And so it was, that on the first day of homeschooling, I woke up with diarrhea.

(The Australians and British include an O in the word, which is apt, and which I will therefore be doing from now on.)

Anyway, this is a common theme for me in recent years, and by that I mean getting diarrhoea before important events. I’m not much of a public speaker except in recent years when I have been both as a Mockingbird contributor and as an advocate for my son to his classes, and half of the last four talks I’ve given at the Mockingbird New York conference were preceded–and engulfed–by stomach viruses that began the night before. Including the first talk I ever gave. So that means twice now I’ve either sat or stood onstage clenching my ass cheeks and praying for dear life not to shit my pants, all while delivering a thirty-minute speech.

The silver lining is that I didn’t need that Xanax I brought, because I had no room for self-consciousness.

So on the eve of the first day of homeschooling last week, I woke up in the middle of the night praying that the rumble in my stomach was due to an inexplicably spicy bowl of chicken soup I’d eaten earlier in the day. Reader, it was not. I hotfooted it to the toilet several times that night, and until about 2 the next afternoon. I spent half the morning in bed while The Husband kept the boys busy upstairs, then I painfully stepped into the shower and threw my body up the stairs to the kids. The school didn’t have their Google classrooms set up yet, so I honestly can’t tell you what we did or how I survived to the end of the day. All I can tell you is that we got takeaway that night and I ate fries because I (literally) stopped giving a shit, and that this was–as it has always proven to be–a weird-ass gift.

I seem to need to keep being reminded that things go better when I start with acknowledging my own helplessness. I had a list ready to go of activities to do with the kids at home; websites and YouTube videos and virtual museums; and I may as well have used it as toilet paper because a fat lot of good it did me from my bed, lying as I did with chills and aches. Whenever grace, in the form of illness or whatever, makes me take my eyes off myself and just stop doing, magical things seem to happen. It reminds me of when my therapist told me about his and his wife’s third and final child and how she turned out so well because they parented her the least.

Quitting is so underrated.

That’s why we’ve been good at it for the past week of homeschooling. Our school mascot could be a shrugging woman, because that is what I am. Our school motto could be “Homeschool is Flexible” because that’s what I’ve repeated to the boys, telling them (in an echo of a couple of their teachers, thank God) that we don’t have to do everything and that if we don’t do everything, everything will still be okay. This has led to more moments discussing fractions over sandwiches and maths over cupcakes; teaching moments that are natural rather than forced, organic instead of rigid.

Which has led to me being more present in the moment instead of in my planner. Which has led to me seeing more.

Seeing that The Kid’s therapist, whom we would have never met were it not for grace’s crazy-ass gifts, still comes over daily and knows how he learns so that now I get to know that firsthand and quickly, instead of muddling through weeks to find out that he actually can spell the words he’s trying to get me to spell for him.

Seeing (smelling) the dinners that neighbours are cooking each night: the curries and the garlic and the other scents that waft between houses up to our deck enveloping me in the moment with the knowledge that we are all, somehow, doing life together even more than before.

Seeing (hearing) TK wake up beside me in the morning and tell me in his sleepy haze, “This is the best time.” Seeing (hearing) Little Brother pad into the room in the middle of the night, climb in bed beside me, fall back asleep, then start giggling at a funny dream.

This is magic, all of it. And it wouldn’t have happened any other way. I start with my own helplessness and then see it all around me, the help that I didn’t earn but that arrives as gift. As grace.

I’m writing this on a Monday because I have no idea whether my kids will be at school or home tomorrow. This kind of uncertainty and indecision could be my undoing, would be, if I weren’t held by something bigger than myself.

It’s like this: we’re standing at the edge of a cliff and we don’t know what awaits us on the other side. We don’t even know what is waiting for us one foot/metre ahead, visual schedules be damned, because we have never done or been through anything like it before. And despite all the posturing on social media, the judgments over how other people are handling quarantine or whether they’re socially distancing enough, the ad nauseam articles posted to make it look as though we have our finger on the pulse of Pandemic 101, none of us have the vaguest grasp of the situation. None of us have any control. Whether we have the virus or not. Whether we have a backlog of toilet paper or not. Whether we wash our hands or not. (Please do, you nasty freak.)

Maybe, in a way, I’ll fare better than some (hahaha nope) because I had to come to terms long ago with the fact that I’m not in control. It was revealed to me in grad school, in relationships, in New York City, on examination tables, in preterm labour, in diagnoses. They say that people make plans and God laughs. Well so do I. But I keep making them anyway, because this is how I stay sane. Even as I know that these plans could be broken at any moment.

Now all we have are broken plans and cleared calendars. There are no illusions to create to distract from the fact that we can’t manipulate this outcome or direct a conclusion. We are utterly helpless.

If you are like me and that statement makes you short of breath in a way that leads you to ask for a COVID-19 test, then consider there’s also this: the possibility that even though much of what is going on is clearly fucked, there are other things that are, strangely, maybe more like they should be than they ever have been before. You know all those assholes who used the hashtag #timeslowdown on the reg in their social media captions? Well, they got their wish. Time has a way of grinding nearly to a halt when all the days are the same, bleeding together so that there’s no such thing as a “weekend” anymore. But up until now, my kids’ kindergarten and third grade years were flying by as they always do. Now I feel like I’m watching them grow live, in real time, rather than in retrospect: their hair is getting longer (and will not be cut anytime soon), their limbs as well, and I’m around for all of it, not just at the end of a school day when somehow they’ve gotten older in six hours without my witnessing it.

There’s the invitation we received to spend Sunday morning “watching” church at our pastor’s house while the kids played Hide and Seek, and what The Husband said afterward: “I think that’s actually what church is supposed to be like?”

There’s the morning I just spent researching websites and activities for teaching kids at home, because I am nothing if not great at generating ideas (and shit at executing them, #prayforme), and imagining both the toll it will all take on my mental health and the moments we’ll create that they’ll remember forever (hopefully not capped off by mommy riding in the back of a padded truck off to her new home).

There’s the new dance that TH and I do around and with each other now that he’s working from home, the one that both builds my anxiety and chips away at it: cups left out, guttural sighs released, resentments stockpiled; impromptu conversations, watching Netflix together again for the first time since the kids were born, sitting outside talking about whether we can afford to buy anything other than a cardboard box to live in here.

There are the conversations with the kids that I never could have imagined having when they were babies, talks about pandemics and instability (“Is the world descending into chaos?” The Kid asked me on the way to school this morning, and I laughed and crapped my pants a bit), markers of their growing awareness and our tell-the-truth policy with them (about everything but Santa Claus).

We have been robbed, for now, of a clear vision for the future. We’ve been robbed of every moment except the present one. And maybe that’s how it should be? Maybe that’s a gift that’s been given to us (along with all the gifs, har har) that will help me to be here, now. That will help me not to interpret every moment, but inhabit each of them.

I’ve been meaning to do that anyway.

It was pain
Sunny days and rain
I knew you’d feel the same things

The Kid and I have a little dance we do every morning.

Before the sun rises, he wakes up with rustling limbs and yawns and stretches that turn into requests for the iPad and long monologues (all of this while The Husband and Little Brother sleep in the next room because every night, TK sneaks into ours and he and TH swap places because if they didn’t, LB would awaken at 3 am with shouts of “Daddy? DADDY!” much like the Etrade baby). And I dig in next to his warmth for a few minutes before I get out of bed and slide into my workout clothes. The dance begins.

“No! Stay! Just for today,” he says.

“You know I’d rather be here with you,” I tell him.

“So stay!”

I’ve stayed before. But mostly, I go, trudging upstairs and outside, into the darkness and onto the running path, even as I feel pulled like the blanket TK and LB play tug o’ war with daily. I stood in the scalding shower this morning after one of those runs, wondering how it’s possible for my body to run one minute and want to collapse the next, why I’m always tired even when I’m moving, and I think this is it: there’s not a moment in the life of a mother when she doesn’t feel pulled in at least two directions, if not more. And this, this is exhausting.

Also exhausting are the morning (and afternoon…and evening) fights the boys get into over things like “he looked at me” or “he laughed at me” or “he got a bigger cookie.” They echo the fights that The Sis and I had growing up, which leads me to believe they are primal and unavoidable, and maybe that’s why they grate at me so powerfully, why they make me want to scream–I’ve been in one or another of these fights my whole life. They lead to moments of regret after school drop-offs, rehashing the morning in my head and wondering where I could have been more patient and kind. Wondering if “you two are going to drive me crazy” is an honest admission or a ticket to their future therapy.

But then there are the moments that wash all that away: TK calling me “sweetheart Mommy;” or when they ask me what the best part of my day was and I tell them it was when I picked them up and they were so happy to see me and LB says, “We’ll always be happy to see you.” They’re young enough to think that’s true, and I’m delusional enough to try to make it so.

And even when they’re not pushing and pulling me, when they’re in bed asleep or off at school and it’s just me, I’m pushed and pulled by my own shit, by the inner waves set off by anxiety: paranoia about friend groups, questions about whether that cough was part of a seasonal cold or something grimmer; whether I’m being available enough to TH in our marriage; the guilt of parenting that comes with not being patient or teaching or making the most of every damn moment. These waves send me out to sea and back to shore again; one day I’m flat and the world is grey and the next I’m bopping around and it’s in colour.

It strikes me that having anxiety and/or depression is much like being immunosuppressed: a big part of the problem is that the body has a hard time recognising them as foreign invaders. Because when it does–when my mind finally notices the difference between them and reality–I can breathe, and the sea is once again blue.

And I know that none of this would be so hard, or painful, or wonderful, or would even exist, if it weren’t for the fact that I am connected: to sanity, to people, to this world around us, full as it is of rain and sun and grey and colours, just like the overcast skies that clouded our walk to school yesterday before we ran into friends who pointed up at the rainbow arching above us.

When The Kid hears something he doesn’t like–which is often these days, given the existence of toothbrushing and vegetables and getting dressed–he pronounces “DELETE!” and pairs it with a point at the person who was speaking. “DELETE! DELETE!”

It’s so cute to be deleted while trying to parent.

This verbal backspace option doesn’t work, unless the point is trying to get us to laugh, but I have to appreciate the thought behind it, given that I, too, would like to erase the parts of life I don’t like: Australian real estate purchasing…pandemics and the uncertainty they create…mildew.

It’s the season of Lent, also known as the season of virtue signaling, and while I’m not taking it as an opportunity to start a new diet or publicly post my social media cleanse intentions, I do like the idea of looking around at my life and taking stock of what could use downsizing, and what I could make more space for. Delete and add.

Under threat of filling my days and face with screens once the boys were both at school, I decided to do less of that, which means I’ve been reading more (insert curtsey). It also means I’ve had more time to…think. Which I always felt short of, that time to just sit and be and let my mind wander. It’s sort of a necessity when it comes to writing, but I’d been filling it with graphics and lights and Instagram, and it was making me feel literally ill: screen hangovers were characterising my days. It was gross.

So I feel I’ve been noticing more, which is actually pretty life-giving. I took Little Brother to the occupational therapist last week for an evaluation based on the recommendation of his kindy teacher and her concern over his pencil grip. My initial internal reaction at that observation was “DELETE” since we have dealt with a little thing called global dyspraxia before and an imperfect grip ain’t got NOTHING on that, but I dutifully booked the appointment because I am quite aware of the possibility of giving short shrift to LB when he’s humming along without a tilted head, etc.

He was…more excited about it than I was. And in that excitement I saw something both heartbreaking–he wanted to get some solo time in the spotlight finally; and beautiful–he wants to be like his big brother, swinging from trapezes and such.

He’s such a pleaser. But I have to remember that he’s not me, that he may not be headed to therapy for it just yet. Right now, it propels him to tables and whiteboards and into a cross-legged position, toward writing and reading and drawing and learning. I watched him, in that space we’d made for him for an hour on a Wednesday morning: I watched his effort and his attention and his commitment and his seriousness and his humour. I watched his full self in that hour, and what a gift to have been forced into making unexpected space for all that beauty.

I sat there watching him, and in the silence, a voice whispered into my heart: he just wants to feel special. So I made room for that. I still am.

And we’re making room for a new chapter for TK, as his Friday therapist has moved on and he’s inching–but mostly leaping–toward independence. Without even yelling DELETE.

I read a few words the other day about better things, things that belong to bigger things, and it makes me think about how much of grace is making space for those better things. Or having it made for us. Being forced into it, and choosing it, and sitting in silence and tension and uncertainty to wait for those things to show up. Inhabiting these moments that feel empty until they are gloriously, painfully, full.

“Maybe you should stop…just stop trying. It’s exhausting.”

They say that if you want to develop a new habit, you should start saying things to yourself about it. So I’ve been repeating mantras like, “I am a person who wakes before sunrise to exercise.” “I am a person who does one open-water swim a week.” (Also, hopefully: “I am a person who does not get eaten by sharks.”)

But life, and grace, have chosen some identities already for me, identities I’d never planned and certainly didn’t repeat mantras for. “I am the one in the waiting room waiting to hear how her son’s spinal surgery went.” “I am a resident of Australia.” “I am the mother of one child who learns differently and one who learns typically.” “I am the woman standing at the shore watching her that kid surf with a foundation for kids on the spectrum.”

These identities barrelled into my life uninvited. Had I been given the choice (okay, with Australia we technically were given the choice, but it didn’t feel like it when all signs were practically yanking us onto the plane), who knows what I would have said? I do, actually. I would have said, “I am the person who takes the easiest road. I will take the path of least resistance, thanks.”

Oh, what I would have missed.

Everything. I would have missed everything.

On Sunday, we skipped church. No, actually, we had church–in a different location. We went to Manly Beach for the second year in a row and joined up with Surfers Healing, a foundation that takes kids on the spectrum out with professional surfers for a ride (or three) on the waves. This year was a bit different.

This year, The Kid was not afraid or hesitant at all. After checking to make sure that he’d get another medal this time around, he shrugged into his life vest and grabbed the hands of his newest surfing buddies and headed to sea. After the final ride of three, he trudged back to us, dripping and covered in sand. “That second one was gnarly! I totally wiped out!”

Yes, he said that.

So I am a person whose child is a surfer. He’s also in the band at school, playing the baritone, or as he refers to it, his “sweet, sweet beauty.” I am a band mom.

I’m a Little Brother mom–which somehow means I’m a person whose kid is the first one to stand up and volunteer, who is a ham, who is super-social and talkative and loves attention. Who is the owner of a huge heart.

How did that happen?

I think about all the effort I spent, in a former life, to become a certain kind of person–all the thought I put into creating children who were certain kinds of people–and how none of it turned out how I planned. How fucking glorious that is.

After the surf–once TK had, indeed, received his medal (I told him that, since now he has two, he can share one with his brother–he passed on that)–we went with our group across the street to a restaurant for lunch. And when I say group I mean not just the four of us. I mean, because of a “lucky” turn of events, not only TK’s Aussie therapist and her fiancé, but his Atlanta therapist and her wife–who happened to be in the country, in the city, on this beach, this of all weekends.

Our group sat at a table, friends on one side and family on the other, though it’s hard to tell the difference between those two groups these days. And as we ate, and talked, and just were, I thought about all the choices I never made that put me–us–right where we belong, without even trying. Just by being. Because grace, unlike karma, doesn’t honour choices or reward efforts, it gives gifts. It puts us where we were meant to be: at home.

And now my life has changed in oh so many ways

My independence seems to vanish in the haze

But every now and then I feel so insecure

I know that I just need you like I’ve never done before

I go by Steph now.

People have always called me that–family and good friends mostly, and preferably upon invitation. But now it’s what I answer to generally; it’s how I sign emails and receive them and what I’ve heard a couple of times yelled out of a car (which is The.Best.). When I hear the extra four letters of my first name, I give a start, like I’m getting into trouble.

Australians are fantastic at shortening things, like words, and names, and loss of lives due to guns.

But something has lengthened here, and it’s my time on my own, now that both boys are in school. And for every, “How will you fill the time, Steph?” question that I get, I want to point to the mounting pile of laundry, the opportunities to volunteer at the school, the unopened books that have waited years to be read, the books that have waited years to be written, the projects and the beaches and life and I want to respond, “What time?”

As a woman, and especially a mother, I find it easiest to be powered by guilt, particularly when endorphins and caffeine are scarce. And the first few days of the boys’ school year, I considered giving in to that guilt–through eight years of mothering, it has been so faithful! Then The Husband took my car–the one I dinged up in the car park–to the repair shop, and something shifted.

Primarily, it was the roof to his used convertible, purchased a few months after we moved here. As emblems of mid-life crises go, it’s a pretty harmless one, but one used almost entirely by him–I’ve never much liked messing up my hair or being so vulnerable to the elements and…other people. But during my week of obtaining convertible custody, I embraced its features, and I dropped that top down. And it was glorious.

The boys loved it. (Well, The Kid did. Little Brother had to be talked/bribed into it.) We tooled around town–or to the playground and back, at least–with the wind caressing our faces, taking selfies and generally looking like assholes and loving it. I dropped that bitch back on a ride to the cinema. By myself. On a weekday. I smelled the salt water as I cruised beside the beach. And I told guilt to kindly f— off.

Because here’s the thing: for eight years (longer, actually, if you count pregnancy–and honey I DO), I have voluntarily rented out space in my body, in my mind, in my heart, for two beings who consume me. Their existence has altered said body, its neurochemical balance, its hormonal stability, its metabolism, its follicular quality. I have given myself in service of their growth and well-being. I’ve been poked and prodded, had my organs and nethers splayed across two operating tables, had weekly progesterone shots in my ass for one for nine months after preterm labour and premature birth with the other. I’ve had mastitis and a yeast infection in my tits. I have a scar across my abdomen. I can’t sleep through the night without peeing multiple times. Actually, I can’t sleep through the night, period. The list of what women endure for their children is not just long; it’s endless.

Do I regret any of it? Absolutely not. I treasure them so much it hurts. I would give my life in a second for either of them. They are my life.

But that sure as hell doesn’t mean I have to pretend like none of that stuff ever happened.

So yeah, I’m on a bit of a break, I guess, if that’s what you want to call this period, this new era in which I’m riding with the top down and getting back in touch with who the Me is apart from them; in which I’m making space to breathe and think about not just what is next, but what is now; in which I’m sitting beside LB on the bench at school as he crushes reading, and meeting with TK’s therapist and teacher about his soaring independence and the waning need for a school shadow. I am quite literally enjoying the fruits of my labour and the gifts of grace on our behalf.

I wish it for every woman who has come out on the other side of those tender (for them, and us) first years with her kids and wondered, Who am I again? I wish for time for us all to remember how to play, how to imagine, how to invent, how to be. And, after all that, how to see them running out of their classrooms and into arms that have even more space now.

Saturday was a date night: The Husband and I had booked tickets for a party at the local yacht club, which we attended last year and which yielded a priceless photo taken by a friend, an immersion in the ocean, and a foot full (mine) of sea urchin quills. This year, we booked the sitter early so we could go to dinner nearby beforehand.

We went to a place I’d gone to with friends over two years ago–which sounds crazy to say, that we’ve even been here long enough to have gone somewhere “years ago”–so it was my second round there, too. I had forgotten how the owner tried to make meals there an experience–last time I’d been with a big group so the treatment was spread out more broadly. This time, though, we were told, “Welcome home” no less than half a dozen times, including when we left. TH was over it, seeing as how we don’t live in that restaurant and neither of us likes being treated too familiarly by strangers.

We haven’t stopped saying it to each other since.

Which is appropriate, really, given that we are home these days, and looking for our home still. We’ve been chasing a few houses, off and on, eyes glued to the real estate website and minds wavering back and forth over all the old issues: finances, location, size. It’s a decision that feels–and is–monumental, given the money and commitment required for it, and our choice–to assent to a search, then step in gradually, then just, maybe, immerse ourselves–is weighed down by the thousand other tiny choices it entails, statements about making Sydney our home for a bit longer or much longer, our original three-years-later departure date fading in the rearview mirror.

So maybe we’ll get a house soon? I don’t know. This whole process is crazy, full of bids and auctions and anxiety and back-and-forth. The last time we did this was for our first house. It was just the two of us but we were planning for the future. Now there are four of us and we have things like future teenagers, and possible high schools, to consider. It’s an exciting, terrifying chapter.

So Saturday night, after we were welcomed home upon leaving dinner, we headed down the street to the beach. We joined friends and poured drinks and talked. This year, no one jumped in the water–a recent storm has left it too polluted. (Which is to say that the local beach smells like a pile of gorilla shit. It’s sad, but it will change.) Instead, we stood in our bare feet on the shore, bottles of wine in buckets in the sand, and one of us (not me) who has always been good at recognising the beauty of small moments said, “I love this place. It’s like home.”

It is. We have adult gatherings there; Little Brother’s last birthday party was there; we go there on Fridays after school and take flying leaps of bravery there. We do life there.

Home is growing to be a bigger place than I ever realised, full of sand and water and FaceTime calls and uncertainty and life. Beaches, harbours, flights across the world, internet voice apps, text chains, Skype counselling sessions, fires and floods. Frederick Buechner wrote, “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.” In other words, welcome home.

If there’s anything the movie This Is Where I Leave You taught me — besides that Tina Fey should not do accents — it’s about shiva, the Jewish tradition in response to the death of an immediate family member. I’d heard of shiva before but for the first time saw it dramatized in the film, and the images have stayed with me. Unfortunately, I’ve had a lot of opportunities lately to reflect on the practice of grief.

To wit: the spate of celebrity deaths, encompassing everyone from Robin Williams to Kate Spade and, most recently, Kobe Bryant. While Williams’ and Spade’s deaths were fraught with discussions of mental illness, Bryant’s has been a beast of a different nature: an accident, a young life ended too soon, the included loss of his daughter and seven others on the plane. There are countless angles from which to examine the situation.

To be continued, over at Mockingbird!

Our house stinks.

I know I’ve likely belabo(u)red the point, but this situation is getting beyond the bounds of normal limits. We’ve entered mildew/mo(u)ld territory now. This is some apocalyptic shit.

In my former life as an aspiring Fox News consultant, I blindly believed–and doubted–many things. One of the doubts was climate change, but whew chile…there are no doubts left now. Many scientists have surmised that climate change will hit Australia harder than the rest of the world, and if our carpet is any indication, the proof is RESOUNDING.

The shot: four months of drought and fires.

The chaser: a weekend of the worst flooding in thirty years.

There is airspace next to the downstairs aircon vent that I hold my breath when I pass through, like I’m walking by a graveyard in the fifth grade, and there’s a spot on the stairs to the front door that is just sort of…sopping, and a couple of mornings ago there were two frogs by that door, and yesterday Little Brother found a tiny lizard indoors, and y’all I cannot anymore. Tennis lessons and birthday parties have been cancelled. A boat was washed ashore, unmoored at the local beach the other day. This is the same harbour beach where people were surfing due to the storm-induced swells. The water everywhere is brown from whatever shit is stirred by these floods.

EVERYTHING IS SO GROSS.

Which means that when it comes to the real estate website, you better believe I’m right on top of that, Rose–countless times a day, imagining marble countertops and immaculate tiles and hardwoods and every other HGTV wet dream because hope is what saves us. I mean, kind of. Partly, at least.

I find myself wondering, and asking others cutely, if we can’t just have weather that’s, I don’t know, somewhere between fires and floods? Like, is that possible? And then we all laugh and go back to our mildewed houses and I forget that most of life? Is exactly that–between the extremes, in the mundane day to day.

(I just checked the real estate website again. At this point it is a verifiable tic.)

We drag the kids from house inspection to house inspection (open houses) on Saturdays, in search of a dream that will turn out to be a compromise that won’t answer our deepest longings, then coming home to our current house which is totally sufficient for our needs and even great in a lot of ways but still feels like sliding back into an old set of clothes after trying on brand-new ones. And I realise that yes, there are fires, and yes, there are floods, but there are also parts of life that I turn into extremes.

Parent information night was at the boys’ school a few days ago and at the year three session, the standardised testing that begins this year was brought up and I felt the tension in the room rise. Questions were tossed around that really amounted to “how can I propel my kid as far ahead as possible so I’ll feel okay as a parent?” and I felt the pull that used to drive me–the one that tells me to give in to being defined, and having my children defined, by how well we all perform. The undertow was there to yank me down.

Then I thought of my boys, currently at home with The Husband, and how–generally speaking–happy they are. How full of hope. How they don’t even smell mildew. How what they really need is space to feel, and recognition that they are exactly who and where they’re meant to be, and that mistakes are like muddy puddles–they can get you dirty while also being fun as hell.

So I removed that particular concern from the Fire/Flood column, much like The Kid proclaims when he hears something he doesn’t like: “DELETE!”

And I’m trying to do the same with the other moments that threaten to undo me, like when LB waves bravely at me from his class’s line formation in the morning–I want to crumple, and I let myself feel the feelings, but I remember that they are held by hands bigger than mine so I cry a little, then breathe. And when I do, I feel a bit of the weight I’ve been voluntarily shouldering begin to slip off, consumed by fires and floods that seem to just take away, but actually reveal what will never leave.

We were meant to be back in America by now, with Little Brother finishing preschool and The Kid wrapping up second grade. Instead, TK has just begun year three and LB, in a stunning (to my heart) turn of events, now wears a red and navy uniform alongside his brother as he marches into a kindy classroom every morning.

OH, MY HEART.

I knew, once we settled in here among friends and a community that feels like family, that I wanted desperately to see LB in that uniform alongside the mates he’s had for a few years now, little siblings of TK’s friends. I knew that it would be easier this time around, our tenure in Australia three years rather than three weeks, my awareness of what food to bring (and in which containers) cemented, the walk to the school being a familiar one. I knew that LB, having accompanied me every day to drop off and/or pick up TK, would be more comfortable with this new stage in his life.

But that doesn’t mean I was prepared.

I still, often, have flashbacks to my last nursing session with LB. It was a memorable moment: I sat with him on the couch a couple of hours before I was due to take TK for his second MRI, and I had plans to spend the rest of the weekend toilet-training TK. So there was a convergence of goals and emotions that morning, a perfect storm of my own creation, to some degree, swirling around me. The minutes felt precious, fraught, important. It was a “last time,” and those are always hard, even when they should be happening.

Maybe I hadn’t fully examined the “last time” nature of this recent life shift: LB standing there in his uniform, hat perched nattily on his head, expression on his face wavering between excitement and nervousness but eventually falling into “determined to be brave”–the one that pierces my heart the most. And then, he was inside the classroom, along with all the other kids, the parents remaining outside scattered, and I realised what I so often forget: life is almost always full of grief.

It’s the laugh/cry emoji in real time, these moments that are called both bitter and sweet, that hurt and bring freedom, that feel good and bad and everything in between. I walked around town that morning free of hands reaching for mine, free of questions without answers pelting me, free of urgent bathroom requests, but also devoid of the buddy I’ve had for the last three years.

It was, like so much, a little of everything.

As was one afternoon last week, when the boys and I headed down to our favourite after-school setting, the beach at a local sailing club, and they slurped ice cream then hit the sand and water while the grownups had a drink. After a few minutes of happily building villages in the sand, TK sought involvement with the group, who were jumping from a nearby pier. LB was already racing around with them, abstaining from the jumps, and I heard TK ask one of the kids if he could play with them.

It nearly broke my heart. But that’s because projection is a hell of a drug, and my own isolation as a child was coming back to haunt me. But that wasn’t happening here.

After he asked a few times and his friend finally heard him, TK realised he had a choice to make: abstain from the jump like LB had chosen, or…not. I could see him weighing the options there on the pier. He looked up at me. I walked over.

“I’ll do it with you,” I told him, not sure I even wanted to, but when’s the last time that mattered to a mother? His friends began to cheer him on. My heart was being reassembled there on the dock. I honestly didn’t know, though, what he was going to do: he stepped forward, then pulled back, about a dozen times.

Then…something shifted. I felt his resolve, whether through his hand or our connected hearts and souls, I don’t know, but I looked at him and I knew: he was going to do it. He stepped toward the edge, his hand still in mine, and then–he let go.

The kids cheered. LB sloshed toward him through the water and bear-hugged him (then bravely refused to do the jump himself). I was reminded that my childhood is not TK’s, and vice versa. And that everything that is right also hurts a little, because of the letting go.

And yesterday? At his school’s swim carnival? He swam twenty-five meters. To more cheers.

So this morning, after such displays of bravery from my kids (and an absence of accompaniment by them), I headed down to the beach to do the thing I’ve been thinking and talking about but haven’t, yet. I put on my cap and goggles, and I sloshed toward it: the open water. I fully, finally, submerged myself in the Pacific.

At first I felt I’d drown, because the pool doesn’t have waves or fish or currents, and it does have a line that keeps me going straight. But after a few minutes, my strokes became more sure and I looked around at this world: unpredictable and vast, and adjacent to the old one, but still somehow brand new.