“The word ‘however’ is like an imp coiled beneath your chair. It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen, and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin. There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.”

I am terrified of my boobs.

And not just them, but all the other accessories of being a female; these organs that allowed me to become a mom: ovaries and uterus and the whole lot, sitting there now not waiting to fulfil, or fulfilling, but like ticking time bombs. These are the places that are checked yearly with pokes and prods and massive machines that squeeze them within an inch of their life–and I thought nursing was painful.

I check what I can and leave the rest to the doctors and God, wondering secretly, pessimistically, if any of them will ever betray me. Though I threaten, within my own thoughts, to run away quite often, my worst nightmare is not being given a choice in the matter: of being forced by death to leave my family.

Uplifting, isn’t it?

But this is how I operate, I’ve come to realise: waiting for the next shoe to drop, the next big thing to happen, the next disaster to strike. If I get ahead of it, you see, I can pre-empt all the unwanted! Just like I sat in The Kid’s room while pregnant with him, my copy of Babywise at my side, and prayed over everything I could think of.

Turns out I didn’t think of everything.

I never do. And maybe this propensity to obsess so inefficiently is why, one month before we leave for America for Christmas and less than one month before we have to be out of our current house, I broke down in laughter last night over the fact that we haven’t found a place to live. “Hey, remember that time…WE FORGOT TO FIND A HOUSE?” I giggled to The Husband last night as he smiled, tersely, at the ridiculousness of our life right now: living year to year, day to day, moment to moment, planners with no concrete plan. We were meant to be returning to America to stay this trip. Now we’re returning to leave again. To come back to…a home we haven’t discovered yet.

This is insane.

The things that used to work on my behalf–boobs, day planners, calendars–now sit empty, mocking me, illuminating with blinding fluorescent light my lack of control.

I’ve decided to start laughing along with them.

“When I’m an adult, you’ll die,” TK said to me the other night as Little Brother snored beside us. “Or maybe we’ll die at the same time,” he concluded, and I had to stop myself from telling him, “Dude, that’s best-case scenario,” since I had earlier told them both, accidentally, about Hitler and I had no more room for questions and panic. LB has been going through enough at school with a friend who, by growling and hitting and yelling, has transformed into enemy and left LB drained of confidence and joy about his formerly safe home-away-from home. Just yesterday, I drew a love heart button on his wrist and mine as TK proclaimed, “I don’t need those anymore,” and I thought about how time makes fools of us all: fools, and champions, and wiser, and realising all we don’t know. It changes and it leaves the same.

And I’ve been doing it–time–all wrong.

The diarist and author Sarah Manguso writes, “All I could see in the world were beginnings and endings…I knew I was getting somewhere when I began losing interest in the beginnings and the ends of things.”

She goes on: “The experiences that demanded I yield control to a force greater than my will–diagnoses, deaths, unbreakable vows–weren’t the beginnings or ends of anything. They were the moments when I was forced to admit that beginnings and ends are illusory. That history doesn’t begin or end, but it continues…I began to inhabit time differently. I used to exist against the continuity of time. Then I became the baby’s continuity…the agent of comfort that was always there for him…Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments–an inability to accept life as ongoing. It comforts me that endings are thus formally unappealing to me–that more than beginning or ending, I enjoy continuing.”

I have a fixation on moments, but not in a “let’s savour this and take a mental picture way;” more in a “let’s get to the next one” way. Let’s get past the next boob-smashing mammogram. Let’s get past the part where we don’t know where we will live, where we have boxes stacked up in our living room, where LB is afraid to go to his last few weeks of preschool, where TK has his next MRI.

Meanwhile, my own mortality sounds like a gong in the background. I get a death-defying sunburn in the one place I forgot to slather cream. I have a funny pain in my chest. My cycle is…off. And I think to myself…what if I just stayed here, in this moment, the one time will surely take away and turn into something else, but for now the only one I have?

Sometimes I succeed. Often I don’t. But when I do, I’ve noticed how much it can glow, suspended from yet connected to all the ones before and after it, like a sparkle on the ocean water that seems to disappear…yet always comes back.

It is only from the bottom that I can look up.

This is my summation of grace, and also of parenting hungover, which is the worst kind of parenting: worse even than parenting with a stomach virus, or parenting through a painful amateur musical performance. (Maybe not worse than parenting through a spinal surgery, but it’s been awhile, so don’t quote me.)

Because I am drinking less these days but also drinking older, it’s often tough to tell if I’m actually hungover or just really, really tired. The math behind forty-two years, post-midnight arrival home, pre-dawn wakeup call from kids, and erratic sleep ends in the negative column no matter how the result is reached, which is where I found myself on Sunday morning after a birthday party the night before (and I’m not, for once, talking about the kid kind): in the negative column, on the couch, without any desire to leave it (the couch, that is).

The night before had been everything I’ve come to love about Sydney: a walk down the street to the home of people we’ve known practically since we arrived. A spectacular view over the water. Free-flowing champagne. Endless banter with comfortable friends. Spastic dancing. Guttural laughter. Heartfelt conversations and proclamations of love. All leading to knowing glances at school drop-off on Monday morning, and “Do you remember…?” recaps throughout the week.

But between Saturday night and Monday morning lies…Sunday. Full of empty hours (especially if you just CANNOT with church that week) and needy children. And when I finally made my way upstairs and to the couch, I found my family waiting, and coffee brewing.

I really wanted the coffee.

But in those next few minutes of haze before the caffeine kicked in, in those gauzy moments of semi-consciousness–the ones I used to spend on a different couch, in New York, with a roommate who marvelled at the strange alternate reality provided in the morning after when she was surprised we didn’t fall down more–I looked around at my family and realised afresh but not for the first time how often I see them, and life, as something to do--to get through, to serve, to complete as an obligation. I had no energy for obligation, for anything really, so the shackles seemed to fall off and I just…sat. And watched.

I watched the way The Kid sidled over to me, contact on his own terms but always swinging the pendulum between no touching and lying on top of me. I watched his sneaky grins and mirrored them back. I watched Little Brother grow visibly excited over the prospect of having us all, all four of us!, together, at his disposal, for an entire day, and he could barely decide between the games of Life and Clue and Snakes and Ladders and his exotic animal book so he brought them all over, stacking them in front of us and burrowing into my smelly side. I watched as The Husband did the most romantic thing possible: downloaded Uber Eats on his new phone so he could order us a grease-laden meal.

I watched them all, and I loved them.

Which is not so much a revelation, because obviously I love them and already I knew so, but in the moment and for the day there were no demands of that love beyond the immediate. I felt my place in the world, and it was right here, with these people. My people. And it felt not like an obligation but a gift.

I don’t always let it feel this way–let them in this way–but they became my refuge.

And they still are.

Little Brother became obsessed recently with a book at his school called An Anthology of Intriguing Animals. (I have my suspicions that his teachers began hiding it because he wanted them to read it so often.) On a recent trip to Costco, I saw the book and grabbed it, proudly holding it up as I returned to the boys and The Husband. LB shrieked with joy.

We read it every day.

As kids’ books go, it’s actually decent. Better than decent, because there are enough animals in there for my memory to repeatedly forget the ones I read a few days ago, so I keep relearning interesting facts. Did you know that killer whales aren’t whales, but dolphins? That king cobras don’t hiss, but growl? Or that female sea turtles return to the beach where they were born to lay their own eggs?

That one made me stop and think (over LB’s cries for me to KEEP GOING). This time of year always upends me: it’s meant to be cold with shortened days full of baking and football in the background as Thanksgiving and the Westminster Dog Show approach. Instead, the sun is rising at 5:45 am, setting after 7:30, I’ve switched back to unnatural deodorant because pit stains, and there is no Thanksgiving.

And there’s this: the other day, LB asked why it’s cold in America at Christmas. BECAUSE THAT’S THE WAY IT SHOULD BE! I wanted to reply, then realised that he’s had more Christmas seasons in warm weather than cold; is this his normal now? Is this their, our normal, waking up in hotel rooms on beaches or in former hometowns or in current rentals, doing Christmas not in the house we came to from the hospital with them but somewhere else? Often somewhere hot?

That can’t be right…can it?

The boys want to know about their beginnings, their stories, and ours. “You were born in Alabama and Daddy was born in California,” LB recited this morning, and I think about how continuity is a lost concept for them: they haven’t been to the city of my birth in years and to TH’s, only once. We’ve bounced around to three houses here in Sydney, each providing a delineation from the year before it (great for remembering and categorising, not great for familiarity), and are set to find a new one soon. How can they have–in the language of their current favourite video game–a base within all this nonsense?

Then I put them to bed at night.

I no longer remember what it’s like to tuck them in, turn out the light, and tell them goodnight from the doorway as I walk away. Bedtime has, for years now, been a matter of one of us lying down with them until they fall asleep. I take the weeknight shift. and it’s exhausting. It’s also amazing, when I let it be. Because every night, I get to bring them home. And they do the same for me.

We talk about our days, and our feelings. I remind them of who loves them most and best and how wonderfully they were made. They ask a million questions. I speak truth to them, and then at some point, they usually tell me that I’m the best mom in the world.

This is, of course, laughable. There are way too many frozen nuggets and iPads and temper losses in my parenting for their appraisal to run true. And trust me, I beat the shit out of myself for it. Then their tiny voices tell me something that runs counter to all my regrets, and I realise that they are showing me grace, reintroducing me to it all over again. They are telling my story, as I tell theirs. They are bringing me home.

And I stay, until I hear their breathing even out and see their eyelids close, and I think through all the things I’ve done wrong and try to forgive myself as they have forgiven me. They have made me their base. I may question their judgment, but I can’t deny the gift. This gets to be our story.

In the morning, when the sun is rising but they haven’t, I lace up my shoes and work on the next chapter, writing notes for them that tell the truth…fixing them to their iPads, where I know they’ll be found.

Monday morning, I climbed blearily into the dark car and drove toward the beach and my weekly hike there. The notes from the classical station–which I can never listen to unless I’m alone in the car, and I’m never alone in the car unless it’s before sunrise–wafted through the speakers as I hugged the curves of our street. The announcer came on, introducing a piece of music called “Dawn on the Moscow River” and noting its aptness for the present moment, minutes before Sydney’s own sunrise. I had the window cracked because we’re in the transitional part of spring where air-con can be too cold but static air too hot, and as the music played I couldn’t tell if the birds I could hear chirping were on the radio or outside the car.

They were outside, it turned out. And I had the thought in that moment–along with the one a few minutes later when I crested the hill on Awaba Street and saw the sun beginning its rise–that I often have in moments of beauty: Nice one, God.

Of course, a thought like that requires believing in the divine in the first place, and as I’ve learned since we move here, such a belief is…rare in Australia. A friend’s (cute as hell) kid has recently taken to asking me, repeatedly, “Do you believe in God?”, the notion confounding his five-year-old brain. I get it. I’m more comfortable in most bars than churches, and some of my least favourite people are those who claim to be believers (especially the ones who put Trump in office; excuse me while I vomit). When we first arrived in Australia we went to a BBQ dinner at my only friend’s house (my only friend at the time; now I have two), and when asked what we did that morning, we mentioned having gone to church. “Like…on a historical tour?” her husband asked, and I knew we were not in Kansas anymore.

Kansas being, for me, a Bible-Belt upbringing where not attending Sunday services was more notable than showing up in the pew. Then I moved to New York at the end of my twenties and had to actually articulate for some people why I took an hour out of Sunday Funday (not every week, but enough of them) to hear a sermon. It was an education…for me. Not in the sense that I was exposed to a new heathen world (gasp! insert pearl-clutching), but that I saw, through living in it, how cool the people were in that world, and how graceless it would be of me to get up in their faces and ask if Jesus was their personal Lord and Saviour and whether they were going to hell when they died (though I do text that to my friend on the reg now as payback for her kid’s questions).

The more questions my own kids have about faith, the more I understand why other people can’t embrace it. Virgin birth? Resurrection? It sounds dicey at best, a bit insane if I’m being honest, and they haven’t even aged up to the Left Behind series and the damage it’s done to critical Christian thinking.

But also? The more my kids talk about faith, the more I believe. The other night, Little Brother was struggling with insomnia brought about by a car nap sandwiched between two birthday parties earlier in the day, and his mouth was running nonstop. “Mommy, God is everywhere,” he told me, and I murmured my assent while wanting to quote the title to one of my favourite books, Go the F*** to Sleep. “I can feel him in my heart,” he said. “Great,” I seethed. Then he started sniffing his arm. “Mmm, smells like God,” he exclaimed. Then, he licked that arm. “Tastes like God!”

I nearly fell out of bed laughing at the absurd beauty of it: God as Axe body spray all over my five-year-old.

Then, pre-dawn this morning, I was lacing up my running shoes when The Kid padded up the stairs to tell me about his dreams. As he headed back down, he tossed a “Bye, Mommy,” over his shoulder, and I ran toward another sunrise, this one blasting pink all over the ocean beside me, and while I know it’s not what makes sense to everyone else, I couldn’t help–can’t help–but think it again, to think it always–because, besides the sunrises, there’s also the list of fears I wrote before we got on the plane that brought us to our new life here, the list I fretted and prayed over and watched as, one by one, each item on the list was answered, and usually in the form of a person: a therapist for TK, a playmate for LB, a job breakthrough for The Husband, a friend (usually a champagne-swilling heathen, my fave) for me, and with all these people showing up, I can’t help but think that a Person must have sent them.

Nice one, God.

I don’t remember jacarandas in America. But our first spring here, they carpeted the hill behind our house, and I recall The Kid’s therapist telling me their name. Up to that point, they had been “those purple trees” between me and the boys; now, they had an identity. That same therapist, this week, told me she wants TK to be in her wedding next year.

And I’ve read more about the jacarandas. It turns out they’re considered an invasive species here, because they’ve been brought from other places. When I found this out, I loved them even more. Because it’s sort of what we are, invading Americans who are now thriving in Aussie soil.

So when the time came yesterday to go to TK’s class at school to work on a tree project, I picked up some purple tissue paper on the way in addition to the green construction-paper leaves I carried in a zip-loc bag with me. We were going to make a story tree, an invention of mine inspired by a Brain Pickings email I’d gotten about the first American female cartographer, who transformed historical timelines into visual wonders: lists becoming trees, buildings, all sorts of things; bullet points into art. I told the kids, through the sweat and flush that always accompanies my speaking to groups, about why story matters to me, as a writer. About how it can matter to all of us, because it allows us to connect.

Yes, they nodded when I asked–they remembered the story of TK’s apple brain told earlier that year. And when we started talking about their stories, they lit up even more. We spent the next half hour writing those stories onto leaves and hanging them on the tree, then crumpling tissue paper into flowers. We had our jacaranda.

On Saturday, after a marathon birthday party of ferry rides and building bears, my friend had asked if I needed a tree for this project. I thought about the weak DIY ideas I’d already entertained, the best option being a metal garden tower with spokes coming off it, and answered affirmatively. She led me to a wooden tree with numerous branches coming off it, and it was perfect. I’d been hoping for the right tree. I was glad I’d waited for it too.

And this morning, I went to a different classroom: a kindergarten one, where I handed Little Brother off to a fifth-year “buddy,” watching and feeling my heart unexpectedly leap and break as his eyes scanned the area nervously but he tried not to show it, his gorgeous face trying to be brave. He went into the room while I listened to a maths lecture and ached for him, and when he emerged he was himself but changed. He had grown up a bit. I was proud, and pained.

This has always been my favourite time of year in the US, the shortening of days and cooling of temperatures as Halloween gives way to Thanksgiving and then the most magical of them all comes: the Christmas season. Here, now, the sun rises earlier and sets later and shines brighter and hotter, and I find it is possible for something to feel all wrong and all right at the same time.

They are young, but not as young as they used to be. They are growing, but still the same. We are home, and away.

This morning I ran along the path of the rising sun on a street overlooking the ocean, and the clouds and light arranged themselves so that it looked as though there were footprints out on the water. Miracles do still happen, I know this; walking on water just looks different these days. It looks like boys growing. It looks like stopping to take a photo, then on the way back seeing a cyclist who’s done the same. It looks like trees showing up in the right place, always at the right time.

On Sunday, The Husband and I rushed the kids down the streets of Neutral Bay and onto the ferry because I had thought it would be a good idea to book tickets for a classical music concert at the Opera House. “So…is this a regular, non-kid show?” TH asked me, revealing his lack of confidence in my intellect. “Do you THINK I would book tickets for them to see an adult show?” I responded, as we both turned to the boys on either side of us who were at that moment seated at Opera Bar, alternately playing on our phones and complaining about being hungry. TH shrugged and I shook my head, explaining that this was a family show of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons meant to introduce kids to classical music in a laid-back environment. It had seemed an opportunity at the time, when Facebook told me I might be interested in the event and I, like the chump I am, dutifully submitted by credit card information. Now–as usual with booked events involving the kids–I had doubts.

We went anyway, and the boys entered the Concert Hall rather than the Kids’ Playhouse for the first time, and we climbed to our nosebleed seats (I wasn’t dumb enough to pay for top-tier tickets, at least). Over the next hour, Little Brother and TH fell asleep and I tried to block The Kid’s foot from kicking the seat in front of him. I sweated and prayed. I rode my anxiety like the wave it is: retreating, returning.

But something else happened. There, in our post-holiday, post-time change, post-Saturday-rosé-tasting haze, we felt the familiar notes swell around us, and despite the anxiety and the rigidity of the seats and the lack of devices (and, for some, consciousness), we listened. It helped that the emcee was a presenter from a local TV show the boys have seen (well, it helped them; TH and I just rolled our eyes to each other at his lead-balloon jokes). And the boys were especially fascinated with the arrival, during “Summer,” of an eleven-year-old violin prodigy who, it was announced, practised four to five hours a day (I could see the fear in TK’s eyes when he imagined doing homework for that long).

But it was the music that filled the space, notes drifting around us and, I’d like to think, lowering my blood pressure and entering the kids’ brains for both educative and reflective purposes, showing them true and timeless beauty. I’d like to think this is what kept them still, though let’s be honest–it was probably the promise of ice cream afterward.

We didn’t make it through the whole show–despite it being advertised as lasting an hour, “Winter” had barely begun when it was time for us to go if we wanted to squeeze in a trip to Baskin-Robbin’s before we had to make the ferry back. So we climbed over the rest of the people in our row, straining the bonds of social propriety as usual, and headed outside into the sun.

The next morning, in my pre-dawn drive to the beach, I found “Winter” and listened to it from the car. I recognised the notes I’ve heard before, their familiarity filling my now-solitary space, showing me what I’d missed the day before but also reminding me that often, what I see myself “missing” is often just delayed, or replaced by something better. Like ice cream. And ferry rides in the sun.

The whole outing on Sunday–from rushing to the ferry to hurrying through lunch to nail-biting through the music to also kind of enjoying it–had been what these things always are: a high-effort shitshow filled with beautiful moments. Which is…a lot of life, really?

Little Brother is showing some musical prowess himself recently, having memorised basically the entirety of the Hamilton lyrics after a few weeks of listening to them Non-Stop (see what I did there?). He belts them out from the backseat of the car, filling the non-solitary space with familiar notes and words and grinning at me when I glance back at him and sing along. We have a way of doing this, our family, and maybe most of us? Replaying the same music, the same lyrics, the same notes. I have a way of doing it here, every week when I sit down to write: no matter what space I’m in–different time of day, different mood, different circumstances–playing the same notes and letting the same music tell the same story. A story of cynicism, of (I hope) humour, of failure, of forgiveness, of redemption. Of grace. The song I can’t stop listening to, or singing along with.

There is a chapel in the town of Seaside, on County Road 30A on Florida’s Gulf Coast: a white clapboard structure behind an artist’s colony, set among the gingerbread, Truman Show-filmed houses, with a postage-stamp square of grass rolling out in front of it.

I didn’t get married there.

I wanted to, though, and I called from my office at the time on 51st and 2nd in New York, only to be left with mouth hanging open at the required rental fee for a twenty-minute ceremony. So we married down the road instead, at a spot on the beach that didn’t require a deposit of our firstborn child and was perfectly beautiful nonetheless. But I do love that little chapel, landmark that it is of my teen-and-afterward years, symbol of one of my favourite places in the world: that beach.

Now I have a few more favourite places, and beaches.

We just returned from one of our domestic jaunts in Australia, this time to the Great Barrier Reef city of Cairns in Queensland, a three-hour flight north of Sydney. Cairns is, in a word, hot–and not in the Hansel way, but in the literal, temperature, pits-and-everything-else sweaty kind of way–which, given our trip was in the spring month of October, made us breathe a prayer of thanks that we weren’t there in the height of summer, when my perspiration would surely have been a rolling river.

The holiday was eventful, and not. We had plenty of quiet moments in the room and at the breakfast buffet, a couple of hours of the Hamilton soundtrack in the car driving to a crocodile farm and seaside town to the north, whining and complaints per usual, an afternoon at the hotel pool. We also had a Ferris wheel ride over the city (the kids never get tired of my story of when The Sis puked on one when we were kids), a semi-submarine ride through the underwater wildlife of the reef, and a too-close-for-comfort feeding of the aforementioned crocodiles. The Kid barfed after a particularly rough boat ride to the reef island. I enjoyed a solo cup of coffee on the hotel balcony one morning (inspiring; rare; #blessed).

And there were a couple of moments that felt like echoes from a past, but contiguous, life. There was the night I sat on the balcony while The Husband worked in the lobby and the boys slept near me, and I surveyed the scene below–lit-up Ferris wheel, lighthouse in the distance, city noises blaring–and was taken back to the nights of my childhood spent on the balconies of holiday rentals: that sense of life happening all around me but not requiring anything of me; the incomparable peace of the water below and the feeling that I’d finally found somewhere I belonged. Now I felt it again, in another country on another beach in another hemisphere with my three new people–not mom and dad and sister but husband and son and son. A sense of landing, and place. A sense of home.

How far we often have to go to find it.

And yesterday, we drove north after the croc feeding and ate overlooking the water, across from a white clapboard chapel, and we walked over to it after lunch: the kids and TH targeting the playground while I peeled off and veered left, photographing the church and being reminded, always, of other things: the same, but different.

There has been so much of this in my life, and in our move across the world: this sense of details replicated. Of friends who remind me of people back home. Of Costco, but with different products. Of us, the four of us, but three years older, a triplet of Australia-spent years under our belts that have rendered us both at home and between homes; homed and homeless. We can’t plan ahead too far or stock up too much, even with Costco: we take it one year, one day at a time, in the most flagrant disruption of my former, intricately-planned way of life imaginable.

But the view.

We have been located, and relocated, and the home that we find–the place I’ve always felt at home–has had, always, an expanse to view: something bigger than me and my plans and my self-insured surety. That expanse, that unpredictable vastness, is where I have always been home, been located, been lost…and found.

We’ve had cause for a few celebrations lately.

Two Fridays in a row, we received (good) news that prolongs what was meant to be a three-year tour in Australia. First, there was the permanent residency we were granted. Then, our house in America sold and closed despite all the ghosts living in it (kidding).

Then, the other day, Little Brother turned five. And the lead-in was…quantifiable in its excitement. Every day, several times a day, he would ask how many more days were left until the big event. And every day, upon hearing the answer, his excitement would spill over into a giggly dance. Finally, we headed to a hotel in the city for a staycation granted by reward points, and the four of us piled into a king-sized bed for room service and TV. The next morning, LB woke up to balloons and presents and we spent the day as tourists in our own city, walking along the harbour and visiting museums.

But before that, and a couple of weeks early (the sitter was already booked for an event that got cancelled; #romance), The Husband and I headed into the city for his birthday celebration. I had booked a ghost tour because that was the kind of thing we used to do while we were dating–back when getting scared was a matter of haunted houses and horror movies, not unhinged presidents and anxiety over kids. Real life provides enough frights these days, but I booked the tickets anyway, and so we walked over from our Mexican dinner to the Rocks, the oldest part of Sydney.

We had a few minutes before the tour began, so we popped into a bar where live music was playing. We only stayed long enough for two songs, and as we heard the words to “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” TH and I glanced at each other. Before us, between the band and the entryway where we stood, were a group of people dancing with the aid of free-flowing drinks, and an insult formed on my ever-ready-to-insult lips before I saw myself there (or at the American version of there, at least) a few years earlier, belting out the same lyrics atop a bar on the Jersey Shore, just as earnest and just as drunk as the people we were watching. And when we left that bar a minute later and passed by several more–many with lines snaking around corners full of patrons awaiting entry–I felt a twinge of nostalgia for long nights full of endless drinks and possibility.

Then I remembered how those long nights actually went, when peered through a microscope: hope turning into disappointment, buzz turning into hangover, possibility turning into desperation; my own self-imposed urgency (What if my future husband is in this bar? What if I MISS HIM?!); fraught social interactions feeling like games of chess (I’ve never understood chess).

The FOMO that used to both haunt and propel me quickly evaporated. We didn’t stop, instead heading toward our tour group.

Yes, we were truly on the other side now, walking drink-less among a tour group led by an older man in a black overcoat and hat while bar-goers stared at (and likely pitied) us, and we loved it. We were led into dark alleys and locked houses, threaded through Sydney history and personal stories. We saw views of the Harbour Bridge and the water from vantage points we never would have known about, much less ventured to.

All of that, plus we got home at a reasonable hour. And the only dudes I woke up with are the ones to whom I’m related by blood and marriage. Score.

Sure, there are parts of life that are circling the drain at any given moment: workplace woes, real estate scarcity, to name a couple. But then last Saturday, I took LB to a birthday party at the zoo’s ropes course and he told me on the way in he didn’t want to do it. We kept walking, though, and a few minutes later he was harnessed and helmeted, and after a few minutes more he was–with a panic-stricken expression–doing it. After he made a particularly tough crossing, he turned back to his friend: “Don’t worry, E, you can do it! Trust me.” He had gotten to the other side.

There’s always another side. Sometimes you just have to endure panic, and maybe crap your pants a little to get there–where there becomes here, where panic becomes joy.

Trust me.

Permanent residency established, house sold. Husband found, kids born. Diagnosis received; denial transformed into advocacy of the beautiful different; move across the world completed; friendships made. I sat by one of those friends this morning on a beach where our kids played and I told her what I knew, what I will always know: “I would have been a completely different kind of mother if none of that had happened. If we had stayed where we were.” And I didn’t mean a good kind.

The four of us on the birthday of the youngest, walking around our city, our home, TH and I begging them to enjoy the view, dammit. On the beach gazing across the water in which they’re playing. On our couch watching the bridge go up and down. Watching. Trusting. Seeing.

I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory.

The best things always begin in the dark.

This hasn’t kept me from being afraid of darkness for most of my life. When I was a kid, I went around the house turning on lights until my dad put a moratorium on unnecessary electricity, telling me I was running up the power bill. Light has always felt like protection–fewer things, bad things, can hide in the light.

Maybe that’s why I’ve always embraced hypochondria: if I could imagine it, see it happening to me, and fear it, then surely it wouldn’t? Shining a light on cancer, on aneurysms, on everything that could go wrong with my body–this would protect me? Like expecting to get struck by lightning and thereby outrunning it. When we were young enough to be left alone but not old enough to be unafraid (is anyone, ever? the fears just change), my mom would go to her grad school classes at night and I would imagine car accidents, knocks on the door, until she got home safely.

So yes, I suppose I’ve always been a bit of a downer.

But then there is the day when you learn what is on the other side of death, death itself being a catch-all word for anything that veers from our original plan; death being everything from mortality to diagnoses, differences, loneliness, tears, broken hearts, physical maladies, mental struggles.

And perhaps the biggest: childbirth. Or maybe just parenthood, period.

Last week, The Kid’s school began their year two swimming scheme: two weeks of intensive instruction at a local aquatic centre with the kids grouped according to ability. Immediately upon hearing that term–ability–I bristled, my advocacy sensors blaring. I hoped, prayed, that he would be granted a teacher who would give him a chance to show all that he’s learned from years of swim lessons, who would not let the sight of his therapist lead to lower expectations and inequitable treatment.

Apparently, the answer to that prayer was a maybe next time.

His therapist told me how the instructor had let all the other kids swim a length to show their skill level, but that TK and the other kid with a carer were told to walk. Then, she told me, my boy was all, “F this noise” and began to swim anyway, much to the surprise of the instructor, who apparently equates the spectrum with physical and mental flatlines. She persisted in her misapprehensions, insisting that TK have a carer with him in the pool at all times, and though I’m the one who has been at those swim lessons with him through the years, who has lived in three different homes with pools he has traversed countless times on his own, when it comes to informing someone who Always Knows Better, I’m just the Mom Who Irrationally Defends Her Kid. (Hey, I’ve been called worse.)

So I kept him home one morning, swimming with him myself, working on his stroke while we laughed together through my anger and emotion. And the next day, his non-swim teacher told me he wanted to get in the pool with him the next time his therapist couldn’t be there.

I had died a little when my boy was not seen; then I was brought back to life by the people who do see him.

And as his confidence grows alongside these deaths and resurrections, he ventures out more into the world than ever before. Three days in a row last week we went on bush walks, crossing over branches and stumps and all the sorts of things that would have turned him around before, back to the familiarity of home, and now he presses on, exclaiming along the way: “This is so fun!” “It’s the best day of my life!”

And I meditate, daily or just when I can, in the friend-recommended savasana, or corpse pose. Practicing for death, which really just feels like letting go. So much of death is letting go. So much of life is.

They say that when the Romanovs were told to go to the cellar of The House of Special Purpose (morbid, I know, but I’m a bit obsessed; sue me), they thought they were going to be transported somewhere new, so they brought their jewels with them, fastening the gems to the inside of their clothes, weighing themselves down with the material, so that when, instead of being moved they were executed, the stones acted like bullet-proof vests, making them harder to kill and extending the nightmare until the soldiers stopped shooting and started using their bayonets instead.

Clinging, it so seldom leads to life.

On Mondays, especially ones after disco parties and late weekend nights, I awaken before the alarm and the sun is over an hour away, and I put on my shoes and drive through the dark to where others will meet me and we will walk toward the dawn. Lately, the sun has been inching closer, earlier, but it is only in the darkness that I see its promise. I was a different person: before New York, before kids, before Sydney. Each time, I had to die before I could come to life. This is the order: it’s not fair, but it’s true. And every time, every time, I see it as a reminder, as a promise kept: the things that bring us through the darkness, that bring us closer to death–these are the things to bring us closer to life too.

Among the many traits The Kid and I have in common is a reticence for eye contact, though each of us has our own reasons. Mine: a condition called congenital nystagmus that renders my eyeballs shaking marbles in my head and often leads people to ask me “why [I’m] doing that weird thing with [my] eyes.” His: a propensity to be overwhelmed by sensory input, including but not limited to others’ gazes.

Actually, maybe we have that reason in common as well.

All my life I’ve resisted the socially-required act of holding eye contact. I’ve looked everywhere but at the person to whom I’m speaking during a conversation, often leading that person to turn and check behind them to see what I’m looking at. Sometimes I forget that my eyes do this freaky thing and then, when someone looks at me a bit closely, I remember and start swimming in self-consciousness.

“Eye contact” is an actual goal in TK’s therapy program, a heavily-emphasised action that he is constantly encouraged about. “Oops, where are your lovely eyes?” he’ll be asked. “Where am I, James?” I imagine him rolling those lovely eyes when no one is looking, muttering “You don’t know my life” under his breath.

I know we each also have non-diagnosed reasons for shying away from being stared down: as introverts, we can get worn down by contact with others; we like to protect ourselves and our space. So much so that having someone look at us can feel like our souls are being peered into without our permission.

Have I mentioned that we’re both sensitive?

I’m writing this on a Tuesday, and this afternoon I’ll be going to TK’s class to continue what is becoming a tradition since last year’s inaugural event: my speaking to his class about autism, or his “apple brain,” as is our preferred nomenclature for the way his mind and body work. I’ll show photos and a video and tell his story and answer questions. It’s something I’m privileged to do, and nervous about. I’m opening a window on both of us, inviting people to peer inside. It’s unnerving, and wonderful. Hard, and easy. But my mind was made up when my friend told me that her son still talks about the wonder of “James’s apple brain” a year after the last talk.

I never chose to be an advocate. When I was in my residency, I wrote a paper about autism and remember thinking how interesting and foreign it was. The autism I wrote about–the specific behaviours, the dental effects–does not describe my son in the least. Maybe that was why I had such a hard time accepting his diagnosis when it was handed to us four years ago: it didn’t fit into the parameters I had sectioned off when I was studying it as a foreign entity back in school.

Because now, the spectrum is a real and living thing. It limits and it gifts; yet it still doesn’t define. It is a part and not the whole. The whole is The Kid, and this is the story I tell: of all he’s been through, of what he likes and dislikes, excels at and needs help with. Of how he has kindness in spades (and of how I am seriously considering getting a bumper sticker that reads, “My kid on the spectrum is more empathetic than your kid who’s not”). Of how he’s a big brother and can’t stand vegetables. Of how he is you, and me.

I’ve had to lay down so much armour I carried into adulthood, and parenthood, so that people can really see me, and see us. I’ve had to showcase scars because they are such an integral part of our story. And, so far, I’ve typically been met with love and understanding (to my face). Still, it’s uncomfortable. It means I get asked about my eyes, or about the red ink on my and TK’s hands–the love buttons we share to send hugs when we’re apart. It means I get to document how nothing is as I expected it to be, and how this has both broken and blessedly remade me, sending the painfully shy and fearful girl toward microphones, into classrooms, telling the story she didn’t choose but the one that’s being written for her, for hers–the hardest and best kind of story there is.