I’ve had enough of death and depression lately, thank you, but apparently I am not on the steering committee that decides when these matters show up in my life to be paired with a tall glass of seltzer or, more likely, cabernet.

Death: two friends from college have each lost a parent in the last few weeks. Little Brother lost his preschool teacher.

Depression: see below.

Last Wednesday, I opened the fridge at LB’s school to place his lunch inside and was greeted by the sight of a simple carafe whose very presence was a punch in the gut. It was not so simple a carafe, see, because one week ago to the day I had been in that same kitchen, opened that same fridge, and seen that same carafe. That time, however, LB’s teacher was in the room with us and I paired a sideways glance with a knowing smirk, asking him, “Hey A, is that a carafe of rosé I see here?” He appeared confused for a second, then got on board with the joke as we speculated together over how necessary alcohol was on the job. A day later he was gone. A week after that day was his funeral, and I missed expressing sympathy and experiencing catharsis because LB was sick on the couch with a fever. So instead, I found time on my own to cry: on training hikes, in a swimming pool. I tried to cry and breathe my way through the loss of a person who loved my child, whose near-daily presence in our lives was now a hole, to say nothing of what his family is experiencing, of what all these families who are left with holes might be experiencing.

That alone would be enough for some sustained sadness. But depression isn’t “feeling sad.” It’s more insidious and less obvious, burrowing underneath the circumstances of daily life and waiting until things feel relatively calm and measured before pulling the rug out from underneath it all like some kind of asshole magician. To wit: there seems to be an annual pattern for its arrival. First there is the heat of the summer and what starts off as a blessed lack of schedule and excess of Vitamin D. Then the togetherness gets stifling and we’re all driving each other crazy. Then the anxiety about school sets in for the boys and me, schedules are readjusted, and newness is encountered. Then the season of adjustment appears to be completed, the boys are settled, and WHOOSH! Here comes that asshole magician to leave me in the depths without any explanation until I remember that it likes to wait until the overt anxiety has evaporated and I am left with the quiet I’d longed for over the summer that now either weighs down or isn’t enough. I’m overwhelmed by the little things–making lunches, being questioned about zombies, managing emotional moments at bedtime–while the big things stomp around, promising to go nowhere until they’re dealt with too.

Also, I have PMS and I forgot to wear deodorant today. And The Kid’s therapist is sick so I just negotiated a half-day at school followed by a trip to the toy shop. The Husband is at a work dinner tonight and LB cried at drop-off while the teachers urged me to leave and I did, feeling like a neglectful mother the whole way while also feeling relieved and feeling guilt about that.

It’s complicated! And I think that’s because it’s all connected. The sadness plays into the depression and the anxiety plays into the anger and a simple morning before school turns into a Greek tragedy leaving me in a whirlwind of emotion and regret.

Titanic was on TV the other night and I was reminded of a few things: The Sis saw it, like, seven times at the cinema; Rose as an older woman was a bit too sassy for my taste (THAT NECKLACE COULD HAVE FED A SMALL COUNTRY, ROSE); and it really wasn’t that great a flick. And yet the story never leaves, seared into our collective consciousness in its awfulness and unexpectedness, displayed so melodramatically (and with terrible dialogue) by the film. I remember learning about the disaster (the sinking, not the film) early in life and learning more about icebergs shortly after: how the visible part of them above water is actually just the beginning; how that part is dwarfed by what lurks beneath the surface, that mammoth hunk of ice beyond the naked eye.

There are those surprises we didn’t plan for, those piles or ice that pop up in our path and either divert us or wreak holes in our lives, and the thing about them is that on their own, on their surface, they’re enough to do serious and irreparable damage, but underneath? Underneath is another thing altogether. Underneath is what comes along with them, the days and years of grief and absence and gut-punches and tears, the thinking-you’re-okay-until-you’re-reminded-that-you’re-SO-not-and-you-may-never-really-be.

Yesterday when I picked LB up from school I was talking to a couple of his teachers (including A’s replacement, grrr) about hating to have missed the funeral. Then they both related to me–including A’s replacement, who was the one to see it while the other teacher was at the funeral–about how much A loved birds and knew all about their names and habits. And that on the day of the funeral, a particular owl that A knew of and liked appeared on a tree just outside the school’s doorway and stayed there from noon until everyone left for the day, well after three o’clock, its eyes wide open, staying fully awake the entire time.

Owls are nocturnal, you know.

“Now I don’t believe in reincarnation, but…” his teacher told me.

I don’t believe in reincarnation either. But I do believe in Jesus, which is convenient when you need to tell your kids about death because you can soften the blow by following up with details on heaven. But it’s quite inconvenient because of all the baggage that comes along with it, meaning that if I believe in Jesus, then I believe in a whole shitload of other crazy things: resurrection, virgin birth, forgiveness. I believe that an owl in a tree can be more than an owl in a tree. I believe in things that simply cannot be explained.

And I believe–because I have to, really, you see–that sometimes the iceberg doesn’t turn out to be an iceberg after all. Sometimes, because land also is not just a floating piece in the ocean but extends its mass beneath the water, sometimes the iceberg is actually a place to dock–or get shipwrecked, if you will, the boat that got you there a mangled mass on the shore–and plant your torn feet on the ground, look around, and see that everything being connected extends to everyone being that way too, and that sometimes what ends up surprising you most isn’t the shadow on the water ahead but the hands that hold you, the faces that show up, the faithfulness that hounds you, the grace, all around.

This past New Year’s Eve marked the first one for my husband and me to actually go out in Sydney — though, with two kids and middle age defining our lives, “going out” consists of joining friends at the North Sydney Olympic Pool for a family night of swimming and fireworks. And, it turned out, several deluges of persistent rain that ruined my phone.

When my head hit the pillow that night in a rosé-induced haze, my phone was sitting in a bowl of rice on the table beside me. Later the next day, the rice was revealed not to have done its job and I entered the new year phoneless.

Read the rest over at Mockingbird!

I am writing this from a silent house, about which are strewn the evidences of our life: books, toys, Christmas decorations, and boxes…OH, THE BOXES. They’re serving as tables, as props, as obstacles. They hold our life together and hold it up. I’m tired, displaced, overwhelmed, relieved. I’m here but not, there yet not quite. I’m in between. I’m all over the place.

I’m learning to recognise the triggers of anxiety and depression for me. Let’s see…there’s oxygen. That’s one. In addition, we have new experiences (some people call these adventures, and I will not be listening to their podcasts or reading their books right now, thank you). We have unfamiliar spaces. We have long to-do lists. WE HAVE MOVING. And we are in the midst of our third move in two years, living between two houses in Australia, one in America; living between two countries and continents and hemispheres. Living between two time zones and cultures and days, even.

When I put it that way–and look down at the ragged nails I have not had a chance to maintain this week (another trigger)–I’m pretty impressed that I haven’t caved in like a cardboard box. Yet.

At this point I feel compelled to make a disclaimer: that these are first world problems. That we have clean water. That we have hot water. That, hell, we have a water view. Still. That I’m stuck at the house for now instead of on a run because a cleaner is coming. That there is space aplenty, and health to enjoy it, together. That in some circles, I would be an asshole for not mentioning all of this earlier.

I don’t care. Hard is hard. We are blessed beyond measure and I can see that while also noticing the cracks in life, the rough spots that press my buttons (and mix my metaphors) and unsettle me, leave me adrift. One person’s complaining can be another person’s…telling. Relating.

So I’m sitting on a couch amidst a pile of boxes telling this story for all who have ever felt, who currently feel, adrift. Displaced. Unsettled. On the edge of a breakdown. Between homes.

In the middle of the mess and lack of landmarks, though, there are reminders. Evidences of life. There are the jacarandas outside, splatters of purple against the green of the trees and the blue of the water. Blue and purple: our wedding colours. The boys know the name for them now, these trees that pop up every spring, and this is evidence of life too: that first I had to learn what they were and name them, then I had to teach the boys, and now they tell me. There is the fact that The Kid lost a tooth this morning, his fourth, and what is typically a catastrophic event with trauma leading up to it and remaining after its exit, that event became a non-event: a tiny tooth dangling from a toothbrush and a hurried search for a container, an assurance that the Tooth Fairy knows our new address (see also: Santa), and proud announcements to friends at school. This process, in mouths and life, of soreness and struggle leading to letting go and new things. Growth. Ugh, and also…wow.

It’s been referred to as springs of water in the desert, this work of grace that makes something where there was nothing. I rely on it more than oxygen even as I doubt it, as I fear it has run out for good (spoiler alert: it hasn’t). But to me, lately, it feels different. It feels like there is already water, and I am floating on it, adrift always, in-between always. For while you’re on the water you’re always leaving one spot and headed to another, never fully stopped. Never seeming to be home. Not knowing where your damn running hat, or the wine opener, is.

But still, evidence of life. Of growth. Of spring in our former winter. For this is the time of year, traditionally now for us as we start the third one adrift, when we move. When we unpack. When we celebrate TK’s birthday. When we observe the Christmas season in a place where it is hot and doesn’t feel like Christmas. Where we are, quite literally, on the water.

Yesterday I walked the path from our new house to the reserve behind it, the harbour beach. I looked to my right at the dogs off-leash, running around freely. I looked to my left and saw a house. A house? A house on the water, with a porch and everything. Not everyone can get there–you must have the right transportation. In this case, a boat. It’s not for everyone, this water living, this floating existence. And yet here we are, living it.

When Jason and I dated, we bonded over a variety of shared interests, but our favorites were the holy trinity of tapas, Jesus, and camp horror. The two of us were among the dozen viewers who kept Harper’s Island on the air for an entire season. (He figured out who the killer was by the second episode, thus cementing his status as the Smart One in our smart ’n sassy combo.) We shared nightmares over The Strangers. (Okay, I had the nightmares and he listened to me complain about them. Don’t nobody kill Ben Covington on my watch!) And when I heard whispers of a show called American Horror Story, which was premiering just a few months after our wedding — and a few weeks after I found out I was pregnant — I emailed him trailers and we set our DVR.

Read the rest over at Mockingbird!

Monday I hopped into the car with the boys after our usual weekday back-and-forth fighting and existential angst-ridden morning. They alternately blabbed and went quiet in the backseat, and the classical music station that The Husband loathes–the one I would like to glue into place on our dial because it is my sanity–began playing a familiar tune. As we turned from our street now onto the street where we used to live, the notes went from tumbling around my head to organising themselves into “God Bless America.” In between questions shot from the backseat about why we have a Hyundai Tucson and what would happen to the power lines if there were an earthquake, I tried to hear what the DJ (do they call it that on a classical station?) said about the musician who performed the song–how he was an Australian who moved to America by way of England and fell in love with the US.

I thought of how our journey as a family has been the reverse path: how we were at home in America, then considered moving to England, but instead landed in Sydney and proceeded to fall in love with it. I thought about this as the questions pelted my rapidly-shrinking head space and pangs of homesickness bounced around my insides, missing one place while loving another, feeling always-in-between homes. I thought about it as I felt the urgency to check realestate.com.au one more time (for the hundredth time) that morning, as I debated over the house we may have settled on, as I wondered when or if we’d ever stop moving. I thought about it as Little Brother cried from the front seat about wanting to go to Mommy School today, not preschool, and The Kid told him, “WILL. STOP IT. YOU HAVE TO GO TO SCHOOL.”

I was a bit of a Monday morning.

That LB, the one who needs coaxing back into the old routine after a holiday, who needs a morning filled with cuddles on the couch and oh-so-much attention, his birthday party was this weekend and while I agonised over the thunderstorms that were predicted and how they’d affect our planned event in the park, I tried to focus on celebrating him. It’s not hard to do: he is celebrate-able, you might say, with his knowing grins and easy excitement, with his utterances implying his assurance of his own identity the day before: “I’m going to James’s class with him at church today so I can protect him.” The morning of his party he kept clapping his hands together in exultation: “I’m so excited for my birthday!” This one walks through the world with an air of confidence, an absence of self-consciousness, and this comes to his own language as well. While TK constantly assesses our individual linguistic patterns–TH and I speak/are American, while he and LB are/speak both British and Australian–LB, well, he just speaks. Often incorrectly, which is somehow better than correctly, because it brings us words like payooter (computer) and Dark Mader, and, most recently, hilarious.

Yes, LB has reclaimed and renamed hilarious for us. A few years ago, Louis CK tried to with a bit that TH and I had practically memorised about how the word is overused and incorrectly applied (it was funnier when he did it), but lately, in the wake of allegations admitted as truth, that bit (or its author, at least) has become less quotable. So LB stepped in and decided that hilarious meant something different altogether. Somehow he came to associate it with negativity, throwing around proclamations like, “I don’t want to go to the doctor. It’s HILARIOUS there!” or “You said we could go to the mall. That’s not fair–you’re HILARIOUS!” Fittingly, it was hilarious–these unknown-to-him misreadings, his attempted insults that landed instead as jokes as he grew more enraged while we laughed. Even after I explained it all to him, he kept doing it. So we kept laughing.

And last night, TK leaned in after I asked for a cuddle, and he assessed our language again: “Cuddles is Australian for kisses,” he said, and I thought about correcting him until I realised I like his definition better, so I planted one on him–his cuddle.

It made me think of all the words we use to define what we know, and to try to pin down what we don’t, and how sometimes they’re just…wrong. Or not enough. How you can live in a country that is both foreign yet familiar. How a home cannot, for us right now, be captured by a house, because we keep getting kicked out of them after a year’s time anyway, but also–and this is such a big part of what the last two years have been for us–home is where the four of us are: in rentals, in hotel rooms, at tables in the twilight piled with pizzas and bottles of wine. No, make that five of us, because grace is right there with us, whether you call it that or spirit or God or love or whatever word you use, the four of us walking within its eternal fifth presence, always somehow heading and being home.

The boys have taken to an expression lately: “when I was a baby.” You know, once they utter this, that whatever comes next is going to be at best revisionist history and, most likely, complete BS. Recent examples:

“When I was a baby, I didn’t have watches.”
“When I was a baby, I didn’t like Transformers.”
“When I was a baby, I couldn’t run fast.”

Okay, so these things are all true, but as the boys tell them, they’re meant to convey how far they’ve come. “Baby,” of course, is a term meaning anything they want it to: last year, or before they were even born. It’s history, is what I’m saying, and they’re the ones writing it based on what they know now.

Meanwhile, I look back with my somewhat faulty yet still more complete memory and can see a sweeping vista of both change and sameness.

Mine might go like this:

“When I was a baby, I moved to New York and finally grew up. And met your dad.”
“When I was a baby, I didn’t know how to stand up for myself so I let people walk all over me. Now I have BOUNDARIES. And swearing.”
“When I was a baby, I could stay awake until 4 am and not be hungover the next day.”
“When I was a baby, I voted straight-ticket Republican and thought I couldn’t be safe without a gun.”
“When I was a baby, I thought that everything–including people–was either one of two things: black or white, right or wrong–and didn’t let anything transcend that.”

Last week, the second and final of school holidays before summer, the four of us flew to Tasmania. Hobart, specifically, and as we walked around its streets and gazed upon the sea, I thought about how a few years ago–when I was a baby–if you had told me I’d spend the better part of a week exploring this island off continental Australia, I would have asked for a paper bag in which to hyperventilate. (I didn’t even know until way too recently that Tasmania is actually an Australian state.)

But there we were, even deeper into the Southern hemisphere than usual, ambling around cobblestone streets and alleyways, exploring shut-down prisons and insane asylums, boating to museums, driving up mountains, and ferrying in our car to an even smaller island to eat cheese and drink beer. We have been evacuated/ejected/moved/sent to corners of the world we didn’t even know existed back when we were babies, and there is something devastatingly wonderful about all this. How easily it could have been avoided, rejected, missed. How beautiful that it wasn’t.

On that island, after a lunch of cheese, bread, and more cheese, we drove to what they call the island’s neck. Our family has a deep familiarity with necks, so it felt only fitting that we pulled the car over here and looked around at a spot, the thinnest on the island, where on one side were the calm, smooth waters of a bay and on the other, the churning, slapping waves of the Tasman Sea. An array of colours, all within the blue-green range yet more than that, one side sparkling and the other frothing. Stuck between two totally different yet somehow similar places.

I don’t know, seemed apropos.

Later we celebrated The Husband’s birthday and Facebook sent me a video of our friendship, going back to when we were babies, and on to now: now, living on a huge island in the South Pacific, between homes in more ways than one, with two kids who are so different and so similar. Then, and now, with now always turning into then to be replaced by another now. And amidst it all, the wish that we’d uttered to each other–to someday live near the water–turning into a prayer so laughably and abundantly answered that there are oceans on all sides of us, all leading to this moment on a neck surrounded by water that, as I write this, is now a then.

And I look outside and still see water now.

It occurs to me that I’m quite awful at being in the Now, and that meditation is supposed to help this but I’m shit at that too, but that over the past few days I’ve woken before even the kids (thank you, weighted blanket) and haven’t pushed the wakefulness away like I did in that Tasmanian hotel bed but instead have embraced it, lying there in prayer and meditation and, hopefully, the Now. The moments that I complain are fleeting are that at least partially because I truncate them myself in search of the next one, always moving to get past rather than seeking to stay. To look around. To take in.

When I was a baby, I hardly ever did that. But now…and Now, I’d like to be here and try. Because Now feels holy.

The rules of the game keep changing. But when I look more closely, when I actually grapple with life as it happens, I begin to strongly suspect that the rules don’t exist as I think they do, and it’s not a game–it’s more.

We found out yesterday that the owners of our house are moving back in, in two months’ time. Just like last year: different house, different owners, same scenario. Searching, packing, unpacking, adjusting. This is not what home is supposed to look like, is it? Sitting still momentarily in a place we don’t own, only to be thrust out after a few months?

Anxiety laps at my rough edges, threatening (as always) to undo me.

I found out yesterday, in the form of a text from The Husband, the one (but not The One) who brought us here in the first place, his texts emissaries from the true author of our story, upending the Known for the Unknown and whispering gifts at the same time that I was too anxious to hear until later. I was on the Ferris wheel with our boys, the second Ferris wheel in as many days, finding out about the second move in as many years, and it wasn’t lost on me, suspended as we were there over the water of the harbour, the bridge nearly close enough to touch, the Opera House practically beside it, these landmarks of our now-home dotting our view as we sat there, in motion yet still, helpless in the sky with an incomparable view: this is life.

I struggled to regain control. Anxiety works like this: always grab for control. I imagined our gondola free-falling into the water below; how would I secure our exit with steel bars blocking our way? On to more manageable things then: realestate.com.au. I resisted the urge to grab for the phone, the boys clambering over me. I tried to trust. It felt both Herculean and natural.

There is a moment now that wasn’t always there, but has been growing since I was a high schooler who, looking back on life, had finally realised that my constant surprise at grace always coming through for me might be more a reflection of my own distrustfulness than a verifiable slight on the nature of unconditional love. “Maybe I should just…trust from the beginning?” I thought then, imagining a life where that was possible, and how it would look. Less sweat, more peace. What a concept!

And now, at forty, at mid-life (ugh) if I’m lucky, I’m different and not. Similar yet changed. These upendings, these shock waves via text, they are somehow accompanied by an undercurrent of surety: as my New York roommate once said (when I found out I falsely owed ten grand in taxes), “this is not a surprise to God.” Grace remains unperturbed by the waves that rock my life, and so they don’t pummel me like they used to. The text came, and with it–before the urge to grasp at control–there was that assurance, that moment that used to not exist, that awareness: “Oh, this is going to be okay. This is part of our story. We are not suspended; we are held.” I sat there for a moment.

Then the Ferris wheel moved, as it always does, and the boys scattered, and I grabbed for the phone, but even in my grabbing and searching I knew, knew, that I wasn’t in control, and this somehow amounted to freedom. Oh, it sucks. Don’t get me wrong: it truly, truly BLOWS, the searching and packing and unpacking and unknown and adjustments, and when I think about it too much I want to simultaneously head for the bottle and barf. But. With all that is the almost giddy, insane certainty that this is not a game but a story. That we are ridiculously and lavishly loved. And that this changes everything.

So I both have to look at the real estate website…and I get to.

Last weekend we went to the Hunter Valley, New South Wales’s wine country, with the boys. Wine tasting is…different with children around. More bounce houses, less lingering sips. More laughter. A little of less, and a lot of more. Saturday morning, we went to the pool instead of champagne brunch, and I went underwater with The Kid. Under the surface, I “talked” to him, and he laughed. We tried to understand each others’ words. It was a level playing field for me, the one who’s been speaking for decades, and he, the one who still struggles to be understood. It’s not like we could breathe under there, but somehow we could speak. It was a new world, just one thin layer beneath the one we know. One where we were suspended, and held.

The next day we went into the city with friends to watch a live-action seizure-inducing PJ Masks show, and afterward the boys and I got turned around finding our car park. I felt anxiety lap at my rough edges, felt the rules shifting under my feet again: Why does this always happen to me, this getting lost over and over? Several blocks’ hike and one car spotted later, and a different question: Why don’t I question why it also happens to me, this always being found?

“IT’S NOT A RACE!” one of them will invariably yell, these boys who make everything a race lately: getting dressed, getting undressed, brushing teeth, running upstairs to yell at Daddy to hurry up in the shower (I may have put them up to that one). The protest over rules that were made long ago always comes from the one lagging in second place of the two, the one no longer wanting those rules to apply. Usually, tears ensue. Life lived in a hurry surely is a tragedy.

I should remember this. You know, since it’s only every day that I engage in my own races against time: adrenaline- and anxiety-fueled marches through my moments, a constant look ahead to what’s next. And in the bigger picture, waiting impatiently for something, always. Currently: issues with a teacher…nighttime toilet training…knowing for certain where we’ll spend the rest of our lives and planning our children’s education accordingly. You know, the little things.

I read back over something I wrote two years ago (!), when we were preparing to move to Sydney, before any of the life we have now was fleshed out before us. I wrote about how The Kid is a story told in more than one sitting, and aren’t all of us? Isn’t life? Yet I constantly try to distill it into manageable doses where the ending is already known, if not accomplished outright.

Last week, on Father’s Day, I benevolently repaid The Husband for my own break on Mother’s Day and took the boys to a movie. Christopher Robin was playing at the local cinema and it was a rainy afternoon, which meant everyone in the general area was there, every seat taken. Considering it was a live-action film with several Serious Adult Conversations, the boys made it through a respectable amount, but when TK announced he had to go to the toilet we stumbled over everyone in our path and headed home. Later, of course, I went to my favourite movie spoiler website because that is how I roll. I wanted to see the ending I’d missed, and I read the quote from the last moments of the film, when Pooh asks Christopher Robin what day it is. “Today,” he replies, and Pooh says, “My favourite day.”

I wish I could be more like a stuffed bear. I wish I could enjoy each moment for what it is, and not out of guilt or obligation but because of the beauty inherent in each one–because of the gift they all are. Instead, rather than resting in these gifts, I feel more like Little Brother as he learns his way around the monkey bars, which for right now looks like him being suspended uneasily in the air, yelling “HELP!” right before I come to grab him.

For his part, TK doesn’t like the suspension any more than I do. “I used to be American but now I’m Australian,” he often announces lately, his dividing lines always so black-and-white and ever-present, his way of making sense of the world riding on clear divisions and Befores and Afters. I know it’s not that clear, no matter how often I too wish it was–that who and where we are is more of a complicated mixture than a linear path. But even his demand for clarity is its own gift in all its moments, like when he was in Scripture class and they were saying the Lord’s Prayer. “But what does that mean?” he asked the teacher, and when she recounted it to me at church this week, she said she realised what a great question it was–how it made her slow down and really think about the words anew.

This suspension with which I am so uncomfortable, this constant between-ness–between countries, and people, and moments–I suspect I would enjoy it more if I’d remember the simple truth that I am held. Held by a grace that doesn’t swoop in at the last moment like I do for LB on the monkey bars, but that is always there, enveloping me though I can’t feel it, can’t always see it either. This morning the boys and I walked to the car and LB gripped my hand in that awkward way kids do, fingers splayed all over it, and I thought it to myself, that I should enjoy this moment. That he won’t always want to hold my hand. Drops of guilt and fear mixed in with the attempt at gratitude. He’ll probably even drop it any second now, I thought, preparing for what I thought was next. Instead, he didn’t. We walked across the front yard, to the car, and he climbed inside, somehow holding me in his grip the entire time.

There’s a darkness upon me that’s flooded in light
In the fine print they tell me what’s wrong and what’s right
There’s a darkness upon me that’s flooded in light
And I’m frightened by those that don’t see it

I never wanted to be a fighter. Swords get heavy, after all, and seldom match my outfit. There’s too much struggle, too much disappointment in war, too many enemies made. For the first half of my life I was happy to fly under the radar. Then a couple of things happened.

In school there was a group of students accused of cheating. One of them had been a friend of mine, but we’d grown apart. I felt personally betrayed by the rumours swirling around, the idea that people would take the easy way out while my ass warmed the same chair in the library every night. And if it were that simple, that honourable, it probably wouldn’t be worth writing about. But it’s always about more, isn’t it? In this case, my own struggle to maintain mediocrity in a class of fifty-something when I’d built my identity on being a star student up until then–that struggle eroded what little confidence I had. It undid me, really. Checking scores on the printout that was posted on the wall after every exam next to our secret codes, it became a test of self-worth. A measure of personal value. Oh, I was so deluded, but I was confused. Lonely. If I wasn’t “the smart one” then I didn’t know who I was.

So I became a crusader. I formed a bit of a militia, I testified in front of the honour council, I engaged in clandestine phone conversations and whispered meetings in said library. I plotted for justice. But justice wasn’t served. And as the well-founded accusations and testimony were eschewed in favour of conflict avoidance (and, possibly, some friendly negotiation between the accused students’ parents and the school), I looked around at the field. My focus was on all those who hadn’t bothered to show up for battle–they were now the betrayers. Why didn’t they care more? Wrong and right, black and white–these were ideals that must be preserved. Why weren’t they angry?

It should be noted that I spent the first half of my life (thus far) pretty angry.

Lately–this year, in fact, the one in which I’ve passed forty–I’ve noticed a shift. Social media has largely revealed it, this turn (descent?) into middle age, evidenced by photos of long-unseen contemporaries looking…old. Photos of their children exiting childhood and becoming teenagers. This march toward our parents’ ages, except they’ve evacuated those spots and left them to us to populate. We’re getting older, and it’s weird. It seems mean, too, how obvious it is. Surely I don’t look as worn as the others?

That was rhetorical.

And people are dying, good people whose lives represented decency, or at the very least represented my own youth, they’re leaving. More spaces vacated. More time gone. It feels like a crossing over, though I don’t remember a checkpoint.

But maybe…

When The Kid came along, and the doctor visits with him, I was called into a different kind of battle. Drafted, you might say, because I never enlisted for this particular fight (see also: The Society of I Didn’t Sign Up for this Shit). I became an advocate because I was made into one, planning sleep schedules while, deeper, bigger things brewed. Matters of identity, of diversity, of a different kind of justice. A justice that was no longer about me, but him.

The calls into battle have been sporadic since his earlier years, but they don’t disappear. Too bad, because I’d really love to trade the sword in for something more portable and trendy. But here we are, time after time, and the sword is really more ornamental than anything at this point, could be left at home really, because the battles we fight for our children are more nuanced than that, require more of a deft touch than that of a blade. They require school visits, speaking to classes of kids about how different is not only beautiful but everywhere, even within them. They require conversations sometimes whispered, but always fraught, because on this side of life, at our age, we know that things are rarely black and white. They are complicated. People aren’t characters. Everyone has a story, and it’s so annoying to have to honour that when it would be easier to write them off.

Some show up for battle and some don’t, and they have stories too. Personally, I’d rather stay home. I love my couch. I like books, not hard conversations with real people. And most serious meetings don’t have wine.

But I know if I had the kind of kid that made flying under the radar easy, I’d go back to not knowing who I was, to trying to forge an identity for myself, and that never worked out all that well for me. I am a mother, and I was issued a fighting spirit at the hospital, though the nurses never mentioned it. I have two boys who will learn from me what it looks like to stand up for what’s right, and the truth is, it looks so much different than I expected back in the honour council. It looks less like blind anger and power than tears and frustration. It looks like a head on the steering wheel and deep sighs and occasional wins mixed in with losses. It looks like no longer worrying so much about what people think, even when I desperately want them to like me. It looks like tolerating pain long before there’s a payoff. It looks like friendships made deeper by a common cause. It looks like second-guessing and anxiety.

It looks like two little boys in the backseat, listening intently as I tell them what it is NOT okay for people to do, even if those people are grownups. And it looks like them being so, so worth it all.