One of the most annoying and wonderful parts of my day is the journey with the boys from our car to their school. I sling their backpacks from the front passenger seat onto their backs, and we walk the few dozen metres together but also separate: the brothers usually beside each other, one occasionally lagging back to hold my hand or tell me something, but always, at some point, with me behind them, nearly stepping on them about a hundred times.

Why must I trip over my own children? Because, of course, they are so slow. They take their precious time, stopping to scratch their butts or fix their shoes or point out someone they know (sometimes) or (more likely) a dog or it its errant poo on the ground. They notice everything except me, it seems, as I flex and curl my hands and take deep breaths because patience don’t come naturally here, and we eventually make it to the spot where I kiss them and they run onto the school grounds.

Then I take my time, creepily hiding behind a tree branch to watch them scamper off to their classrooms then emerge seconds later, reconvening on the playground.

Cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz made a project of walking around a city block with everything from a dog to a geologist to see what they saw. She writes, “Together, we became investigators of the ordinary, considering the block–the street and everything on it–as a living being that could be observed. In this way, the familiar becomes unfamiliar, and the old the new.”

It’s alarming how much my children teach me when I’m trying to teach them. While my attentiveness is typically self-focused, they never fail to notice the world around them: the yellow flower in the middle of the grass, the rare piece of litter, the way the wind blows a leaf across our path. The Kid analyses and draws conclusions that help him feel in control; Little Brother searches for words he can read to show off newly acquired skillz. They reveal the world to me, but more importantly, they reveal themselves.

It’s a good day when I pay attention.

And before these walks, even before the part in the car where I say a prayer over them and remind them of what is true that they can take into their day, there is the moment before we leave the house–actually, TK came up with it and now when he forgets, LB reminds him (teamwork makes the dream work)–of saying to their toys, “To be continued.”

The other day I finally heard it, and when I told TK I love that he does it, he explained, “Yeah. To be continued. It means the story is still going.”

It’s perfect timing, I guess: as I get older, and my eyes aren’t what they used to be, these two are teaching me to see all over again.

This morning I woke up a bit depressed, which makes sense because it’s my birthday, and big feelers such as myself have an ambivalent relationship with all things that are meant to be one thing: birthdays=happy; Christmas=merry; sports=fun. There’s also the tiny detail that I’m on my forty-third of these damn things; who allowed that to happen? All my peers and I are becoming middle-aged, and our parents are becoming (gulp) elderly. I did not see this coming.

And yet I did, every year, because one of the big things I feel is anxiety, which is like bad fortune-telling for the perennially nervous. So I’ve been preparing for middle age awhile now, just like how I start thinking of myself as my new age (and my children as theirs) months in advance. What a buzzkill.

It didn’t help that last night’s sleep was delayed and fitful (#preciouschildren), so I woke up with a headache and an urge to kill. But I dealt with that by going to the grocery store and buying myself a cake (the boys told me to get chocolate mud; I got a dye-filled rainbow sprinkle and they can SUCK IT), then going on a long walk through several beaches that echoed the eternal hikes I used to take when training for that cursed 60K, minus the blisters and hopelessness.

Deja vu is real, y’all. Everything that goes around comes around, and all that. Especially when you have kids and get to relive childhood through them, and also witness their need to live by constant repetition. A year ago, it was The Kid who demanded I draw a love heart on his hand every day so that he could press it and send/feel hugs from me; now (well, for one day at least), it’s Little Brother who grabs for the sharpie and sends me sideways grins as he presses the heart.

I remember the “last run” I took in Central Park in New York City; it felt freighted with meaning; then I returned for yearly visits and redid it every time. Not the same, but not totally different either. And there was the running route by our last (fourth) house here, to which I ruefully bid adieu when we moved, then a friend reasoned that I could reenact it whenever I wanted after dropping the kids at school. Which I did yesterday.

One way or another, you can always come back. A novel I recently read refers to this as the tidal life–the coming and going and coming again nature of life, the way people and places return to us, and we to them. The other night when I put him to bed, LB started crying and saying he doesn’t ever want to leave this house. He, we, need an unbreakable, unchanging home. I think we’ve proven to them–over the course of six in the past four years–that the house may change, but the home sticks.

“The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents,” said Carl Jung, and if there’s one gift The Husband and I have given the boys, it is lives lived–all over the place. Adventures accepted. Memories made. Stories to be told. I’m working on some of those stories now, but these are the ones that include the boys–fiction based in real life that I’ve invited them to help me with, which may be a mistake because I didn’t count on them having so many opinions. Kind of reminds me of when TH and I were wedding planning and I’d ask him about a colour, or decoration, and he’d make the mistake of not saying “whatever you think.” Everything kind of reminds me of something, marks left from moments already lived that keep coming back: LB pointing to the remainder of red marker in a heart shape on his hand, urging me to wipe it off then forgetting he even asked, so that I get to see it not just once, but enduringly.

I wanted to believe, and I did believe, that things would get better. But later I discovered, I guess, that you have to have this sense of faith that what you’re moving toward is already done. It’s already happened…It’s the power to believe that you can see, that you visualize, that sense of community, that sense of family, that sense of one house…And you live that you’re already there, that you’re already in that community, part of that sense of one family, one house. If you visualize it, if you can even have faith that it’s there, for you it is already there. –John Lewis

One of the decor items The Husband and I bought from the overpriced furniture store near our new home was a glass jar for our outdoor table. Since we placed it there, we’ve been filling it with shells: not one lump sum of them dumped in, but a few here and there, grabbed during our respective walks down to the beach ten minutes’ walk away, or after my swims down at the beach over the bridge, as I shiver in the sun and try to feel my toes. We each come in after these procurements and make our deposit, and so the jar is slowly filling.

We had the boys’ teacher/parent interviews yesterday over Zoom, and after some technical issues that left us a minute late to the first one (and left me seething through anxiety), we heard about each of them from people who truly know them: who see The Kid’s creativity in solving problems, his ability to be funny without knowing it, his growing and beautiful social interactions and his confidence at public speaking; who see Little Brother’s ability to be funny while totally knowing it, his need for eye contact and approval and physical closeness, his sunny demeanour and love of reading.

Can I tell you how many tables I have sat at, across from people who did not know my kids, across from school staff who said things like “he doesn’t sound like a fit for us” or who had an eye only for weakness? Those years-ago-now meetings can still pierce my heart but they no longer lord themselves over me because we are in a different place now, one where the road has turned and the light has become more and more visible, the hope springing up more and more often. These boys are becoming themselves and it is glorious to see. And to see it be seen.

It’s been compared to the underside of an intricately-patterned rug, this life we live that often only makes sense in reverse because, as it’s happening, the threads just seem chaotic. Especially right now? I would go further and say that it often just looks like a pile of shit that you did not order and would like to send back, thank you, but then there’s the moment when the rug is flipped over–or, maybe, the moments when it’s briefly flipped over, and the intended beauty is clear.

But until, and between, those moments is the now-but-not-yet living, which is full not so much of the beauty but of knowing, trusting, that it is there. That it’s coming. It’s what Maria Popova calls “almostness,” what John Lewis refers to as “living as if.” It’s defined by a yearning, an incompleteness that I remember best during a few periods of my life: like when I was single and waiting for TH, or when there were three of us and we were waiting for LB.

I believe we are intimately acquainted with grace in this yearning; that, indeed, if we are focused only on preserving the way things are instead of seeing the now-but-not-yet of this world, we are missing that closeness with grace that the yearning provides. I once read that the longing of God stretches across history–we see it in the three days before Easter, in the whole of the advent season, in our own lives. When we miss it, we miss everything: how grace aligns itself to us not so much when we’re fighting for things to be the same, but when we’re recognising the Much More that is always just out of sight. When we live toward this More.

“It’s hard getting ready,” TK said from the backseat on the way to school the other morning as we listened to a song that said the same. And he should know. It is hard. And even more beautiful.

Then we’ll be waving hands singing freely
Singing standing tall it’s now coming easy
Oh no more looking down honey
Can’t you see?
Oh Lord 
I’m getting ready to believe

Last week, after a fortnight-long break fuelled by holidays and laziness, I got back into the water.

The water I speak of is the ocean, and it is frigid, as this is winter in the Southern hemisphere. I’m one of those people whom, months ago, I would have pegged as a lunatic: wetsuit-clad pain-seekers devoted too much to exercise.

But here’s the thing: after the pain subsides and the feeling comes back to my fingers and toes, the frigid water is actually enjoyable. And this isn’t my first time at this particular kind of rodeo–I remember runs through Central Park during blizzards, accompanied only by the rueful shared glances with other weirdos.

I’ve been this way for awhile, it seems.

This way meaning both “the way I am” and “in the direction I’m going” which is to say, away from what feels comfortable and safe toward what is unknown and unpredictable.

It’s not a bad way to travel, if you can handle the minor inconveniences and occasional hypothermia.

“Back on my bullshit” is one way to describe it, and I relegate that phrase to recaps of the oopsies, both large and small, that I seem to repeat: overlubricating in social situations (you know what I mean), resorting to sugar and breading for comfort, losing my temper over the same stuff with the kids, pole-vaulting into cynicism and its familiar shores.

Luckily, there’s a grace that goes beyond my bullshit, that renders my efforts to “be better” or “do more” so minor as to be ultimately inconsequential when it comes to both my fate and my faith: I am held by what has been done for me, not what I’ve done. So these repeats often turn into redos: sometimes with the same results, but often with tiny movements forward, toward more freedom; more grace.

Was I thrilled to wake up with a hangover on Saturday for the first time I can remember in awhile? No, and neither was my bathroom. But the moments shared the night before–sun setting and champagne flowing as four of us shared life together and spoke about what we mean to each other–those are what last longer. Grace.

Do I enjoy the mental unraveling I feel when The Kid devolves into an anxiety spiral and I struggle not to lose it? Not a bit. But what I can love, what I can even rest in, is the moment when I see a tiny shift in him–a “but” that prefaces not another worry but a realisation that there is more he is seeing now that he wasn’t before. And the thought that my own journey is part of what helped him get there. Grace.

Repentance, redemption, change: these are the language of grace, but they do not hinge on me getting life right, on having a game plan for improvement, like they do on me sprawling at the feet of grace and watching as it lifts me, moves me, like the waves send me to the shore, where home and a hot shower await.

Which is harder: parenting a kid who doesn’t want to go back to school, or homeschooling that kid and his brother?

Answer: they both suck. And these are the lose-lose moments of motherhood, the isolating and excruciating struggles that I must walk alongside them through because I cannot not walk with them, my body and soul tied to them messily and inextricably and eternally and inconveniently and beautifully.

Hello! It’s Tuesday morning.

The boys went back to school this morning, despite collective parental fears with every informational email from the school that this would be the one announcing suspension of onsite learning; that we’d be returning to the hell that is homeschool because COVID numbers have gone up here (though nowhere even near the same league as what’s happening back in the good ol’ US of A). That email didn’t arrive, so we did: at the school gate on this sunny morning, one mother, one happy kindergartener, and one anxious third-grader.

So our return was both excitement- and tear-soaked, happy and sad and everything in between. And with every repetition of the question from the unexcited one–“But why is it the law to go to school?”–I both felt the recognition of myself at his age, and the frustration of being compelled by circumstances and emotions beyond my pay grade.

What I’m saying is that this is hard and I’d rather be catching up on old episodes of Gossip Girl on Netflix. That is the familiarity I crave: images of the streets of New York that I last watched when I was on those streets, living a decidedly less complicated life (in that no one depended on me for their well-being/survival), but also…a less full one. One marked by less frustration with what was, but more yearning for what was not yet.

When I walked those streets, countless as they were, I would rarely get lost–owing not just to my familiarity with them but maybe more my unwillingness to stray from the areas I knew and frequented. But when I did run aground on some unfamiliar spot, I only had to find landmarks–a known building’s spire plunged into the sky, a street sign with a number or name–to know where to go next.

The Kid is in the unfamiliar territory of not having a therapist at school with him, of not having someone dedicated to just him, and though he’s managing his schoolwork beautifully without help, he has decided that this is not a street he enjoys traversing. There have been tears, so many of them, and I struggle to not feel them as an interruption to the smooth sailing I prefer, even as–and maybe because?–I see so much of myself and my own young (and often current) struggles in his own. Fighting against change, clinging to what feels safe. Resisting movement in favour of a dropped anchor.

And then, by grace (another Great Interrupter), I remember my landmarks–like a fire in the night or a cloud in the day or a whisper on the wind or the North Star that led to freedom–the breath that is the truth of what I believe: we are not being interrupted, but unfurled, like the sail on a boat driven by winds beyond its control but always, always, in its favour. So many of the choices I made in life, the paths I wanted to take–those were the actual deviations, and time after time I was set right, moved back on course, by what felt like interruptions but were grace gently leading me where I was meant to be.

And so I tell them this, in whispered moments at bedtime, in tearful ones putting on shoes, in still ones in the car battling traffic outside and anxiety inside, I tell them this–not that they’ll be okay or that it’s fine or any of the sayings I’ve heard that were meant to brush away the interruption–but this: that their lives are a great story, one of hard parts and easy, storms and sun, but stories full and beautiful, told by a grace that will always lead them home. And then I hope and pray that, like me on my good days, they’ll believe it.

I’ve been reading a lot about brain integration lately, and if this topic isn’t appealing to you, then you sound like me before I got into it. I stumbled there, as I do into most things, and the route was–per usual with many discoveries–driven and marked by desperation (see: my move to New York City, most notably).

Lockdown and homeschooling–two areas we’ve just exited and could be entering again soon–left me flailing, and the life preserver came as it always does, in the form of grace, this time manifested in a couple of podcasts and books. A common theme kept popping up there, within words like regulation and dysregulation, integration and differentiation. I found that my brain could do with some integration, and that much of my frustrations come from attempts to go from dysregulated to regulated, or from trying to balance integration and differentiation. And failing at all of the above.

Again, this is supremely boring if you don’t know anything about it or don’t think you need it. And maybe you don’t. But for me, it’s been oxygen. Because for me, lately, the sources of dysregulation have gone from being the occasional intrusions–children’s needs, social obligations, annoying people–to life itself, the uncertainty of the current moment and survival within its consequential question-shaped existence. Oh, and Zoom meetings.

We’re not in lockdown now, just school holidays–which holds a few similarities to quarantine, particularly in the brutal Sydney winter (see: 60-degrees-Fahrenheit highs, frequent rain that always brings rainbows along with it). This is the epitome of first-world highs and lows: being smothered in children and their demands one minute (did you know that Hyundais are made in South Korea and also five- and eight-year-olds apparently need 50 snacks a day but NO REAL MEALS?) and sitting on a beach splitting a bottle of rosé with a friend the next.

These are the moments of note–the peaks and valleys. The driving thunderstorm and the glowing rainbow; the gale-force wind and the beating sun; the constant intrusions and the moments of serene solitude. Less tangibly speaking: wounds and healing, chaos and peace, waves and calm. Yet the extremes, while most noticeable and often necessary, do not make up the bulk of life. Nor are many of the moments I characterise as extreme actually that; they just feel that way when I’m more attuned to drama than evenness, peaks and valleys than rolling hills.

What I’m saying, I guess, is that integration is about experiencing most of life as it actually is: not as disturbance to be swept away or annoyance to be avoided, but as nuanced narrative to be lived. Letting each moment be what it is, and seeing that most of it is not waves that will sweep me out to sea but the rocking rhythm of water that always takes me home.

“Mom, you’re meditating, aren’t you?” The Kid asked the other day, and after the moment I had to appreciate his growing awareness that includes his recognition of my need for space, he followed it up with, “That’s boring.” Also fair. This growing awareness has its own ups and downs: the trip to his former therapy centre to collect his folders, now relics, and say goodbye to his therapist, a journey made with the guidance of muscle memory rather than Google maps, past rather than future. The ups. And the moments in bed just before sleep, spent ruing the definition of cool and his perception of its presence in others but not himself. The downs.

One of my books talks about our “organised adaptation to suboptimal experiences” and girl do I know about THAT. Living life as an exercise in coping. But watching, with time and experience and grace, as it becomes more. As I return to the breath that signifies so much more than just that. The rhythm that is a home, the core of everything, the idea of returning itself: re-turning and re-turning and re-turning back to what matters, what is real: love that shows up; freedom born of saying “no” when that is where sanity resides; prayer and liturgy and breathing that remove me so they can deliver me back where I belong.

We just returned from a viewing of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York in our hotel cinema and while the boys proclaimed it better than the original, I did not agree that there was a Godfather situation happening. That didn’t keep us all from laughing at the antics of Kevin, Harry, and Marv all over again, despite the formulaic predictability (The Kid: “He is about to throw something besides a camera down to them.”).

We’ve been to this hotel in the Blue Mountains before, twice actually. We’ve gone to dinner the first night and returned to “Christmas in July” presents for the kids, a tradition we’ll never be able to break now since they’ve got it marked on the diaries in their heads, along with the train rides and the cinema visits and the indoor pool swims and the arcade games.

“I don’t think Santa Claus visits hotels,” someone in the movie said, and they were wrong for the McCallisters and for us, since Santa has visited us in a few hotels over the last few years, in both July and December. He’s had to learn multiple addresses, actually, as have our family and friends back home. Back in our old home.

With dual citizenship as a possibility at the end of this year, our dual homes are ever-present on my mind, especially as I watch from ten thousand miles away as my home country seems to be engulfed in metaphorical (and, often, literal) flames. We feel sad to miss our annual Christmas trip back to America because we won’t see family whom we miss. But mostly? We also feel…lucky. Protected. Safe.

We feel at home.

This is due in no small part to our actual home, which seems made for us in a way that was solidified over this last weekend, when we celebrated the Fourth of July by grilling hamburgers on the back deck while a heat lamp warmed us and Hamilton played on the big screen downstairs, and we shared our space and our history with friends who came over for the first time to our new place. We gathered around its tables and countertops and said screen and settled in, a process that began here three and a half years ago but feels more real, more solid, now.

We have a place here. The boys each have a room, into which I venture each early evening and “get ready for the night:” closing blinds and turning on lamps, something I’ve longed to do with this level of familiarity ever since we left Atlanta. We have traditions. We have all our stuff: the wedding china we never use, the gravy boat I’m eyeing for a potential Thanksgiving celebration, TK’s surgery collage and halo shrine and his and Little Brother’s framed birth announcements.

We’ve been at home, with each other, everywhere we’ve gone–hotels and houses, ferries and planes–but now it feels official. And in true “us” fashion that feels completely antithetical to who The Husband and I are but somehow makes sense, we have no idea how long it will last, for what length of time it will look this way.

But right now? As I sit on this hotel bed with a glass of red next to me, the sun setting outside, and the boys on the other bed? Forever sounds pretty good.

Oh my, I didn’t know what it means to believe

But if I hold on tight, is it true?

Would you take care of all that I do?

Oh Lord, I’m getting ready to believe

–Michael Kiwanuka

Well, I just wrote a paragraph about The Kid, who read it and told me he didn’t want me to share it. You see, he’s home from school with a cold and he’s also eight, which means his awareness is growing and, in turn, limiting what I can make public. Dammit.

But also, great? Because this awareness is what we want. As is the fading-out of his therapist at school that has been achieved. As are so many of his accomplishments lately. In fact, the other night a friend texted to tell me her daughter said that TK is one of the smartest kids in the class. So excuse me while I dodge these rainbows and this lack of coronavirus from our new, much-loved home.

But still…I really want to tell you the story. So I’ll just say this much: the other night, there was tiredness and a tantrum and the proclamation of dreams not coming true. It was an Oscar-worthy performance, and totally sincere while also completely irrational. The end result, which I cannot fully explain because I’m no longer allowed to totally pimp out my kids on this blog, is the designation of “false dreams” to what are unmet (and, frankly, unreasonable) desires.

Which is incongruous to this period of our lives right now, because I feel like I could look out my back door right now and see a unicorn galloping by, so charmed have our last weeks been, and it’s leaving me convinced that Something Awful is just around the corner. Brené Brown, in her podcast, tells me this is called “foreboding joy,” and I’m just glad there’s a name for it because it means I’m not the only weirdo who’s found herself struck by it. Because on Sunday, after The Husband and I set about cleaning the house from top to bottom for the first time since moving in and I actually sort of enjoyed it, and then I heard the unmistakable strains of an ice cream truck passing by outside, I almost threw my hands up on that sixty-degrees-and-sunny winter’s day and screamed, “IT’S ALL TOO PERFECT!”

Of course, it isn’t. Perfect, I mean. But the downsides all feel very first-world: I have to say goodbye to our housecleaners. I stepped in a massive pile of dogshit and my cheap-ass Old Navy boots will not survive the attack. TK has that aforementioned cold which means he is home from school and monitoring my online output. And I wiped a crusted-over booger off his bedroom wall last night (ah…home).

And then there is the no-man-is-an-island version of suffering, the human-community of it all: a friend is facing a road of chemo and radiation; other friends are starting over in new places; entire populations of fellow humans are confronting their own marginalisation and not everyone is giving them grace for that; coronavirus is making a comeback stateside and masks have somehow become a political issue.

There is so much deep pain in the world, and because I am not personally in the thick of it at this moment, I worry that I will be, and soon–which itself is a narcissistic stance because why do I have to centre myself in the story?–and I wonder if this is because of my own false dreams, which took decades to be deconstructed through pain and struggle. And now that they’ve been so effectively dismantled, I’m left with their rubble cleared in favour of the better story their absence makes room for, able to see it for the first time and just breathe…and, of course, fret.

But Hamilton comes out this weekend on Disney+, and we have friends coming over to watch it, and there’s a new rainbow practically every day because apparently it’s rainbow season here, and I get to take baths again, and downstairs we have a room where TK and I will go soon (he keeps asking if I’m done) to watch some Pixar shorts, his favourite. And we’ll watch the one called Float, about a kid who is different and whose dad goes on a journey from ruing that difference to celebrating it, and I’ll watch TK’s face light up because he knows this story. Most of us do, in one way or another, whether we’re in a dogshit or rainbow part of the story, and so I’ll try and do the thing that I’ve failed at so many times, but why not give it another go: be here, at this part of the story, now. And live the thing I never dreamed, but that came true anyway.

How many times has the rug been pulled out from under you?

I’ve felt that kind of surprise so often that if it hasn’t happened recently, I start to actively worry that it will happen soon. See: thoughts like “I haven’t had a stomach virus in awhile;” googling “weird headaches and brain tumours;” researching “erratic periods: perimenopause or cancer?”; or, currently, meditations on how thankful we are to be settling into a house we love coupled with my anxiety over the other shoe dropping.

So it’s not a huge distance for me between being pleased that “this rug really ties the room together” and “what about that rug being pulled out from under me tho.” I kind of specialise in these preemptive mental strikes. I remember sitting in both boys’ nurseries before they were each born, belly swollen as I nested in our brown rocking chair, praying away any problems I could think of. And it must have worked? Because those things I prayed over, they didn’t happen.

But other things did.

No, I didn’t pray about tilted heads or laminectomies or neuroatypicality. What I see now about what I was praying for then was that it was for the road to open up ahead of us, smooth and flat and untroubled and easy. Because the thing about flat roads is that you can see far off into the distance, which precludes surprises and preserves a sense of control.

It’s also boring as hell.

Also filed under Things I Didn’t Pray About: being moved across the world. Spending holidays on airplanes and in hotels and in rentals. Feeling like nomads for much of the boys’ early childhood. Living in five houses within three-and-a-half years.

So now, now that we’re in Our Home Here, a place that meets so many of my hopes and dreams (gas fireplace! Wine fridge! Downstairs guest room! Upper level sanctuary that’s just for us with two bathtubs that no one outside our quartet ever has to use!), I’m wondering, of course, whether that new rug that really ties the room together will be pulled out from under me. What I can’t see that’s just around the bend. Because if we were kicked out of this house, or out of this country, right now, I would make. a. SCENE.

There is a walk nearby that includes a spot called Arabanoo Lookout. From it, you can turn one way and see the city skyline, and the other and see Manly, and in front of you lies the ocean, vast and blue, specked with headlands. It seems that you might see anything coming, from any direction. And standing there makes me think of a couple of things. I think of how I never would have known this view if we hadn’t come here. And I think about how the idea of “seeing everything coming” is not only an illusion, but also overrated.

The boys and I went on a bush walk there recently, during the homeschooling days, when I tried to lead them to some Aboriginal drawings but, it turned out, I didn’t know the way. They irritation–and mine–grew as we stumbled around, directionless, before giving up and heading back to the car– a spot from where we could see a rainbow. I’ve tried to rebrand “wanderings” to them as “adventure walks” and sometimes they buy it; sometimes not. There is something to be said for wandering aimlessly, but only when the one who’s leading you ultimately knows what the hell they’re doing.

Which I do, but also? I really don’t. I know techniques, and evidence-based research and its findings, and I have a weather app, and an alarm that goes off in my car if I’m backing up too closely to something. Otherwise, if I’m being honest with myself, I’m flying blind, and this has especially been revealed lately as the kids have gone back through the school gates without me; as The Kid has gone it alone, therapist-less, and I cannot rely on her thorough reports each day. (Although this morning, I did hang around to watch what the boys would do after they put their things down in their classrooms. I peered through a tree like a creeper as Little Brother emerged first, pacing around the playground until TK showed back up; then LB looked straight at me and pointed with a violated look on his face and I ran away like a small child.)

I get hints, glimmers really. We all do: SARS before COVID; The Husband’s call about Australia a year before being sent there; the clouds before the rain before the rainbow. I either miss those hints, or try to use them as scaffolding for a roadmap that allows no alterations or detours. And I do this time after time after time. Dead ends seem to be my love language.

But so are U-turns, and new starts. Surprises, which can often feel like attacks–like rug-pulls–until I remember that so much of “not being able to see” is about not being kept in the dark, but about being in the right place, with the right protection, to witness glory–the view we never would have known otherwise.

Our family owns a sign that I bought for The Husband one Christmas from one of those overpriced catalogue companies who do specialty art that makes your life feel…unique. I love that shit, so I’ve bought from them several times over the years. We are also the proud owners, for example, of a twee little wall-hanging that has our names on it alongside maps of Alabama and California, our home states. It’s so overly precious and it’s my JAM.

This particular sign has our last name on it above the coordinates of our first home in Sydney: the latitude and longitude of where we lived four houses ago, seven minutes away from where we are now so not all that different. It felt important at the time to acknowledge our new position in time and space, different as it was from our previous spot in Atlanta, much like a dog marks his territory (or my sons mark theirs, with bush wees all over those coordinates). The other night, TH went back to our last rental to do a sweep of anything we might have missed. The next morning, I noticed that sign next to our front door, planted firmly in the soil there. “We almost forgot it,” he told me.

But he didn’t.

And so it’s planted anew, and so are we, in a home we’ve bought in a land far from where we started, which is strange but so wonderful. From the moment we walked in last week, moving boxes in hand (and so many more being loaded onto a truck at the rental), this felt like home. That breath I’ve been holding for three years–first, holding until we returned back to the US and, quickly, holding in hopes of staying–has been released and re-released endlessly over the last few days as we’ve found a place for everything and everything has found its place. This spot seems made for us: the deck overlooking the trees, the egg-shaped bathtub to which I return nightly, the colours that are exactly what we would have chosen.

Then there are the nearby walks along cliffs and beaches, the expansive park ten minutes away where we envision runs with the dog we’ll be getting, the coffee shop next to the park where TH loads up on caffeine, the grocery stores that are bigger and newer than what we knew, the sandwich shop that has filled a need I’ve been feeling since we moved to Sydney.

If I say everything feels right, will that jinx it? I write that in texts to friends and feel it as anxiety creeping in when I realise I’m just so happy, so relieved to be right where we are. When I look around with a goofy grin at this spot that is ours. When I see our photos arranged around the mantel where, in a few months, Christmas stockings will sit stuffed because we will not be in a hotel this year. As TH and I have said to each other multiple times over the past few days, it all feels too good to be true. We’re waiting for someone to come kick us out.

And it is to good to be true, if I’m expecting this house to change everything: expecting it to fix every problem I’ve ever had, or to be a place to hide permanently from the ups and downs that life will bring. I was standing next to our beautiful new oven the other night, swearing at it because I couldn’t figure out how to turn the damn thing on, and I realised that PMS and anxiety and ingratitude will visit me here too, because I am here. And I’m still me. How annoying.

But the sense of relief makes space for a new view, not just the one from a different vantage point over the bridge, but a view provided by a soft landing–a view of the gifts I did not earn, but am free to now enjoy with tears in my eyes: the runs along the water at sunrise, pink and purple giving way to blue as I slowly conquer new hills. The secret beaches I find on hikes and can’t wait to tell the boys about. The car rides, rather than walks, to school that are a bit longer but also give us space to talk when we’re not hoofing it uphill.

I got an email from The Kid’s teacher last night. He and Little Brother have been champions throughout all the upheaval of the last few weeks: coronavirus, homeschool, the move. (They’ve also been assholes, to be sure, but champions nonetheless.) TK has the added weight of his therapist being faded out completely, rather than gradually, because of COVID, so now he goes it alone daily in what I can only see as a feat of invincibility. I yearn for any updates the teacher can give while walking the delicate line of not wanting to harass her, so yesterday’s note, when it arrived as I was settling in to bed, was the most incredible gift.

“James had a fantastic day today!” she began, going on to describe how Mondays can be tough but he gave everything a go and “completed the activities to a really high standard.” She went on, “He melted my heart when he said, ‘I am proud of me today.'”

Well shit. I sat in bed, reading and rereading, tears overflowing, as she finished by saying how happy she is to teach him. I just…sometimes, you know, the hard stuff is too much. And sometimes? The beautiful stuff is.

The other night TH was putting the boys to bed and I saw our wedding photo book sitting in its new spot on the bookcase. I grabbed it and a glass of wine and took them both outside, poring over the decade-old memories: the two of us having no idea what lay ahead, a couple of non-tired idiots forging ahead into a new life. Having no idea what cleaving to each other would look like, what forms it would take as it shifted between joy and sorrow and pain and glory, too hard and too beautiful, everything too much and yet carried on the breath of grace that somehow makes it just what, and where, it should be.