and when my important things don’t happen, I get upset.”

I lay there in the darkness, stunned by the boy who couldn’t speak at four but now says more than I ever imagined.

There was a time when I would have stayed in my anger; there was a time when he would have stayed in his. Now, because of a grace that is stronger than that anger or either of us, we each inch forward, over and over again.

I remember the days just after The Kid’s diagnosis, when the world felt shadowy and uncertain, and I would analyse everything he did as a predictor of his future–typically, per my brand, with grim foreshadowing. Glass-half-empty on steroids. I had been dealt a death blow, as my old pastor and friend would say: a death blow to my own plans, my own certitude, my version of who TK would be. But I’d forgotten the most important things about death blows: they are dealt by grace, and they are followed by resurrection.

So what ended up dying, really, were those former plans. The version of TK without challenges, without the need for therapy. (He was never meant to exist in the first place, you see, because then he wouldn’t be, well…him.) My need to conduct polls to determine my next action, to garner approval for my own survival. All of that died. Thank God.

And what came to life? Oh, just everything is all.

You know what never would have happened if I’d been granted my plan? This past weekend, that’s what. So let me tell you about that.

A year ago, TK’s school therapist asked him to be the page boy in her wedding and walk down the aisle ahead of her. He said yes. Cut to us nearly a year later, a few weeks ago, TK begrudgingly trying on his wedding attire to make sure it fit. The Husband and I were deigning to interrupt a Roblox game to achieve this task. As soon as TK was fully robed and I snapped a photo, he made his displeasure abundantly clear.

“Take this fucking thing off me.”

TH and I looked at each other, wide-eyed. Did he just…?

“What did you just say?” I asked TK.

“I said, take this fucking thing off me.”

It was a real that’s what I thought you said, dad-in-A Christmas-Story, “oh fudge,” tire-changing moment, and TH’s and my wide eyes switched to barely-concealed laughter, because…you know, shit happens. And our family knows the difference between what we call “home words” and the other kind, and to his credit, TK hasn’t dropped the F-bomb to anyone outside our family. Plus, I grew up with a heavy emphasis on avoiding “bad words,” the four-letter kind, while racial aspersions were lobbed around with abandon, so my standard on this is different from that of many.

All of which is to say, I found it mildly troubling and mostly hilarious, but that’s not the point. The point here is the story I’m telling. Which leads to this past weekend.

True to their brands, TK did not want to practise his wedding walk, while Little Brother was an all-too-eager undesignated understudy, running around the backyard rehearsal site with performative glee. It was looking grim. The bride told me that she would do whatever he was comfortable with, and if it didn’t happen, that was fine. We all went our separate ways and I was pretty certain the next day–at least, TK’s part in it–would be a total shitshow.

That’s what I get for thinking.

After protesting his boutonnière then angrily accepting it, and a speech we made to him about how special this role was, TK was folded into the bridal party and I waited off to the side, anxious as hell. LB, for his part, refused to walk away from the bridal party, having harboured (it appeared) secret ambitions to be called upon to perform at the last minute. And that’s what he got for thinking, too. Because soon, TK and his toy plane were walking in step with the bride’s sister to the awwws of the crowd. He was grinning and I was sobbing.

I have to call it perfect.

Not because it was, mind you. The prep work was unpromising, the lead-in painful, every moment up to it fraught in trepidation. But the moment itself? Beautiful. Which is so on-brand: for grace, and for him.

A few days later, I stuck around after drop-off to watch the kindy kids’ Medieval Day parade. In a typical year, parents would be allowed on school grounds to watch it, but this year has been anything but typical (which is actually on-brand for our family, so we’re sort of used to it?). So I hung around like a creeper and gazed through the trees as the kids marched, and soon I spotted mine: LB in all his knight regalia, dancing so hard to the medieval music that he was practically breakdancing around the pitch. So on-brand. So perfect.

I’ve been listening to this podcast lately (five stars, highly recommend) and the episode linked was with the conductor of the LA Philharmonic. He talked about how conducting is really about making your own interpretation of the music set before you, and how he appreciates all the mishaps that turn into “perfect mistakes.” I wouldn’t dare to call anyone in my life either perfect or a mistake, but there is something to this idea: the beauty that shows up in the unplanned and uncertain and unasked for. The singular way a child walks down the aisle or dances across a playground, because they’re already exactly who and where and how they’re meant to be.

Recently we sat down as a family and watched Black Panther, for obvious reasons. It was a rewatch for The Husband and me, and a semi-rewatch for the kids, as we had attempted a viewing with them last year but they hadn’t made it the whole way through (spoiler alert: they didn’t this time either). Despite having seen the movie before (and parts of it multiple times), I had forgotten some key elements. Or maybe just taken them for granted?

The way T’Challa’s suit absorbed the energy from impacts so that he could use it for attacks of his own? Injury transforming into strength? Yeah, that metaphor hit me square in the heart-crotch this time. One of the beautiful things about immediate family is that the amount you drive each other crazy directly correlates to the amount you know each other/are known, and what I know about the four of us is that we are all walking around with our own invisible suits akin to that of the Black Panther. And this? Is hard and wonderful.

I love that we are embedded in each other’s stories. I love that even though there are people who have known TH longer, there’s no one who knows him better than I do. And there’s no one who knows the maps of my children’s skin, or the way they look right when they wake up, like he and I do. We have done battle across two continents and hemispheres together, in hospitals and waiting rooms and IEP sessions and therapy visits. We do all of life together, on soccer fields and beaches and in front of screens and fireplaces, in homes rented and bought. We have done Christmas in hotel rooms and New Year’s Eve on planes.

We have taken impact together: through diagnoses and post-op visits, in recovery rooms and through sicknesses. What felt at the time like it was destroying us has proven to be what makes us us, these hits that turn into defining moments and even gifts. That’s what someone told me during a particularly rough period after The Kid’s diagnosis, when I didn’t know which end was up, and he spoke insane truth into that moment: You’ve been given a gift. You may not see it now, but you will.

And I do. I see how those impacts have made us stronger. How the newborn days and nights have given way to one-of-a-kind personalities and quirks and occasions for laughter. How Little Brother charms everyone he meets with his kindness and humour and unparalleled voice. How, as I sat at the beach with friends one afternoon, TK walked up to us and whispered to me, “Who is that?”, pointing to a member of our group, and when I reminded him, he turned and enveloped her in a bear hug, apropos of nothing–and of everything, because that’s who he is.

Disabilities, my ass.

And I see how other people respond to “different,” how it can knock them around a bit and play with their preformed expectations, and how there are those kindred spirits who have seen enough to know themselves and be open to the beautiful alternatives to the status quo.

How people are placed in our lives not to be fixed, but discovered. How love and grace are the ways by which this happens.

When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden. 

For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you.
Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.
Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.
He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast. 

All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life’s heart. 

But if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing-floor,
Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.
Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
For love is sufficient unto love.

–Kahlil Gibran

Today started out just fab. The skies were grey, rain threatened, and I said to The Kid, “Why do you have to complain about everything ALL THE TIME?”

Even as I said it, I felt regret. (And believe me, it was the nicest of the statements that were flitting around my head in the moment.) But? Honestly? Why does he have to complain about everything all the time?

He doesn’t do that. And when I apologised to him, I told him that. But he does do it quite often, and I should know because it takes a complainer to know a complainer. It also takes an anxiety-ridden person with obsessive-compulsive tendencies and control issues to recognise one, and as far as that goes it’s like each of us is looking in a mirror when we’re around each other. His recent success with independence at school is counterbalanced at home with OCD behaviours and stabs at controlling everything in his environment, and I resemble that. It all reminds me of my life from childhood until…two seconds ago, usually, so this mirror does indeed have two faces.

My own issues, which have allowed him to come by his honestly, should make me more empathetic. And they do, in theory…and when I’m in solitude. And sometimes when I’m with him, in calm moments, talking at bedtime or cuddling on the couch. But at other times, we combine to combust. And then there’s Little Brother, beside us and watching, and now I have shame and guilt to add to the mix.

Parenting is so fun.

There are times when I look around at our life and think that things are almost too good, and then I have to laugh because I will never run out of things to discuss with my therapist, and soon TK will find the same with his. It’s all lather, rinse, and repeat around here, and no matter how many times we go through our rhythms, I still think that someday my insides will match my well-ordered and wiped countertops. A place for everything and everything in its place. Done.

Then TK screams about how LB is doing a poo and he just knows the toilet paper will be arranged messily afterward, and I realise that these moments aren’t aberrations that will disappear, but they are part of the rhythm. And there is no song without a rhythm.

I find myself revisiting our beginnings here lately, those moments after we first landed when everything was new and life felt like an extended vacation. There was uncertainty, but also potential. But that time carried its own grief that gets lost in the sands of memory as life becomes routine and new becomes familiar. We tell people how long we’ve been here and find that it exceeds their own stay. We’re becoming veterans, knowing and being known. There is such beauty in this, and also moments for grief.

What should have been a kindy year full of experiences that echoed TK’s has been a narrowed-down, pandemic-affected, altered year for LB, with fewer of those first-time school experiences. Yesterday, I said goodbye to my hairdresser, who’s moving back home to Europe. She was one of the first people I met here and I see her more often than I see any of my extended family. We’ve talked about anxiety, depression, Netflix. LB and I still miss his beloved preschool teacher, whom we lost eighteen months ago.

There are stretches of sunny days punctuated by rain that makes me forget how blue the skies are. And then there are swims in water so clear it makes me realise I never knew how cloudy it could get in the winter. There is sniping and forgiving. There are unforgettable dinner parties with friends, and regrettable hangovers the next morning.

There are sharps and flats and majors and minors and all the keys, and I never really knew how much they all tell a story until I listened to this. How we need every kind of note to make a song, and convey its meaning. How only when we embrace it all does it become music.

I was tagged recently on Facebook in a photo of my first grade class. The first thing I noticed, natch, was myself: a nervous, rule-following, hands-folded six-year-old in a peach dress with a placating, not entirely genuine smile. Then I zoomed out to take in the full picture, and I noticed a couplet of offences: we had two teachers that year, one morning and one afternoon, and the name of the Black afternoon teacher wasn’t listed on the information card held by the students in the front row. Second, there was a…ahem…curious arrangement of students, with all of the Black students relegated to the back row except for two, who were placed on the ends of the other two rows.

Weird, right? I think so. So did a friend, when I texted her the pic and asked if she noticed anything. She spotted it right away.

Thirty-seven years later and these injustices, large and small, are finally catching the attention of people beyond just those upon whom they were targeted. I received a message recently from a high school friend who was letting me know about some accusations that have recently been voiced about blatant acts of racism that occurred there throughout the years, both during our tenure and after, and I thought about how blind I’d been to all of it; how, at the time, I would have found a way to even justify it. I believed that we all came from a level playing field because that’s what I was taught.

It’s a lie.

I was lucky, fortunate, (#)blessed to grow up in a financially secure, two-parent home. The gravest injustice I endured was of the I-only-have-three-Swatches-to-stack-on-my-arm variety. Meanwhile, people around me–children–were treated differently; were, two decades after the Civil Rights Act, told to stand in a different row. This was their day-to-day life. How could I possibly understand that, or see it as a level playing field?

After Little Brother’s soccer game on Saturday, once we were all in the car, I checked my phone and gasped at the news of Chadwick Boseman. The boys asked what had happened and I told them–Black Panther died. And the first thing The Kid said? “Was it COVID or the police that killed him?”

I’m not sharing this as a sad little anecdote to garner white expressions of temporary ruefulness; I find it fucking heartbreaking. I actually have to tell my children that some people don’t like other people simply because of the colour of their skin and then watch my boys’ faces screw up in confusion because they don’t remember the last time they heard something so asinine, so mind-numbingly, God-defyingly stupid. I dread the day I have to admit my own complicity.

I find myself in conversations with friends who grew up similarly to me as far as timing and geography, and we are all coming to terms with the contradictions that ran rampant in our homes and churches. We’re angry. Those of us who aren’t currently in therapy know we need it. We’ve inherited a complicated, messy set of “principles” that is collapsing in on itself.

But we’re doing something about it.

How? In every way, I hope. In the recognition that what is wrong needs to be made right. In admitting that we are often wrong, and apologising to our kids in ways we didn’t hear ourselves. In making space for their questions and feelings. In allowing room for our own grief, which can be unlocked so readily these days–by news footage, by the death of a celebrity who seemed decent and kind and there are too few of those people left so of course it hurts. We are being reborn through their realisations that the world can be more beautiful than it was, than it is now. That we can be on the side that loves it toward that beauty.

For our anniversary (I know, gross) The Husband gave me a pendant of an Australian emerald. It’s a gem–a colour–that I’ve never actually seen before. And yesterday, on a walk on the first day of spring here, I turned to look at the ocean and I swear, the sea and sky were both blues that were brand-new hues to my eyes. Imagine that: forty-three and still surprised by the beautiful new that is possible.

It was last Friday morning, and I’d just dropped the boys off at school. I was on FaceTime with The Sis as I pulled up to the house–funny, because I had just spoken to her over the phone about four years ago right before The Husband upended my plans then, too. This time, I descended the steps toward our front door, listening to TS and glancing around at the red flower petals scattered across our lawn. “Is that someone’s trash?” I thought, because this is usually what I see first: detritus, not gift.

I looked ahead through the front door and saw a sign–10 Years was the headline on a framed newspaper-style print–and I began to stammer. We had said we weren’t getting presents for each other, that the house was the present. Sure, I had found a shitty little cross-stitch world map to document our travels that I had almost finished yesterday before breaking the needle, but I began to suspect that I was about to be outdone. I told TS I’d have to call her back, and I stepped nervously inside.

For the next hour, I was repeatedly bowled over by The Husband’s thoughtfulness, which I will not go into full obnoxious detail to cover here except to say that it involved a pretend trip to the site of our honeymoon, a slide show of memories, and a day planned in advance with the help of friends that culminated in an overnight getaway.

It was slightly better than the cross-stitch map.

I don’t remember the last time I felt so loved. I mean, Mother’s Day–when I received candles from the boys, along with mugs that said “Best Boss Ever” and “Tired as a Mother”–was a close second. But this…this was premeditated. It reflected my being known. It was a walk from the beginnings of our togetherness to right now, and I glowed. It was almost as bad as the time he practically forced me to move to this country I now love, a place that has become home.

How dare he.

This pattern of love intervening in my life–it’s so disruptive. My plans are shifted, if not entirely tossed, and I head toward new ones–thought out just for me, for what I never would have been brave or imaginative enough to plan for myself. There was the way I remained single in the South for so long that it was getting awkward, and how my lack of fitting in there forced me to flee for New York, where, among other gifts, I met TH.

There was motherhood, which knocked me around so much I didn’t know who I was anymore (besides postpartum-ly depressed), until I emerged an advocate, a storyteller, a warrior, a writer with more to say than I’d ever had to say before, a person with a deeper well of love and pain than I’d ever thought possible.

There was that extended singleness that led to this particular marriage, which–well, we’ve covered that, I think. Knowing and being known, and loved anyway.

There was, as also previously mentioned, our exile across the world, to this place where my children thrive and so do I, our days filled with salt water and ocean views and dear friends and lots of FaceTime.

How could love do this to me? Disregard my plans so flippantly, interrupt my schedule, relocate me…to save me?

All your sorrows have been wasted on you if you have not yet learned how to be wretched.
– Seneca

I just finished a binge of Netflix’s Love on the Spectrum, and the series was everything it was recommended to be: heartfelt, honest, and sweet. There was the added bonus that it was filmed in Australia, where we’ve lived for three and a half years, which means I recognized names and scenery as a local (always fun!). Other than that? Let’s just say it’s complicated.

I don’t remember the last time I engaged so intensely with a series on both an emotional and physical level. In a word, my viewing of the quartet of episodes was fraught: every muscle in my body felt clenched, my face contorted, my heart spasming. This was due in part to my own connection with the spectrum, and the fears the series raised about my son’s future.

Read the rest over at Mockingbird.