This afternoon I sat at a table next to the school playground. The playground where both of my kids go to school, as of this Monday. I watched The Kid as he played ball with his class ahead of me, and I looked at the door to the kindergarten classroom, behind which Little Brother sat talking with his new teacher. And it was glorious.

It took awhile to get here, but here we are.

TK was laughing on the field ahead of me, talking to his friends and raising his hand to answer questions from the new teacher. Then LB emerged from the classroom grinning, with his teacher–who was also TK’s teacher in kindy–telling me how ready he is to start school.

I thought, while sitting at that table, about this scenario three years ago: how we were less than a month into our life in Sydney; how I was drinking a bit too much rosé every night; how The Husband and LB and I all tagged along for this meet-the-teacher moment with TK and how nervous TH and I were, wondering how he was doing in there–if he’d even speak to her. We were raw and tired and uncertain. Which are not bad things to be, actually–I’ve found they often describe me right before something wonderful happens.

We were supposed to be back in America now, three years later, but here we are. Sitting in the same spot, the same school, the same teachers. And it is wonderful.

It’s wonderful because it’s where we’re meant to be, right now. It’s wonderful even though I’m still anxious and there are still occasional nights when I have too much rosé. It’s wonderful even when I lose my shit with my kids and have to apologise. It’s wonderful even though I’m on the real estate website every day looking for another house, one that does not have stank carpet, and even though there are still people who piss me off and I’m still not a paragon of peace and adjustment. (Dammit, I forgot to meditate again today. That must be it.)

It’s wonderful because we’re here, and we’re together, which makes here home, and we’ve relearned, in the last few days, that life is short and people you never thought would disappear, do. It’s wonderful because, in the best moments–between impeachment coverage and celebrity deaths and sibling fights and smoke-filled air and all the other annoyances of life–it is full of wonder. I am.

Last week, the last full week of summer holidays, I took the boys to a birthday party at a waterslide park. I went down first with LB, and felt him tensing up the whole way down, proclaiming at the end that he didn’t like it and was DONE. Then I watched as TK came down on his own, grinning. We left early to get to a show in the city, meeting some friends for dinner in the brutal heat and sweating our asses off, then walking over to the theatre. LB alternated between watching the show and asking to leave, while TK and I stared, transfixed, at the magic occurring with light and air onstage.

Sometimes LB arrives places earlier; sometimes TK does; and often they both lead me to where we need to go. For three years we’ve been home, and we march ahead into another. They came out of the playroom the other day, announcing that they were taking an inventory of their toys: “We’re remembering them all,” they said. I felt the way I did in the theatre, at that table on the playground: full of wonder at the fact that I’m the one who gets to know them best for now–not always–but for now, each of my hands holding a sweaty little one. Wonderful.

It would not be the same, but it would be familiar.

A few weeks ago we decided to squeeze in a quick holiday between our return from America and the boys’ return to school. One of The Kid’s friends was spending January at her family’s house on the Gold Coast and invited us to visit, so we used that as a jumping-off point to organise an entire vacation. A three-day one, at least.

Our expectations were nonexistent, considering The Husband booked the hotel and flights from his phone in an Atlantan Marriott Courtyard a couple of weeks before we left, but as we drove through the lights of the city and arrived at our hotel just before bedtime, TH and I looked at each other and came to the realisation: we liked this place.

We continued to like it when we awoke the next morning to blue skies and bright sun. We continued to like it as we built sandcastles on the beach and ordered drinks by the pool; as we went to a BBQ at TK’s friend’s place; as we returned for sunset on the beach. Well, I did. TH took the boys to the pool for an end-of-day swim and I headed down to the water solo.

The pounding surf and whipping wind greeted me. I felt like I was returning to a place I already knew, where the world Gold replaced Gulf, where the current was stronger and the waves rougher and the buildings down the road were taller, but that felt familiar nonetheless. I felt the way I always feel at a beach: at home.

Something within me is set aright when I’m surrounded by the vastness of the ocean: I’m reminded that I’m not as in control as I like to pretend I am, that there is a story grander than the one I could tell, that the world is dangerous but something bigger is keeping me safe within it. Because the ocean, it is brutal, and filled with all the danger one could imagine (hello, Titanic remains), but when I stand on the sand before it, just out of its reach, I can remain in protected awe.

I think I may believe in God because of the ocean. At any rate, its existence fosters within me a sense of recognition: I have been here before. I know this place. Even when I haven’t, and I don’t. Which makes me believe there is a connectedness, and a source for it, beyond what I can see.

And there’s this: after I texted TH to come down with the boys and see this beauty–because for all love does to curtail freedom, it is also an end to loneliness, to living without witnesses–I turned and saw a boy wrapped in a white hotel towel appear at the crest of the hill leading to the beach. He ambled toward me, and I recognised him. As my own. As my home. And he told me the same: “I saw a woman on the beach and it was you, so I ran.” And so we remained in awe, together.

Finding home, I think, demands this recognition. And to find this recognition, we must pay attention, be attuned, so as not to miss the echoes of home: Little Brother’s hesitation on the sand that echoes that of my sister’s when she was younger and called it stinky before coming to love it, as he has (sort of). The map on our bedroom wall that TK hung the other day, created by the illustrator of our book cover, that details how he and I found each other. Finishing the first Harry Potter with the boys at bedtime and being reminded of all the best parts I’d forgotten.

These stories, these beaches, these echoes, these recognitions, all like stones leading our way home.

Grace does not do things tit for tat; it acts finally and fully from the start. –Robert Farrar Capon

We’re no longer jet-lagged, so that excuse is off the table. But life itself is tiring, especially to two active boys, and bedtime at our house can get…emotional. And since I’m all about making space for the feelings (a goal recently reinforced by a book my friend recommended, and then my therapist affirmed), I find the process can be…exhausting.

You would not believe (or maybe you would?) the “issues” that resonate with young boys when they are exceptionally tired. There was a full joint meltdown recently over whose Bot Bot was bigger (and this was at 10 am). One gets mad when the other laughs/breathes/sneezes too loudly–and I mean “mad” to the point of “tears.” But what has consumed The Kid’s mind most recently at bedtime is a cosmetic issue of sorts. And it’s piercing my heart.

He doesn’t like his smile.

Self-awareness comes with age, usually, and therapy, definitely, and as my kids grow in self-awareness I both enjoy its fruits and despise its difficulties. They pick up on everything: being treated differently (by friends and…me), they recognise their own emotions and often indulge them to the point of hysteria, and they see the discrepancies between themselves and those around them.

Hence the Smile Issue.

“Why can’t my smile be like my brother’s? I want a perfect smile!” TK wailed the other night as Little Brother slept peacefully on the other side of me. “WHY WON’T GOD LET ME SMILE?!”

Well, that got me. Silver lining notwithstanding (hey, at least he believes in God?!), his pain was evident and I had no idea what to do with it. He’s in that transitional developmental stage that lasts…well, forever, but especially while teeth are being gained and lost, and I think part of the difference he sees is that: the gap-laden mouth of an eight-year-old compared with the white picket fence of his brother.

But there’s also this: their very natures contribute to the way they smile, and LB is adept at the posing. He knows how to pose. And he loves to do it. So when the camera appears, he squints his eyes cutely and grins widely; meanwhile, TK–not much for artifice–is focused more on the effort of it; the technique. So his smile, while its own form of posing, is a bit more…strained. Like me at a social event when a lens is thrust into my face.

Because he and I, we sort of walk through life like this. (Also, not for nothing, there’s the weakened oral musculature with which he was prematurely born, so it actually is harder for him to smile. Which makes him a champion for doing it in the first place, IMHO.)

LB, though, he’s a force of nature–not nurture, apparently, because his social savviness was definitely not derived from our gene pool. He can work a room like no other, talk to anyone, make friends in an instant. I’m stunned by it because I have no idea where he got it and I will never personally achieve it. The flip side of that social mastery, though, is an awareness and sensitivity to the way others treat him, and an intuitiveness about their feelings–both in general, and about him. So while his smile is real, there is so much more behind it.

And isn’t that always the case? Because with TK, while the smile in photos is more forced and effortful, he has another one–we all do–that is free and unfettered. It’s backed up by laughter and euphoria. It’s honest.

We all have an honest one and a…photo-friendly one. A fraught one.

So I tell TK, lying in bed, the truth: that I love his smile, that it’s one of my personal favourites, that every smile is different like a fingerprint and is exactly as it should be, right now. And I feel quite smug and pleased with this well-researched and maternal answer. And it is not enough.

So I tell him–maybe even more gently–that we can practice his smile. And I place my fingers on the corner of his lips and lift upward, and we do that a few times, and I tell him we can do it again tomorrow. And something within him seems to unlock, a weight drifting off. Because for all the truth of different being okay–being wonderful, actually–sometimes we just want someone who will walk alongside us and help lift the weight.

There’s no perfect smile. I know that. But as he drifts off, finally, into his own complicated form of sleep, I do smile–a complicated and real one.

This is what life looks like: feeling the plane descend through clouds and smoke toward the city that is now one home of many, watching my children’s faces lift with delight upon recognition of that home, feeling the cord stretch between our hearts and the home we just left and the people there even as it slackens with our approach toward our people here. This country is on fire and we are returning to it, thankfully. This is crazy. This is life.

I got to see Little Women on our last day in America, and I say “got to” because it was an opportunity afforded to me by The Husband, who recognises the tenuousness of my mental health on a good day but especially on a day that is: post-Christmas; devoid of a hotel-room base because late checkout was at 2 and we don’t fly out until 11; full of choices regarding food that my body now regrets; tired from the weeks before and the impending hours of travel. So he took the boys to a cartoon while I sat, by myself and among others, in a darkened theatre and watched the March sisters charm their way, once again and more than ever, into my heart. It felt joyful. It felt comfortable. It was perfect.

Then I left through an exit and saw the “Emergency Exit Only” sign but pushed the door anyway and the buzzing started and people stared and an employee rushed, looking at me directly and saying, “Did you do that?” And I responded that I had and gave no explanation because there wasn’t one, I couldn’t explain except to say PEACE OUT, AMERICA, I AM DONE FOR THIS YEAR. And so my boys and I had one last hurrah in the lobby of our hotel with snacks and drinks and then boarded our plane and the welcoming arms of the Virgin Australia flight crew. And…scene.

For that part, at least. Now “real life” begins, whatever that means, but here’s what it seems to mean so far: trying to get used to this new house that I vacillate between tolerating and hating, filled as it is with carpet (I cannot, and in Sydney one should not, humid as the air is and I do NOT want to use the word moist but you know where I’m going here); two beaches in two days with two boys; running through smoke to get some exercise for lungs that are probably blackening; reconnecting with friends who are family; organising my way into a more hopeful attitude about said house; trying to maintain self-awareness about how this all is affecting my mental health (no worries, I get therapy on Friday, #blessed).

But here is what has come before and, in its beauty, gets sprinkled throughout the present through memory and grace:

A Sudanese Uber driver who piques The Kid’s interest and they go on to have a conversation about whether the government in Sudan is good (it is, now, but watch out for that country to the south); a flight attendant whose intuition seems to lock her, kindly, onto both my kids but especially TK, and I watch but can’t hear yet can only grin as they have a conversation through breakfast and are both smiling themselves; a girl at the hotel pool who befriends my boys and they proceed to pretend to be dogs and dolphins (her dad sounds like Harvey Weinstein and I try to ignore that); a boy in the airport lounge who sees my boys on their iPads and they proceed to make said lounge louder than it’s ever been with their exclamations over Roblox and, for some reason, poops. Bonus: his drunk mom makes me feel better about my comparatively modest alcohol intake, #grateful; running into the kids from TK’s (and now Little Brother’s!) school vacation care at the beach and seeing faces light up when they recognise the boys.

There is no longer a hotel card key in my wallet, but a house key in my pocket. There is smoke and missing family and present friends and beachside lingering and waning jet lag and wondering about the future. There is a love committed to us, that proves itself beyond my doubts and disbelief in every moment, until all I can do is just behold it and try to breathe in its beauty.

Just look how far we’ve come. Thousands of miles and back. So far, yet right where we started. Across the world and always home.

I, I’m a new day rising
I’m a brand new sky
To hang the stars upon tonight
I am a little divided
Do I stay or run away
And leave it all behind?

It’s times like these you learn to live again
It’s times like these you give and give again
It’s times like these you learn to love again
It’s times like these time and time again

This is my favourite time of day.

These waning hours–after sunset and before bedtime (because we are in winter here and the sun goes down hours prior to lights out), during which the four of us are sprawled across two beds, immersed in books or screens or toys, bodies not merely adjacent but connected, crossed over each other, resting upon and underneath each other, because what are boundaries when it’s just us anyway?–these are my favourite. They don’t hold the ensuing obligations of the morning hours, the expectation to fill a day, the weighing and consideration of priorities, the heaviness of to-dos. (It should be noted that, yes, we are on vacation, and yes, this is still how I think on vacation.)

These hours hold laziness, and freedom, and rest. They hold a glass of wine or two, ice cream, binge-watching, boys splashing in showers, and winding down. They hold sleep. They hold the untouched moments between lying down and rising, full of promise for the next day without demanding anything yet, not so much as an early wakeup call other than the 7-am sunrise that will move, soon, to 5:30 am but for now beckons only half-heartedly, refusing to blaze until hours after we’ve had time to exercise, or eat breakfast, or just lie still some more on those beds.

I guess I’m…tired or something?

And it’s not just jet lag. Not for nothing, we’ve sort of become pros at that, mapping out allowances for it months in advance, knowing our own and each others’ bodies well enough to account for rest stops in hotels without any plans on our way in and out, and–when those allowances aren’t made but are needed anyway–shooting apology texts to say we aren’t going to make it to church on Christmas Eve after all because, well…we just can’t? Because we aren’t physically, and emotionally, able, even though we’d like to be? But we know well enough when it’s time to raise the white flag, and the people who know us, they know and love us well enough to tell the truth: that they’re disappointed but understand.

That’s one of the things you learn when you splay yourself across homes on either side of the world: how to tell the truth in love. How to say things like, “We’ll see you soon…ish?” and hear in response, “Not soon enough.” How to hear from the people back in Sydney that they miss you and tell them the same even as you’re missing the people you just said goodbye to here, dreadfully so. How you watch your youngest cry in the backseat after he’s said another farewell to the cousins he’s finally old enough to remember and enjoy and how not to distract him from the tears, but encourage him to feel them and, in so doing, feel them yourself. It hurts. And the hurt is so necessary, because it’s real.

Love is hard because it’s real. Because it tells the truth. Anything else is just cheap. Love that is strong enough to not only withstand the truth, but grow stronger because of it? That shit is real, man. It elevates, and it pulls you under, and it takes your breath away and gives your life back.

It’s what we’ve found by moving across the world. By spending Christmases in hotels and saying goodbye a thousand times and returning to kids who were way younger when we left, so much so that their growth punches you in the gut. It’s how we know each other, this four-sided square of ourselves, as well as we do. It’s the only way to have gotten to where we are: to leave everything we knew and go somewhere new, then toggle back and forth between the two over and over. It’s insane.

It’s also this:

It’s meeting The Kid’s first therapist in the park, and hearing her say, “I don’t even see autism anymore,” and it’s feeling your heart soar at the words, but not for the reason you would’ve thought five years ago when the doctor handed you those papers; it’s because you’ve finally learned that it doesn’t matter whether that word is even real, because whatever it means, whatever it holds, it doesn’t begin to contain the multitudes that make up your boy. It’s finally believing that, and would there have been any other way to get there than through there, through the doctor and the papers and the therapists and the journey across the world? It’s not because the words–autism, or apple brain–are a bad thing, it’s because they’re a nothing, not when compared to the person they can’t begin to describe.

It’s standing in that church, not on Christmas Eve but, finally, on the Sunday after, and feeling a presence brush against you and a hug wash over you and a face who knows you across oceans, much like the ones back across that ocean. It’s “I love you”s not held back like, I don’t know, but maybe they would’ve been if we’d all stayed in the same place? It’s walking toward the table you miss so much, the one with the people in front of it without whom your life is incomplete but, now you see, you aren’t without them. And the bread is pressed into your hand until it breaks, because that’s how love gives–so hard, so unyieldingly, without reservation–and the voice of the giver, who is also your friend, it breaks too as he says your name through tears.

It’s knowing you are home, even as you are not, even as you always are. It makes no sense, even as it does. It’s fraught with tears and laughter that seem to always be adjacent–no. Connected, splayed over each other, resting upon and underneath and within each other. Love is nonsense. And we are wholly immersed in it. What a glorious surprise, over and over again.

I write this from the children’s hospital in Atlanta, with which we are so familiar that my computer immediately defaulted to its wireless. That is just…lots of things.

Wrong. Helpful. Funny. Sad. Exhausting. All the things, really.

The Kid is getting his yearly MRI, the one where they check various places in his head and neck, a follow-up we’d very much like to #cancel, but so far have not managed to avoid. When I just took him back to the scan room, he writhed in my arms, screaming, “WHY DO I HAVE TO DO THIS?” That was what got me: all that he’s been through, all he’s had to endure. It’s not fair. And yet it’s made us who we are. Funny. Sad. Exhausting. It’s all the things.

I just filled out a “coping plan questionnaire” for TK which is well-intentioned and probably helpful, but I know that, like me, the best way he has of coping with hard things is for them to end. I’m forty-two and still haven’t completely accepted that this isn’t how life works, so I can’t expect him to have arrived at that realisation yet, but here we both sit, anxiety riddling our bodies, “STOP!” being our battle cry, trying to put on brave faces while, inside, spiralling.

And yet…we’re growing.

It’s been three years since we moved to Sydney, and this was the year we were meant to move back to America. Joke’s on the me from back then, since we’ve signed on for at least two more years, which makes this trip to America just that: a trip, a visit, a round-trip holiday, not the bookend return to our arrival. Our house here in Atlanta is sold and holds new occupants. We’re on our fourth Sydney house. It’s all quite ridiculous, really, and yet not? Because it’s our brand of making sense now, this dual life we lead, loved ones on both continents and within both hemispheres. Home scattered across the world.

This most recent move may have been our fourth in three years, with conventional wisdom telling us it should get easier, but a recent shipment’s arrival from the US meant it was a bigger move than the others, and our new place is the smallest. I’ll give you time to do the math there. Visually, it looked like rooms full of furniture scattered about and me standing in the midst of it, shutting down in a panic.

One of the pieces of furniture that made its way across the ocean is the rocking chair I used to feed both boys in as newborns. I remember sleepless nights spend in that chair, frustrating feeds and angry words shot from that seat toward The Husband, who annoyingly hadn’t been cut open and turned into a cow himself and therefore deserved all my resentment. Now, though, it serves as a seat for an eight-year-old and his five-year-old brother and their older yet slightly less tired parents, this four-pointed family who have come so far–literally and figuratively–together since those early days (and nights).

Then, we barely knew each other. Now, we are bonded by a glue stronger than anything we knew of back then: travellers in a strange land together, navigating fields both foreign and familiar, jet-lagged yet aware of each other’s “tired signals,” each knowing how to both push the others’ buttons and make them laugh uncontrollably. So, yes, I know how to fill out a coping plan for TK, and I’d know how to fill one out for Little Brother and TH too, but really? What we need most is grace, followed by each other. Luckily we have both in spades.

I would now like to discuss the past week.

Six days ago, we moved house. I was twenty-four hours off my latest counselling session and therefore riding high on enlightenment and well-being, or at least as close as they come for me when wisdom and peace are showered upon me from a trusted outside source. The Husband was, unusually for him, stressed and freaking and I was all Monica on Friends about it, breezy as f*ck, but really I’d just gotten to the point where I had nothing left to give and therefore no energy to expend on such luxuries as caring.

Besides, I had to get The Kid to school, Little Brother to sports camp and school readiness, and myself to TK’s awards presentation. There was no time to breathe, let alone freak out, and when people remarked about how calm I looked, I fought against laughing myself into convulsions and insanity in front of their faces because of how ridiculous it all was, is, our fifth house in three years, Christmas in summer, a cross-world trip, ALL OF THE THINGS ALL AT THE SAME TIME. What kind of assholes are we to keep doing this to ourselves?

Well, for one thing, we are the kind of assholes who are held by a grace that brings incredible people into our lives. People who fill our buckets, and glasses, and bookshelves. People who show up with a playmate for LB and a mini-Christmas tree for us, because who has time to put up a tree in the middle of a move? (TH does, but more on that later.) People who overserve me rosé at the end-of-year class picnic and give me a literal shoulder to rest my head on. People who cry when they tell me about how TH was looking at TK during the assembly; who cry when telling me how much he’s changed as he reads to LB, into truly the big brother he was made to be. People who hoot along with me during the pause when we were told not to applaud (so I YELLED, dammit) as TK made his way onstage to collect his award–for increased independence and a growth mindset. It’s not the award I got as a child, the one I had probably aspired to on his behalf before I met him–the standard excellence awards. It was a new one, designed specifically for him by a teacher who knows him, who knows what matters to him and what makes him…well, him. And it was pretty damn perfect, that moment, as he bolted to the stage and stood amongst his friends and grinned impossibly huge and I sweated and shook and felt it all, all the feelings, at the same time.

That morning, the kids had sung us to school in the car as we passed the moving van en route to our house as though there were nothing at all to obsess and stress over. Afterward, I had taken LB to his sports camp and watched, drained of energy, with nothing to do but relax and enjoy him. The day before, I had kept my hair appointment as packers boxed up our belongings as though I had time for that kind of nonsense. My roots had time, though, and as they sat covered in foil, I finished the book loaned by a friend, the one that I had almost given up on multiple times because it had enraged me, this main character’s BS, and then suddenly: a shift in perspective, an enlightening , some wisdom from outside, and I found myself affirmed like in my best counselling sessions–it wasn’t crazy to have felt that way!–and I read as it told me about dark matter, this thing that is everywhere yet unseen. This thing about which so little is known, and yet it binds so much of everything together, it pulls objects into rhythm with each other, and we know about it because we can see the objects, but not the dark matter itself. It is a mystery upon which everything depends.

Something we can’t even see…but its existence known by what it does, this invisible connective tissue that holds us all, that, as I write this while LB asks me one million questions and I get irritated then apologise and when I ask for his forgiveness, he looks up and nods, smiling. That, when I’m at the end of myself because TK is crying on the way to school because so much is going on and, once we arrive, his beautiful friend steps up and asks if he wants a hug. That sends TH home early once again because he’s been the one making this a home as I look around, no longer breezy but stunned and overwhelmed and shutting down, and he sends me to the cinema where I gorge on popcorn and White Christmas and learn to breathe again. Because sometimes you need Jesus, and sometimes you need your counsellor, and sometimes you need Bing Crosby in drag, and sometimes you get all of them all at once along with everything else, AT THE SAME TIME.

Three years go, I sat on my friend/spiritual mentor’s couch sipping tea and predicting how I would respond to our upcoming Australian relocation: I would feel disoriented, anxious, stuck in a dream- or hellscape, depending on the day. She told me something that, at first, I didn’t understand. She said, “You’re going to need to give yourself some space.”

I get it now, even if I’m still not fully able to put it into words. But I’ll try! This has been a week of radical self-awareness and care, our Unintentional Annual Moving Week, timed hellishly with so many other events. I’ve listened to my body as it reacts to each of the myriad (real and self-perpetuated) stressors. I’ve felt the anger and exhaustion. I’ve acknowledged the resentments and sense of loss and transience. I’ve exercised and slept. I’ve breathed. I’ve prayed. I’ve stayed away from the alcohol (for now). I’ve eaten chocolate. I’ve made list upon list and checked things off dramatically. I’ve been still. I’ve ducked away and stolen moments for myself. I’ve observed Advent with years-kept rituals that ground me.

This morning, I had a FaceTime sesh with my OG counsellor. It was another thing on another list, but it was also life being breathed into me.

Yesterday was The Kid’s birthday. It was also his school’s annual dance concert–what has turned into a yearly triumph of his spirit and progress. It was, also, another thing on another list. It was, also, life being breathed into me. Strange how something can be both.

I’ve had Little Brother at home with me 66% more of the time than usual because this is how we survive and do self-care too: by choosing not to put ourselves through the emotional upheaval of him facing a bully and what feels like an unsafe environment. There are times I have pushed, and will have to push, him into those zones, where he’ll have to see for himself that his perceptions are not always completely accurate, but this week? This week we’ve gone to the zoo and the mall and the couch for cuddles and this has been both hard and life-giving too. We are knowing each other in ways we didn’t before, all because some kid was being a shit to him, and that’s both awful and wonderful. Why do awful and wonderful so often have to arrive paired?

He has had space from school, from fear, and I’ve had…less space to myself. But more with him. More wandering around the zoo hearing him spill his knowledge on Sumatran tigers and meerkats. Time for him to be the teacher. This is also space, and life.

As we once again fit our life into boxes and pre-organize accordingly, I’ve held onto and thrown out slips of random paper, and on Monday I told TK’s school librarian: “I’m not the kind of person who loses books! Let me know what I need to do,” and she asked for the title of the book, and when I told her, she said it had already been found, it was never lost in the first place. Our family flits from house to house and home to home and I know we’re the same.

This week has lasted ten years and my schedule is all thrown off so I missed my weekly group Monday-morning hike. Tuesday morning instead found me going it alone, with a full day ahead and a short time available for wandering. I took to the footpaths I know, and from above the beach I could see the waves gently lapping. I ached to get down there, to spend a moment watching the calm of the early-morning sea, but there wasn’t time: I could only watch from a distance that day. I turned around and headed back toward home, which is to say my family, and thought about how giving myself space sort of feels like listening to Christmas music in the smoky heat or singing “It Is Well with My Soul” while chaos reigns all around me–two things I’ve been known to do lately–and believing that is can also mean it will be, that even when I’m not on it, the beach is still there, and I will get back there and until then, I’ll have to settle for it being a part of me.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, and you know what that means…

We’re due to move to another f*ing house!

This, after a weeks-long roller-coaster ride of home inspections, auction considerations, banking consultations, back-and-forth decision-making… and emotions. Oh, the emotions tied up in where we live: the sadness of leaving one place that’s become home mixed with the missing of the landmarks we’ve enjoyed there (indoor pool, hiking trail down to the water in our backyard, cafes and restaurants). It’s such a gross, privileged thing to say–“How I’ll miss swimming early-morning laps in my indoor pool, Jeeves!”–but here we are, giving up some of our expat package-covered amenities in favour of a more realistic life choice.

So within the next week and a half we will do the following: manage Little Brother’s newfound bully-provoked fear of going to preschool on Mondays and Tuesdays (he’s sitting beside me as I write this, the second day in a row I’ve let him stay home); a weekday night of The Husband and me going in separate directions (he to a work dinner, I to The Nutcracker) while a sitter stays with the boys; The Kid’s birthday party; a Christmas dinner/farewell-to-this house party with close friends and their kids; LB’s end-of-year school performance; TK’s end-of-year school performance; TK’s end-of-year presentation day; and a bunch of other stuff I’m forgetting.

My calendar, typically a sparsely populated smattering of events (and I like it that way), looks like a Rorschach test this time of year and I twitch every time I go near it. I don’t know how we’re going to get from where we are now–fully settled into our current house but with extra boxes from America strewn about–to settled (somewhat) into a new house a few blocks away. I don’t know how we’ll do it, but I know that we will, because we’ve done it twice here already and we haven’t killed each other yet (though I am glad we already had those family photos taken because I’m not sure we’ll be mustering smiles by the end of this).

And there are the teeny little bitchy things I’m obsessing over in the corners of my mind: I don’t love the house. The bathrooms could use some updating (look, I’ve been picky about bathrooms since I was a kid and smelled sulfur water at my grandparents’ place in the country and need I remind anyone of my childhood camping experience? I like sleek surfaces and new toilets and SUE ME BUT THIS IS WHO I AM). I am not high-maintenance about some things–I’ll buy the shit out of some clothes at Target and I only recently started investing, after years of my sister’s derision, in higher-quality hair care and don’t even LOOK at the state of some of my underwear–but show me a mild carpet stain of unknown origin at my place of residence and THERE WILL BE GAGGING.

It’s not lost on me, how this yearly chaos and search for home (and the attendant existential crisis about what exactly home is) falls during the season of Advent. A season meant for slowing down, for slow approaches, for promises kept by being fulfilled in ways surprising, unexpected, and unplanned. A fellow expat friend said it best over text recently when she talked about how Sydney real estate constantly reminds her that we will never have a perfect home this side of eternity. (“So true,” I responded. “But the bathrooms…” I still inwardly wailed).

But the moments, the slow burn toward Christmas, are where I’m looking to live right now. And they keep turning up, if I only look. There was the pop-up elf station at the mall yesterday, manned by a caffeinated, kindly grandmother-type and a good-natured twenty-something dude, where LB and I sat and made a reindeer mask and can I tell you that twenty minutes spent colouring with him were even more therapeutic than a hot bath and some Kenny G?

And there was the email I received yesterday, the first of its kind in the three years since we’ve been here, informing me that TK has been chosen for an award that will be given at his presentation day and the tears that sprang to my eyes were the redeemed kind: born not of the responses that the parent-I-was-going-to-be would have had (“Finally! Everyone will see what a great mom I am,” or “This will be fantastic for his resume!) but the burned-through-fire, sifted-through-his-story kind that just know what kind of joy will jump to his face when his name is called.

There is the pine-scented candle I just bought, the two Advent books I return to yearly as my story changes and doesn’t and so do/don’t I; the music piped through radio and phone, the tree we will put up at our new-old house, the self-enforced slowing even as the world seems to pick up speed.

And there was the moment on Sunday, while LB played downstairs with the rest of the kids and TK sat in his preferred spot on the pew between me and TH, when they were passing the bread and wine and I realised TK had never had communion. I asked if he wanted the bread, and his main concern was whether that would serve as his morning tea and would thus mean giving up the tray of cookies waiting outside. I said no, he could still have tea, and that the bread wasn’t a snack but a sign of something bigger done on his behalf. And I know he didn’t understand it fully–hell, I still don’t, but there’s this: we believe not in our own full faith and understanding of something as a necessary precursor before acceptance is acknowledged but in the full faith and understanding of the One who accepts us already, and that providing everything we need. Because it is that–that acknowledgment, that intrusion, that grace, that shows up not at my bidding but as gift. As unexpected and unplanned. As a welcoming–a welcoming home.

I just spent the morning driving around town looking at three rental homes for our family, who needs to be out of our current home in the next three weeks.

This is no way to live, right?

We’re straddling the decision of buying vs. renting in a city we’ve lived in three years and will stay in at least two more in a country where we’re permanent residents. My kids don’t even know about the Civil War (although they know about the Revolutionary one thanks to Hamilton) but they sure as hell know about huntsman spiders and quokkas. Little Brother is starting to say things like fust instead of first and he and The Kid are both aware that the blue-ringed octopus is poisonous.

Meanwhile, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade will air soon and I will sleep through it. AND THE DOG SHOW AFTERWARD.

This is all quite insane.

We were tucked into our three-story suburban home this time three years ago, with our endless yard and a swimming pool across the street. The Husband and I had siblings within walking and half-hour driving distance instead of across the world (maybe this is why I dreamed last night that The Sis died of an overdose? It was horrible; am I feeling guilty or something? Also, she doesn’t do drugs. I don’t think).

But this morning, we had our first (excuse me, fust) family photos taken since LB was a newborn. And we had them taken on a beach across the street from our (rental) home. And afterward, the boys had a quick play on one of their favourite playgrounds before I dropped them off at the schools they love (LB’s recent bullying experience notwithstanding; more on that later). And, yes, we are missing family (and I am missing cornbread and dressing) deeply, but we have a date set for a Christmas celebration with friends who feel like family. And TK’s epic dance concert is approaching–on his birthday. And on Friday night, we went with friends to the U2 concert I’ve been waiting for my entire life.

I have no interest in doing things normally.

My older kid has a diagnosis that doesn’t begin to define him, defined as he is by his kindness and empathy and ability to bring people together in ways they weren’t looking for, never expected, and wouldn’t trade for the world. My younger son has been targeted by a frenemy at school and has watched teachers and friends close ranks around him and stand up for him (while still being kind to the other little shit, don’t worry, though I’m considering purchasing a voodoo doll) and has learned, in the process, to voice his feelings and get special school-hours access to Mommy on occasion. He has learned that the world isn’t always safe but there are safe spots within it and that above all, our family is a team. (TK, for his part, is learning that there’s no I in team).

Friday night, after the rain poured down and the smoke (temporarily) cleared, I listened to songs that have become anthems only because they tell stories–and those stories don’t come from normal. They come from wars and struggle and defeat and triumph and glory. They come from not staying in one place, from standing up for what is right instead of what is comfortable, from faithfulness to what is bigger than ourselves.

So “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” echoes in my head throughout our current real estate saga. And TH and I, on a grey weekend afternoon, decide to tackle the shipment that arrived from America last week, and we find ourselves knee-deep in photos from decades ago, snapshots that tell our stories that eventually merged, and we show them to the two people who came from that merging, and I think about all the turns that seemed wrong at the time that got us here: the outsider status that led me to writing, the prolonged singleness that led me to New York, the diagnosis that led us to the therapist who just asked TK to be in her wedding, the people who led LB to his current hybrid accent, the unwanted offer that led us to Sydney.

An unpredictable, messy, unplanned life. Anything but normal, which can–and I say this with the love of Jesus–kiss my ass.