• 

I’m convinced that some (some) of my anxiety comes from a simple failure to recognise patterns. For example, right now I sit twisted in figurative knots as I await a move in forty-eight hours, prior to which packers will be arriving (tomorrow) and after which will begin a lengthy unpacking and settling-in period. We’ve done this already–four times in the past three-and-a-half years, to be exact–and we’ve made it through, every time. But I’ll still sleep erratically for the next two nights and will be powered by cortisol for the next two days. After which I’ll find something else to be anxious about.

Having moved out of, and into, so many houses over the past few years, I can honestly say that this one brings the most excitement because it feels like ours. (The hefty money transfer occurring would testify to that as fact.) When we fill drawers and decorate walls, we will be doing it knowing that (as far as we are aware), we won’t be undoing this all in a year or less. We will be truly settling in. This is terrifying, and wonderful. But, especially given that we can’t even go to the US right now, it feels right. It feels like it’s time. Soon, I will be releasing a three-point-five-years-held breath.

But I’ll still be anxious. I’ll be unnerved by all the boxes, overwhelmed by all the choices, and looking towards the next stage of our lives with questions: are we here forever? What should we do about high schools? And was that post I just read about the prominence of leeches here in damp yards meant to prepare me for something?

So many questions. Which feels only appropriate, as my life thus far has taken the shape of one mass and constant exodus away from the certainty of all I know and into grace and all its mysteries.

This plays out in strange ways on the ground. Because sometimes, having the Red Sea parted for you looks like finding out your kid’s brain works differently because this is the only path that will get you all to where you need to be and to the people who will be with you there. Sometimes, being rescued looks like the opposite of it–say, like getting swallowed by a whale or, in less dramatic examples, like inching away from the philosophies you grew up hearing until your new moral ground looks decidedly more diverse, less predictable, and much like getting called a socialist by those who knew you back then. And sometimes, being shifted into the current of grace looks like buying a house in a foreign country to which you protested moving because now, that country is home.

For some reason, foreign words keep finding me, and this week’s is the Welsh word hiraeth: a homesickness for a home to which one cannot return, or a home which never was. I feel both parts of this definition, deeply. I know that I have moved past the comforts of much of what I was taught, from the clear lines that were drawn that separated us and them, from the lack of nuance and complexity into a world where grey figures in prominently and people are more than one thing. I cannot go back there. I have seen too much, and the etchings of time and pain and love and grace have done their awful and wonderful work. I am profoundly grateful.

I also know that I long for a home I haven’t experienced yet, one where justice–true and sweeping and sufficient justice–has made all things right, where love has made all things new, and where all that is sad has, finally, become untrue. I await this home having never seen it but trusting it is real both because I believe it is and because it just has to be. Because its future reality and its present promises are unveiled more and more to me by grace, by the unremitting love that is grace–the love that will not leave me to comfort when it can be with me in the more.

I’ve caught up with several friends this week, a couple of whom I haven’t seen face to face in over a year each, and even with my anxiety over these reunions (will I say the right thing? Will I know how to behave in a social setting when it’s been so long?), they have been like mini-homecomings. At the end of one of them, my friend said, “I think of you often,” and I told her the same as a woman nearby glanced up at us quizzically, surely wondering what our deal was, and as I thought about it on the way home, I realised that this is our deal–my deal: that without grace intervening and making this particular story our story, I wouldn’t ever hear things like that, truths spoken in person and over email that are often taken for granted: I’m thankful for you. I’m so glad you’re here. I miss you. I think of you often.

This is what being in the flow of grace is: floating along peacefully one minute, thrashing about the next, each moment unpredictable and beyond my ability to control it. And knowing, for all the moments, that I am held and heading home.

• 

For the past few days, I’ve approached our washing machine and recoiled in disgust as the fumes of faeces have hit my nostrils. I’ve made as many excuses as I can for this stench without actually diving into the machine for firsthand research: maybe it’s all the rain we’ve been having? That has contributed to some stanky mildew masquerading as a boom boom? I’ve rationalised my way out of dealing with the problem until a few minutes ago, when it practically hit me in the face: a small log of poo resting neatly on the inside door of the machine. The problem–and its true source–could no longer be ignored. It had risen from the depths to the surface. And I had to clean that shit up.

So I did. Half-heartedly and gagging the whole time. As I wondered how many past loads of clothing have been stained by said shit, are now carrying around flecks of it, and how many future loads will bear its traces. This baby log likely (definitely) erupted from the skid marks of one of the boys’ underwear, but it will live on in ways both seen (smelled) and unseen.

(I’ll give you all a moment to adjust out of your “metaphor” setting.)

This morning I ran across the nearby bridge as Coolio sang the bars of “Gangsta’s Paradise” into my ears, and it took me back twenty-five years, to a dorm room in Birmingham and my first year of college. My new sorority sisters and I danced and swayed, beers in our hands, to the soundtrack of Dangerous Minds as we prepared for a night out on campus at our homogeneous school, situated in a “bad” (black) area of the city, across the street from a bar whose owners sold us cheap beer. In return, we gave them our patronage and assuaged our own consciences; how could we be racists if we supported their business and listened to Coolio?!

I’ll tell you one way: by, the next year, voting down the return of a black girl to our second night of rush after a heated debate. I remember the battle lines drawn that night and I remember who was on each side of them. I remember being on the wrong side as my friends on the right side recoiled in their inability to understand. I remember trying to justify what was utter shit: hatred dressed up as who cares what because it was, simply, racism. The shame I carry from that night, from so many other moments like it, will rightfully last me the rest of my life.

But I’m not here to fetishise past sins or create a linear narrative of wrong>>right. These white-girl stories of “I’ve seen the light” smack of virtue-signalling, and the position of White Saviour has been eradicated from the job listings, FYI. I’m here not to seek absolution but to grieve, I suppose, because when in doubt that posture has always been life-giving. There is always something to grieve in this world, especially now, and I know from experience that grace meets me there, always, with its hope.

I’ve been clinging to a Hebrew word recently: hesed. It has been defined many ways, but what it is, is a synonym for grace that dives deep. It is a covenantal, irrevocable love bestowed upon a beloved. It is unassailable. It is what I think about when I watch my kids cross into the school gate that I can’t, currently, cross with them: they are held by this chesed love that is greater than what even I can give them. It reminds me, it re-members me, when I am curled at home in a ring of anxiety wondering about their present and their future. They are beloved, and so am I. They are held in hesed, that which is greater than I can force or imagine.

All of us are held in this love. All of us were created to bear this love. This love that is greater than I can imagine, that cherishes me, it created and cherishes everyone, especially the brokenhearted, and it makes their lives matter. It proves their worth and it defies all hatred against them, and if I stand against them I stand against it. I stand against this death-defying, unassailable, perfect love.

I’m not going to do that.

The boys’ forced independence has forced dependence on my part: dependence on this greater love that holds them and directs their steps within a plan beyond what I can see, or smell, or imagine. I am counting on their belovedness, I am counting on mine, and I am coming to terms with all the ways I have begrudged others that belovedness before but how I can see it now, this love for all life that binds us together.

Yesterday, Little Brother had his first soccer practise and he ran up and down the field, pure joy streaking across his face. Later I got an email from The Kid’s teacher, letting me know he’d had a great day, how he had reached out to partner with the new girl in class and when another friend had wanted to join, he asked the teacher if they could have a group of three so she wouldn’t be left out. I watch these children of mine and know they are constant proof of a love greater than I have shown, greater than I can give. I see them as hope of a better world.

There is another Hebrew word I cling to: shalom. And it doesn’t mean, simply, peace like I used to think, but is better represented by wholeness. It’s a word that’s so far from describing our world right now, but its mere existence–like that of my children–is a source of hope: that it’s what we’re meant for. That it can be where we’re headed, carrying our grief for now but carried by what will heal it, all of us, the beloved.

• 

“The big thing is so ridiculous that you absorb only the smaller miracles.” –Kevin Wilson, Nothing to See Here

On Sunday morning I was drinking my coffee when I received an email about Little Brother’s soccer team: they would be having their first practice the next day.

This is the soccer team that was formed nearly three months ago and whose original first practice had been called off, like so many things, due to the pandemic. I had been given second-hand uniforms from a friend but still lacked cleats and shinguards and whatever else you need to play soccer that I don’t know about because if it didn’t involve a book and solitude, then I didn’t grow up doing it, and the whole idea of this Big New Thing left me reeling. I’m not ready, I thought. I’m not ready for the real world yet.

I went outside to do some yoga a few minutes later, to relax and get away from all the people in my house, but the wind was whipping my mat around and I grew angrier by the second. I don’t think an ideal yoga practice is punctuated with obscenities, but there I was trying to relax, dammit while cursing the weather and the world.

Last week, when school was just occurring one day a week and I had opted out of the online homeschooling component and social interactions hadn’t graduated several levels, a friend and I talked about how maybe things were at the perfect point: there weren’t many obligations we had to meet or people we had to see. We had reached Optimal Pandemic Response Level and maybe could stay there awhile? But now the kids are back full-time and things are opening back up (slowly, here; what are all those assholes doing on the beaches in America?! GOOD LUCK WITH THAT) and the restart, this reintroduction into society, is making me pine a bit for our former seclusion. It’s also, apparently, making me angry.

Here’s the thing: when I’m carrying around irrational yoga-mat or otherwise-directed anger, I know it’s due to one or both of two things: anxiety and/or unprocessed grief. This is the kind of wisdom that therapy provides. I used to walk around the world bruised and mad and not knowing why. Now, when I scream “F— you!” at the wind, I think of what my counsellor would say: that anger happens when we haven’t properly grieved. Or what he did say, in our most recent session: that maybe the panic attacks and other anxiety have come up because that anxiety has always been there, latent, and this quarantine gave it space to rise to my awareness.

This makes me wonder what else is hiding in there, waiting to come up.

But I already know, really, and it’s new versions of the same thing. It’s the same sadness over the space between what the world is and what it should be; over the disappointments that arise when expectations are not met. It’s the anxiety of watching my children navigate this world and wanting to protect them through it in a way that would be unhealthy and suffocating for all of us. It’s living in this world, period, as myself, and dealing honestly with all that’s not perfect instead of distracting myself from it. And it’s doing that over and over again, like some kind of idiot, which is to say…surviving.

I went to the mall yesterday, nervously and begrudgingly (always), and picked up a book about raising kids with special needs. I wondered what advice I might glean from scanning and not buying it, and as I flipped through the pages, I realised it was a “how to” narrative that I have already “done” most of on my own. Battling loneliness, managing advocacy, facing denial–I’ve been there, and I will be there again, but I’m not where I was. Same thing, different view.

Then I drove to our new neighbourhood, where we’ll be unpacking in two weeks, and to a lookout near that house where we’ve spotted rainbows before. And then (because the kids were still at school!) I drove to our current nearby beach and walked it and looked at the same water I had just seen from a different vantage point. I thought about how it feels like this, how we’re always starting over at the same things. About what Michael Jordan had said on the last episode of The Last Dance, describing the beginning of his career with the Bulls: “Started with hope…started with hope.”

How, even with the grief and anxiety–no, because of it, because living deeply acquaints us even more with it–so within the grief and anxiety, at the start of every new thing, lies hope, which is really just grace born anew, over and over.

• 

“The matter is taken out of my hands. And that means liberation. A great anxiety is lifted, the greatest of all.” –Karl Barth

Last week, the boys and I hit a wall. We actually hit several smaller walls on the way to this one but had somehow either pushed through those or found a way around them, but this wall…it was no joke. This wall had homeschooling written all over it and after hitting it, we were done.

I was tired, as previously mentioned, and this facet of tiredness had to do with juggling my mom and teacher roles, and feeling I was failing at both. Cracking the whip of learning while also trying to be their comforter and refuge. And for their part, the boys had turned into major assholes, defying my every instruction and groaning endlessly about the smallest amount of work. Things began to grind to a halt when Little Brother screamed out for help only for me to look up and see that he was…watching a video? And needed help with it? (See also: when he asked me the opposite of hot. They were done with the “thinking” portion of homeschool, is what I’m saying.)

So on Sunday night, after half-assedly brainstorming ways to make learning fun (gag), I came up with a plan. It should be noted, at this point, that I am great at plans. I’m fab with ideas. It’s the execution part at which I do not excel.

I emailed both The Kid’s and LB’s teachers and told them we’d be bowing out of online learning for the most part. That I was going to pursue more outdoor experiences, more on-the-ground-as-we-go lessons, more guided-by-their-interests projects. And after waiting nervously for responses that I ostensibly hoped would be positive but inwardly really hoped would acknowledge me as The Mother of the Universe for making this call, I heard back from the teachers. Their responses were affirming and lovely and, most practically, were green lights to my plan.

So Monday morning, I sat the boys on the couch with our whiteboard, which typically lists all of their assignments for the day and is the scourge of their, particularly TK’s, existence. And in dramatic fashion, I took the eraser and wiped the damn thing clean.

They didn’t get it at first. Then they tried to quantify what was happening: how many things did they actually have to do, then? Was spelling still on the table? What time would we finish this new kind of learning? But they were overall on board, as it sounded like less work than they’d been having to do, so we settled in to our new routine. I was chipper about it. This is always a bad sign: me being chipper.

After a bit of time at the table doing reading and maths, then on the floor doing English (conjunctions are like trains connecting sentences together and my children do not care), we headed out for the Field Study component of our lesson plan: a walk to the Aboriginal drawings in the nearby bushland. The last time I was near these drawings was during my twelve-hour hike and it was nighttime and I wanted to kill the world, so my approach had been a bit different.

This time, we parked at a nearby overlook and set out on the path I thought would take us quickly to the drawings. Surrounded by complaints about everything from my choice of parking to the existence of the sun, I felt my temper fraying. TK stopped to do a bush wee then complain some more. I may have whispered the words shut up. I may have muttered the words the fuck between them. There may have been tears and desperation. And we (I) may have finally given up and returned to the green oval to throw a football around then head home.

On our way to the car, though, something happened. TK, who is in that stage of Protesting Everything We Do and who is also a control freak like his mother, looked left and pointed out a rainbow. We have been positively rife with rainbows here lately, short rains giving way to sunlight and the spectrum of colours inhabiting the space between them. In this moment, the three of us looked across the water to that smattering of hues in the distant-but-not-too distant sky. And right there, the lesson plan changed.

On the way home, as they argued with me over which route to take, I told the boys how lucky we were: we had planned to see drawings that we can go back and view anytime, but instead we saw a rainbow that we could only catch in that moment. They argued this, telling me that we see lots of rainbows, but I told them how each rainbow is different from all others, just like each person is different from everyone else. Yes, I polished that turd up good, to a lovely sheen, but even I started to believe what I was saying. We went in with one plan, I told them, and got a rainbow instead. (And a blog post. Though I didn’t tell them that.)

And once we were home and they’d eaten the gourmet lunch I’d prepared (PB&J) and we had all retired to books/screens, I thought about how much I suck at execution, at how I always seem to have a plan but never seem to know the way. And how in the end–at the end of homeschooling, or saving myself and/or my children, or anything really–how that doesn’t matter, because grace has both a plan and a way. And they’re both so much better than mine.

I feel it all, I feel it all

The wings are wide, the wings are wide

Wild card inside, wild card inside…

I know more than I knew before

• 

We bought a house. And I just dropped my kids off at school. You might say things are…settling into place?

You might, and you’d be wrong. Or at least only partially right? Because the thing I’m beginning to understand, after more than four decades on this planet (thank you, Jesus and therapy), is that it’s a bit more complicated than that. And complicated is something that scares the hell out of people.

But not me; not anymore. (At least, not most days. #workingonit)

So to begin again: yes, we bought a house. It was the one that we thought had slipped through our fingers a few weeks ago. Maybe that whole “let a thing go and if it comes back to you, it was meant to be yours” rings true now, or maybe it’s more complicated than that (you know I’ll go with option B; I never met a cliché I didn’t hate). All I know is that the agent came back to us after a week and we ended up striking a deal (by we I mean, of course, The Husband), and we’re moving seven minutes away in four weeks’ time. That, and there are two glorious bathtubs, which means the boys get their piss-filled one and I get my own. God is real, folks.

Second: the kids are back at school one day a week. And what a beautiful procession it was, the one-and-a-half block walk, the greeting of friends from a social distance (I received an illicit hug; oh, the joy!), the running onto the grounds where parents are, wonderfully, not currently allowed. The beauty of it all being in response to rational, scientific thinking instead of quarantine fatigue (feel that side-eye, America?).

So, at this moment, no one is touching me. No one is demanding that I wipe their ass or bring them food. A friend just texted, “this is one of the happiest days of my life.” GIRL, SAME.

And this feeling of all being right in the world? This sense of everything shifting back into its rightful place? This calm of well-being that pervades my soul? It shall last approximately five minutes before anxiety creeps back in and I fret over how the boys are doing and how much we have to pack.

“Know thyself,” goes the Greek maxim, and here’s the thing: I’m starting to. And it’s messy, and scary, and incredible.

There is a fringe contingent of Christianity (and I say fringe not because they’re crazy, but because everyone who doesn’t belong to it is) that is, finally, acknowledging the connection between self-awareness and mental health, between spiritual and mental health, between therapy and grace. And, because I get to police my own mental health if I don’t want it to fly off the rails, I’ve been diving deep into this group’s offerings: these therapists who cosign on such “woo-woo” practices as meditation, as attentiveness and awareness. Because the truth is that there a lot of people walking around with no sense of identity other than a narrative of their own making; living reactively rather than receptively; not knowing who the hell they are. And I know, all too well, what that’s like.

It’s captivity. And this is not how we are meant to live. It’s not how we were made to live.

If I sound a bit all over the place, a bit in the clouds, maybe it’s because I’ve been drinking for an hour (I’m KIDDING). No, maybe it’s because I am all over the place, and in the clouds. Because the freedom that comes with knowing how many terrifying and dark nooks and crannies there are within myself, and knowing at the same time that this is okay because grace is big enough to handle that and has always meant for me to be on a path into and through that? That is true freedom. That is joy. That is resistance to the status quo of “be positive and agreeable and hide/fight the hard stuff.”

Fleming Rutledge writes, “the beginning of resistance is not to explain, but to see. Seeing itself is a form of action.” We seek simple answers–explanations–because they distract us from the truth that much of life is more complicated than we’re comfortable with seeing; there’s more mystery than we want. We want to know that everything is shifting into place and moving back to normal because we can’t face the idea that things may never be truly normal again.

Well, I’ve lived with “not normal” for awhile now, and it’s kind of wonderful. Also, it can suck. There’s room for both here.

Kay Redfield Jamison wrote An Unquiet Mind (girl, mine too!) and in it she says, “I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces…It is, at the end of the day, the individual moments of restlessness, of bleakness, of strong persuasions and maddened enthusiasms, that inform one’s life, change the nature and direction of one’s work, and give final meaning and colour to one’s love and friendships.”

So, to recap: here, there is room to despair. There is room to feel sad. There is room to be angry. There is room to say “this isn’t right, nor is it okay, Whitney.” There is freedom to look around and mutter, “This sucks,” much like even my five- and eight-year-old boys do (back off, pearl-clutchers; we actually say much worse around our house; remind me to tell you of the Lego Incident of last weekend).

“To see yourself,” writes Sarah Wilson, “to see that you are part of a big magnificent whole–you have to go to the depths…but–oh glory be–by being in our anxiety, by going down to the dark depths, we finally find the connection. Because anxiety, eventually and inevitably, makes us sit in our shit. It takes us there, to the darkness. It forces us to do the journey. And only then can we see what we were looking for. We can see the truth. We see it all as it is.”

As it is. Not as we want it to be, or as we’re trying to make it. Not as we want ourselves to be, or as we’re trying to seem. What we are, as Wilson writes, is what “guides us home.” And that is not a chin-up moment of decision, but a journey.

So if you’d like to be a shit-sitter, come sit by me. I won’t ask you to change, or pretend, but just to look. To see. To gaze boldly around, ahead, and take in the awful magnificence of this world and ourselves: the dark nooks and crannies and the terrifying unpredictability and the wonderful truth that this world–that we–are so much more than one thing. That we are full of the beauty of unexplainable mystery. And so, thank God, is grace.

• 

It’s like learning to ride a bike.

I think about that phrase often these days, as we’ve given the boys new bikes–not the crappy Cars– and Paw Patrol-themed hunks of metal they had before, but legitimate ones they can ride for years. They both still sport training wheels, which is a liability in a place where every other kid seems to not do so, but I’m willing to bet none of them ever had spinal surgery and a halo when they were two so they can ride off into the sunset for all I care; we will get there when we get there. Which, by our estimates, will be tomorrow, when we take our maiden voyage without said training wheels. #prayersplease

The other day, The Kid–after yelling at me to “keep holding him!” (he had a fall a couple of weeks ago and hasn’t bounced back yet)–started his ride with a query for me. “So,” he began. “How’s it going with your husband, Dad? Is he being nice to you? Tell me some stories about it.”

Later on the trail, we talked about fear and how it can help us in dangerous situations but hurt us other times, if we let it run the show. This may be the hardest part of parenting to me: the groundwork-laying that–instead of letting me off the hook to just skip over the givens that I’ve come to accept–asks me to teach these details to my kids, which can be sooooo tedious and always involves questions from them, typically of the why variety–my least favourite.

But this time, after my lecture on fear, TK just nodded his head. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s why I ask you those questions at the beginning of the ride. And why I want to talk the whole way. So I don’t think about my fear.”

This is the same kid who, this morning, wheels turning almost visibly in his head, turned to me and said, “Mom? I think human beings are actually the disease that is killing the earth.” So…yeah. My mind’s been blown a few times lately by him.

And it’s been beaten down, by this whole unrequested teaching gig. We struggle over next-level addition and subtraction and multiplication and division and I want to scream (and often do), and then I remember that it wasn’t long ago we were struggling through adding single digits together, and now I get (get?) to watch him put the pieces together, build on top of what we’ve already done. This is what learning looks like, what growth looks like, and I’m bearing witness to it in a way I never would have chosen and will be happy to hand off again but for now…it’s a bit breathtaking.

Little Brother works alongside us, starting with the basics as kindergarteners do, and after he reads a bit and adds a bit and spells a bit, he calls me over to his break area, the tent that’s been set up in our living room/school annex/fort centre, and he invites me inside to tell him, again, the fart story I made up a few days ago, and he laughs as hard this time as he did the first. And instead of giving into tedium and claustrophobia I try to sit there, in that close space with him, where it is warm and did I mention close, and I remember being a kid myself and gravitating toward spaces like this that felt me-sized and safe. And I feel that way again, with him pressed into me. Back to the basics.

My first day of working at NYU, I was introduced to an over-fifty-years-my-senior Southern gentleman in a bowtie who immediately became one of my closest friends at work, and in life. We would meet at the opera and ballet and over lunches. Once I moved, and would come back for visits, he and I would catch up at his apartment overlooking Central Park, and I’d call him from Atlanta to update him on my life. He always sent a Christmas card. Five years ago, he took me for dessert while I was in New York for the weekend, and as we said goodbye on the corner of Central Park West and he walked away, a feeling pierced me that this was the last time I’d see him.

I was right. The next time I called him, it was clear he was struggling to remember who I was but was making a valiant effort of pretending he knew. This week, I got another feeling, and I searched online to find out he passed away a month ago, of natural causes, in his apartment overlooking Central Park. He was ninety-five.

I grieve for him. There seems to be grief to spare these days, given the new world we inhabit. I find myself writing in my planner now not what I’m going to do but what we’ve done, memorable things the boys have said or small events that have already taken place. Commemorations. This act not of planning so much now, but remembering. Re-membering, the pieces starting small but somehow building, all these moments of endings and beginnings adding together to create a whole and new thing.

• 

I’m so tired.

I regret all the times I said I was tired pre-quarantine. Just like, after having children, I regretted all the times I’d said I was tired before having them.

Because now, as then, I’m experiencing a new kind of tiredness. A new level of exhaustion. I’ve been left wondering if I’m iron-deficient, or have a serious illness. I struggle through runs that used to be…if not easy, then doable, feeling as though I’m wearing ankle weights. I can’t seem to get enough sleep, the alarm set pre-COVID giving way to lingering in bed and an anger over having to leave it. I feel breathless walking up stairs.

I am so tired.

And I’d be more worried, if 1) I had space for more worry; and 2) everyone around me weren’t saying the same thing. They’re so tired too, except for the Instagram overachievers who’ve gone public with all their PRs, but my “they” refers to the people around me, the ones who nod their heads slowly, The Husband commiserating over his own shitty runs; another daily presence commiserating over her own panic attacks and inability to switch from a 6 am wakeup to an even later one without feeling drained.

And who knows, maybe I do need more iron (talk to me about leafy greens right now at your own peril), but I definitely know this: there is a weight upon me that wasn’t there before; and maybe a weight that was there, but that I was distracted from feeling.

Homeschool (distance learning, whatever) starts back tomorrow. I want to punch something just writing that. I am angry about being my children’s teacher, their alternating slavedriver and saviour from it, pushing for completion one minute and throwing my arms up in an “F it all” pose the next (consistency can shove it right now). There is the weight of being a newly-minted, unqualified teacher of two grades and the awareness that comes with it of all they have to learn–to be taught–and the one–me–apparently responsible for that. It’s too much. It’s too heavy.

And then there are the weights that I was distracted from feeling; the awarenesses that didn’t register because I was moving too fast. There are no distractions now from my own chaotic mind, from my own anxiety and introspection. Life used to have a baseline of movement: daily walks, twice over, to the boys’ school, pilgrimages into the world, travels. Now stillness is life’s point of reference: we’re always either at, or headed, home. And home–stillness–for all its noise, is quieter.

Social media still exists, so plenty of us are still adept at evading ourselves and any self-awareness a lengthy interaction with our “selves” can bring. But I’m meeting the unavoidable-for-me beast head on: I am my own observer. I see myself wanting to use online retail therapy to feel better. I see myself noticing, more, how alcohol affects my sleep (and my runs, and my moods) and I have to figure out what to do about that. How food does the same.

I see how I have to be my own advocate, even while caring for others. How an introvert must claim space or go insane–or at least into a panic attack. How I have to send my regrets to some Zoom meetings because that is space I need for myself right now, at a time when we are all so surrounded by each other, in this house at least. How meditation–and by that I simply mean being in the present moment, without judgment, for more than five seconds–is essential. How prayer is oxygen. How humour is a life raft. How books for me, and iPads for the kids, have to happen. How saying NO to the voices that chant “Do more! Make this time count!” is not just self-care, but wisdom itself.

“Every man rushes elsewhere into the future because no man has arrived at himself,” wrote Michel de Montaigne, who is quoted in the book my friend gave me, which has been its own lifeline. And what’s funny and perfect about right now? WE HAVE NO FUTURE TO RUSH INTO! SO WE CAN EITHER RUN IN CIRCLES OR INTO OURSELVES. Sarah Wilson, the author of said book, says about de Montaigne: “He shared through his writing that freedom from the restlessness in our beings could only be achieved by actively resisting the pull outwards and into the future, and instead learning to ‘stay at home’.”

Ha. #stayathome.

On the way back from our daily trip to the beach this morning, the boys asked to hear “My Shot,” and as the familiar tune reached my ears, I thought for a second something was wrong, then realised that no, my phone hadn’t somehow slowed down the tempo. It was always at that speed. Everything feels slow right now, because I’m trying to speed it up. I am being called to stillness. To my family. To myself. And to the grace that waits there.

• 

Our house smells like farts, and I had another panic attack, at 1 am last night.

We made an offer on a house whose marble countertops and double-headed shower felt like a ship on its way to rescue us, the Carpathia en route to the Titanic, but that one–our third–didn’t work out either, so we’re left to rot in moist-carpet hell.

Also, The Husband gave our precious, beautiful boys some haircuts that have been compared (by me) as Dumb and Dumber meets concentration camp.

What I’m saying is that these conditions are not tense, or a strain, or simply tough. They’re warfare. This is not normal–none of it is. So to react normally would actually be…a bit insane? To not lose one’s shit over their oat milk being shared without their permission? To step on that damp(est) part of the carpet and not want to punch a hole in the wall? To hear the kids complain about their charmed lives (but not haircuts) and not want to send them on a one-way ticket to a third-world country? That would be insane. And I am seriously wary of anyone who is taking all of this well.

But, per usual, I’m wary of anyone who is making it all out to be one thing, good or bad, without nuance. Because even in this messy reality of life together, I’m seeing what just would never have been without it: mornings spent at the beach, digging and exploring. Movie nights, every night (fun fact: we alternate between TWO of them! JUST TWO!). Board-game sessions spent teaching Little Brother the drawbacks of not winning fair and square (he has yet to internalise this). Impromptu trampoline sessions the boys get to have with The Husband (another fun fact: I tried, at forty-two years of age, to jump on the trampoline! It did not go well! My knee was hit with a piercing pain and it felt like my rectum fell out!).

Still, the hardest part of it all may be…me. Julia-Louis Dreyfus, one of the only celebs allowed to talk right now, recently posted a photo of herself with the caption, “Look, I’m just gonna say it. I’m fucking sick of myself.”

GIRL, SAME. I am sick of what’s been revealed about me during this time: how I can turn even an unstructured day into a set of rules, as if we don’t get to the beach before 9 am everything will FALL APART. How my thoughts won’t ever slow down, EVEN WHILE I AM ASLEEP APPARENTLY. How my indulgence in “quaran-wine” is going to have to be dialled back a notch because it’s affecting my sleep and is officially an overindulgence. How I rely on order and cleanliness around our house to maintain a certain level of well-being and THAT IS JUST NOT POSSIBLE IN FARTLAND, IS IT??

But.

Occasionally, like at one in the morning the day before two “huge social outings” (The Kid’s speech therapy appointment and my trip to the salon, cue the angels’ chorus) on a stomach full of wine, I (re)learn the simple truth that I am not my own saviour. That the line I used to venerate from the poem “Invictus”–“I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul”–may be some inspirational shit, but as far as it goes with me it’s just shit because (1) I’m terrible with directions, and (2) I cannot save myself. From myself, or from anything else. Salvation must come from the outside.

Which is why strategies don’t work. They can help–drinking less can help, saying “no” to preserve my unwillingness to be violated can help, funny memes can help, comedian Twitter can help (to a limit), some structure can help, meditation can help. But none of it can save me. I need a lot more help than that.

I think that it might start with not pretending to be what I’m not. (Which is why I want to run and hide in a hole when I see other people doing it–it taps into something deep within me that it took a lot of therapy and a lot of money to deal with; I can’t take others’ on too; I’m already tired.) With not pretending that this time is something it’s not, or is just one thing. Because there is no dark corner of myself or of this pandemic where grace does not go with me. Wherever I go, there I am–and there I AM is–the kind of saving grace that isn’t afraid of messy moods or bad haircuts or family drama because it is more with us when we are ourselves, and honest about it, than it ever could be–than we’d ever allow it to be–in our pretending.

My anxiety is a form of sensitivity that characterises much of my life, but here’s the thing–though it may be a bitch at 1 am or the LEGO table, it is a sensitivity that opens me up to things I never would have noticed without it. It leaves me raw and vulnerable, and it is often there–sometimes, only there–where the real magic happens. Where I, far from the captain’s deck and more in the bowels of the ship, collapsed in a heap–I am held, am made, am brought by grace to a place I never could have gotten to on my own.

• 

I’ve been getting into jazz.

I never used to like it, the meandering melodies and changing rhythms, the unpredictability of it all. But lately, life–like jazz–has been all over the place. And so have I. And maybe I’ve needed music that reflects that. So, every day before dinner, I pour a glass of wine, cue up my jazz station, and sit outside with no aim other than to sit still and watch…and listen.

I’ve also been reading. And that’s been all over the place as well: Anna Karenina, in preparation for the ballet that got cancelled; The Crucifixion, because I’m fun at parties; and Ben Folds’ memoir, A Dream about Lightning Bugs. In that one, Folds mentions a quote attributed to one of my new icons, Miles Davis, in regards to screwing up: “Once is a mistake, twice is jazz.” This is prior to a brilliant chapter about finding your voice.

Stay with me.

Remember how The Kid didn’t talk until he was four? And how now, he never shuts up? Yeah, he’s found his voice. He wakes well before the sun with words aplenty, spilling out of him, questions and answers, and continues his talk throughout the day, providing monologues on natural disasters and weather patterns, narrating catastrophes that befall the city he’s created out of blocks. Lately, he’s engaged in a fun new activity, wherein he–when told something is going to happen that he doesn’t like, ie brushing teeth or eating a vegetable (though let’s be honest, not much of the latter has been happening lately, #survivalmode), he lays down the law, always opening with an exasperated “SO.”

“SO. From now on we’re only going to do that once a day.” “SO. From now on, we’re not going to do that at all.” “SO. From now on I say what we do.” In his eight-year-old world, there is one way, and it’s his. And it would be funny, if it weren’t so annoying.

One way. One thing. I’m not a fan.

And in this time of quarantine, I’m being reminded why. We all want some predictability, a linear narrative that is defined by our own rules–control injected whenever possible–a narrative that ends right where we want it to. Discrete, definable patterns; reliable outcomes. We can’t control coronavirus, but we’ll be damned if we can’t control our personal narrative around it. Cue the social media blitz, photos and flowery memes.

A friend of mine, who has the audacity to always have an opinion (we’re alike in that way), went to a birthday party recently that–surprise–turned out to be a beach cleanup! The honouree enlisted everyone, once they arrived, to grab a provided bag and collect trash to fill it. How could anyone argue, as this was a good and selfless deed? Towards the end of the cleanup, the participants were enlisted again: for a group photo, to be shared on social media.

My friend said no. “But why?” she was questioned. “Come on, just take one photo!” they wheedled. And the kicker: “It’s for a good cause!”

She was having none of it. At the risk of being contrary and seen as difficult, but in seeking to preserve her sense of self, she reiterated her refusal. She didn’t want to be a pawn in this publicised good deed.

And there are so many people–the majority, I’d say–who would echo what her fellow trash collectors said: “Just do it! It’s only for a second! It’ll make everyone happy!” Which, I would argue, sounds a lot like the arguments heard prior to an assault.

I’ve been on the end of that form of compelling before–the social-pressure kind and the assault kind–and I’ve regrettably capitulated in both scenarios, donning a prop or participating in a photo-op or just doing whatever it was that would make someone else happy. Sometimes, this needs to be done. Sometimes, it’s a worthy sacrifice. (I am thinking, of course, of all the games of hide and seek I’ve played with my children, which manage to be both fun and tedious as hell. I am also talking about all the times I’ve had to wipe their asses.)

Sometimes, though, it’s manipulation and coercion. And oftentimes, lately, I’ve said no.

One of my favourite things about therapy has been finding out, as I sit on that couch, how often my reactions to situations are completely normal; it’s the situations themselves that are fucked up. And so often, those situations were engineered by someone with an agenda: a narrative to control. And so often, I was a pawn in that agenda.

Oh, trust me, I’m aware of how much of this I’ve perpetrated myself: narratives I determined to control, and people I’ve attempted to control in the process–in the process of trying to feel an iota of agency in the seeming absence of it. But lately, I’ve been finding my voice. And often, it is contained in one simple word: no.

NO to reducing this pandemic to one thing: one positive, or one negative, or one meme (although I’ll take the funny ones all day). NO to figuring out the meaning of it one month through and posting that meaning to social media in a pithy statement. NO to putting my chin up and being positive when doing so will not only be a lie compared to how depressed I’m feeling, but will threaten my mental health further. NO to interpretations of Easter that make it only a pastel parade of victory when we are so embedded in the “not yet” part of the story that we are in the middle of a global pandemic. NO to making it all just one thing when it’s so damn many of them.

In a thread recently, a friend wrote, “maybe all of our church holidays need to ache a little bit. We need to feel the tension of redeemed and waiting for all redemption.” At which point I applauded even as I realised what an unpopular, unsellable message this multifaceted, impossible-to-nail-down-with-one-label this kind of living is.

But it’s the only place where I come to life.

I have a friend–the kind who sticks closer than a brother–who, when I said to him via a video call the other day that “I guess I’m just a cynic,” shook his head. “You’re not a cynic,” he said. “There’s just no word yet for what you are.”

I know plenty of people who could think of a word. Contrary. Uncooperative. Unaccommodating. And those are the nice ones. But I’ve lived through the foolishness of trying to control my own narrative, and my life only really began when those efforts, and that narrative, fell apart to make way for the great mess of beauty that was waiting. So I’m not interested in being a bit player in someone else’s attempts.

Last weekend Andrea Bocelli exited the Duomo di Milano and sang “Amazing Grace,” repeating at the end the line, “I once was blind but now I see.” How about that! A blind man saying he can see? And there was a guy (I’m told he came back to life recently) who referred to himself as both peace and a sword. All over the place. Contradictions aplenty. Unpredictable and unwieldy and out of control. Like jazz.

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice –

though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

“Mend my life!”

each voice cried.

But you didn’t stop.

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried

with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations –

though their melancholy

was terrible.

It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice,

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do –

determined to save

the only life you could save.

–Mary Oliver, “The Journey”

• 

I had a panic attack yesterday.

Isn’t that cute? That it wasn’t the bustle of New York or a move across the world that gave me my first full-on attack, but a few minutes of darting back and forth between The Kid, on his iPad doing a zoom session with his speech therapist, and Little Brother, doing LEGO at the kitchen table. Pulled one second toward TK to cast him a stern glance for not following his therapist’s instructions; pulled the next second by LB’s urges to help him find a piece, pulled apart within minutes by the greater fragmentation caused by this extraordinary time: my own identity overshadowed by the new ones I’ve had to assume, these roles of full-time third-grade teacher, full-time kindergarten teacher, full-time IT support for both classes as class parent.

So I fell apart. My throat constricted–my own personal hallmark of overwhelming anxiety, happens all the time–then the tightening moved to my chest, and within seconds I was struggling to breathe, wondering why my heart hurt so much, feeling like I was going to die. Right there among the LEGO. Like some kind of half-assed domestic martyr.

I put the kids on their iPads and told The Husband that I was going for a walk. I traveled around the block, and when I got home I received a text from a friend: had I read this book? Because she just had, and could loan it to me. I responded with something like, “I JUST GOT BACK FROM WALKING AROUND THE BLOCK TO FEND OFF A PANIC ATTACK SO YES THAT WOULD BE GREAT WHEN CAN YOU BRING IT.” Within minutes, the book was on my doorstep.

You can call that whatever you want to, but I call it grace.

Later, I put the boys in front of a movie (yes, there is a theme here and screens exist for a reason; USE THEM) and sat outside with a glass of wine and my phone, which was playing jazz. The time changed last weekend–it’s autumn here now–and, at nearly six, the sun was setting. I looked up at the backlit clouds and just stared. Their beauty leaves me with no other conclusion than that they have a Maker, though I’m not a fan of a lot of his other work right now, but then again I’m not at a high enough pay grade to receive all the current inter-office memos. So I just stared, and waited, and as the darkness grew around me, I cried.

I cried for things I haven’t fully grieved yet and likely never fully will: our church back in America, where our pastor, I had been told, just forwarded to everyone an article I wrote recently, attaching the message that he was still mad we’d left. I grieved for him and his wife, dear friends–the best, really–and for all the other people we’d left behind there, for the easy fellowship and deep vulnerability we’d experienced with them.

I cried for the grief my kids are experiencing but are unable to articulate, the loss of contact with teachers and friends, the spikes of boredom that are actually good for them but painful for all of us, for the fact they have to spend so much time out of their formative years navigating a global pandemic.

I cried for the suffering we’re all experiencing, for how damn hard this is, for what it’s doing to our hearts and minds that we’ll be dealing with for the rest of our lives (PEOPLE, GET A THERAPIST. IT COULD SAVE YOU.).

I cried for TH, who, when he married me, thought he was getting the “good” kind of crazy, the fun kind, but instead, these days, more often finds himself with the kind who is sitting outside curled into a nonfunctioning ball with tears running down her face, muttering something about takeout on the way because she just can’t.

I cried for my kids again, that they’re going to have memories of me sitting outside crying in a nonfunctional ball instead of sitting beside them watching a movie.

I cried. A lot. And then, somehow, I got up.

I ate the shit out of a cheeseburger and fries that someone else made. I finished my wine. I took a shower and got in bed.

I know that for those of you in the Northern hemisphere, the changing light–longer days of springtime–are a welcome arrival, maybe a symbol of hope. At least that’s how I’d spin it if I were up there where you are. For my part (and spinning), I’m finding relief in the shortened days, the earlier arrival of darkness that accompanies our hunkering down. Night is a gift right now, a rest from the forced “rest” of these days.

I’m finding relief in books showing up–both for me and our kids–on our doorstep. In chance meetings on the running trail with other mums I know, makeup-free and newly vulnerable about how hard this is. For unexpected, unscheduled talks about real shit for once. I’m finding relief in access to moments in my friends’ lives that I didn’t have before, in the kids playing Roblox with their friends over Zoom as their parents talk and live in the background, these parents of their friends who are my friends, these windows into their lives because of this shifting perspective, this season of change.

I’m finding relief in this worldwide newfound sense of collectivism, of taking care of others, not because I have the ability to take care of others beyond my four walls right now, but because I need to be taken care of, and people are doing that remotely and well. One set of footprints in the sand and all that.

I’m finding relief in really feeling my grief, in making space for my kids to feel theirs when they think, at bedtime, that they’re crying over Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban but they’re not, and I know that, and they can too.

I’m finding relief that, as the light and seasons and times shift and new pain is being exposed, that new mercies are too, and that unlike my own sanity and strength, these mercies never run out, never expire. I call that grace.