“Reality is an ally of God.”
— Richard Rohr

When I was in dental school, I spent most afternoons with the rest of my class in the lab, where we’d toil over fake teeth for three hours. It was just as fun as it sounds, which led to filling the time with wandering conversations over diverse topics. Religion often came up, as this was Alabama—the buckle of the Bible belt—and one afternoon a friend of mine laughed over an idea he’d had: did Jesus and the disciples ever fart in front of each other?

I was horrified. My friend was going off the rails, I was sure, and needed to be contained. At the time, I was in my early twenties and therefore knew everything while having no sense of humor about anything. I glared at him, saying he was being disrespectful (I’m sure the words Our Lord and Savior figured in heavily to my tirade). He maintained his opinion that Jesus and the disciples were comfortable enough with each other for wind to have broken; I maintained mine that the mere thought was blasphemy. We never did resolve the issue.

Read the rest over at Mockingbird!

When I first moved to Sydney, I used to hide a giggle when natives would talk about the winter here. “Are you ready for it?” they’d ask, and I’d think, “Sixty-degree days? Sweater weather? Boots? SIGN ME UP!”

Now, things are different. It’s fifteen degrees celsius and the word is jumper. Besides that, though, there is the egg on my face that comes with adjusting to these mild temperatures and non-brutal winters: I’m cold, y’all. And excuses about “Sydney houses not being built for cold weather” aside (THEY AREN’T), I think the biggest thing is…I’ve just gotten used to it here.

Which is why I roll up to school pick-up in my down vest, shivering along with everyone else. “WE NEED TO LEARN TO WORK THE FIREPLACE!” I yell across the house to the husband, meaning he needs to learn to work it, as I fight off expectations of Christmas being around the corner.

And though this past summer, with its pool parties and new friendships and growing “old” ones and general revelry was one of my favourites so far…there is something about winter.

I’m writing this from our couch while battling a stomach virus that had me running to the bathroom every few minutes starting at 3 am this morning, so, granted, I’m looking for a silver lining. I don’t have to look far, though.

The rain that this winter brought with it led to no fewer than four rainbows last week. I gazed at them from the window, calling the boys over. They seem to pop up everywhere, colours piercing the grey, and how can you not feel taken care of, noticed, when that kind of magic happens?

There are the winter sunsets that a friend teased for me the other day, saying our view was perfect for catching them, and we have, the sun’s light seeming to burn extra brightly in the cold, marking its descent in the most show-offy way possible, a palette signature to this place.

There was my book party the other night, people rushing in from the “cold” and placing their coats down to gather in one of my favourite restaurants, the circle formed toward the end and the toasts given, the declarations of friendship throughout. (The hangover the next day.)

Today I watch the clouds from behind a window, blanket over my legs and sickness in my gut, but yesterday I stood on the beach before I went to collect the boys. The waves seem to pound harder in winter. But when the sun is out, I could swear they’re bluer, foaming up with their endless repetition, and I thought about it: how anxiety doggedly pursues me, even across the world, how it laps at me constantly, but now? Here? So do the waves.

And I wondered, standing there in the spray of them as the waves kept coming back, forming and reforming and always returning, what life might look like if I just operated out of a deep and abiding sense that everything will be okay, love and grace like the waves, wrapping around me and never leaving?

I was hungover on my wedding day.

I say this not because I think it’s cute—and certainly my mom and sister, who drove me to the salon to get our hair did while I retched into a bucket in the backseat (it was one of the greeting baskets we gave to the wedding guests with the itinerary, bottled water, and snacks! I emptied it first), did not think it was cute either. My mistake was borne of a week of too much anxiety and too little food—along with perhaps too much alcohol? (The jury’s still out on science.) Once our trio arrived at the hairdresser’s, one of the stylists took me under her wing, sat me in a chair in a private room, and gave me a fifteen-minute head massage. I don’t know what kind of black magic pressure-pointed voodoo she performed, but it worked. I left that salon feeling like a new person—one who would not barf all over her betrothed.

I shat my pants in Las Vegas.

Read the rest over at Mockingbird!

It has been a hell of a seven days.

I know God took that long to make the world–okay FINE it was six–and, not for nothing, I feel like we’ve been under some deconstruction and construction on the order of world-building ourselves this past week. Both boys were thrilled to be starting school: Little Brother in his new preschool, The Kid in his new class at his old school.

The sheen wore off quickly.

When faced with continuing to play with new toys and chasing me out the door screaming, LB continues to choose the latter most mornings. His friendly teacher holds him back while LB throws his arms toward me and I sneak away, feeling like the opposite of a mother. Then I take TK to school.

And hasn’t that been interesting.

Last week he was counting down to the start of school, popping out of bed the first two mornings two announce it: “FIRST day of school!” “SECOND day of school!” He was met, once there, with total chaos and a year one teacher who was away until this week, and he was. not. HAVING. IT. Yesterday he informed me that he hates school (a word–the “h” one–that upset me much more deeply than if he’d said “I don’t like that f@cking place” or “how about you don’t take me to that sh#thole today?” I blame YouTube). I explained to him, rule follower that he is, that it’s against the law for kids not to go to school and did he really want me to go to jail? (When, let’s be honest, we all know that I’d be headed to a mental institution first.) He responded by asking me to tell him a story about how James doesn’t go to school and Mommy goes to jail. Another stellar parenting moment.

Yesterday he sobbed. I walked away from another child, this one with a therapist at least, in the maternal guilt pose: one hand on my phone, the other clasping itself in prayer. Then I spent a few hours by myself and felt like I could breathe again.

Last week we also said goodbye to the Yankee Mom and Dad, visitors for a couple of weeks who were a wedding gift from my sister–at her wedding, to me, when she married their son and I welcomed them into my life as second parents during my stint in New York, when they lived an hour and a half away by train and always served dinner and wine should I need it (I needed it often). We have known each other for thirteen years–the length of my sister’s marriage SO FAR–and they’ve seen the ugly moments of me: the time I missed a brunch early on because I was hungover on my future bro-in-law’s couch; the time I left my sister’s wedding shower early to pin down an apartment in the city; the time I barfed after their niece’s wedding; the times I was super right-wing. They’ve stuck by me for some reason, and even seem to think I’m a decent person, which makes me question their judgment and enjoy their company. Having them around was tiring in the sense that having anyone around besides myself is tiring, but it was also relieving: being understood, and known. No play-acting required. Also, we drank a lot of champagne.

And every time we have guests, we get to know them more and show them this city we are knowing more. We are learning each other, and this place, by heart.

I’m learning my kids by heart, too. Which can sometimes be very painful for all of us.

TK said it from the back seat this morning: “I don’t want to go to school today. I’m just VERY SAD.” Thankful that my need for him to go coalesced with his best interest, I stood firm. “You have to go,” I told him, not bothering to ask again if he wanted me to go to jail–I’m too fragile that early in the day. “But I’ll share your sad with you.”

“You’ll share it?” he asked.

“I’ll be sad with you,” I said.

This quieted him. We arrived at school and he was less agitated than yesterday. His teacher was there for the first time–the (hopefully) last big change for awhile–and he pulled my hand. “I want to go talk to her,” he said, and my heart swelled with pride. He is constantly out-braving me. When it came time for them to line up and enter the classroom, he grabbed my hand and I sensed another epic goodbye meltdown. Then he dropped it and grabbed his therapist’s, and it relieved and saddened me. Joy and pain: the components of all the most meaningful moments.

Over the weekend, we drove out to Costco, a forty-five minute haul, and TK said he’d never been there before. We explained that he actually had, it’s just been a year so he doesn’t remember it. A lot can change in a year, after all: people in the school yard become friends, their understanding replacing uncertainty. A two-year-old turns three, abandoning his nappies for underwear and talking up a storm. Two boys learn to swim. Their mother cycles into a depression and, slowly, back out again. A mammogram comes back clear. A place becomes home.

As the four of us walked toward the entrance, TK skipped a bit, and, as though he hadn’t missed a beat, grinned, and announced, “It’s good to be back.”

We’ve begun our second year of life in Australia, and it’s going by faster than the first.

I remember the tedious days of January last year, when everything was an uncomfortable first: walks through the summer heat to different locations (typically, the gym, the bakery, and the wine store). The first day of school for The Kid and childcare for Little Brother. Our first time at church. First time on the ferry. First mental breakdown at IKEA.

Now, we’re circling back. But things can still feel new the second time around.

LB is meant to start a new preschool next week. In true helicopter mom fashion, I’ve arranged for him to remain at his current location also until I’m sure he likes his new gig. Which will come in handy when it turns out that LB School, The Sequel may not accept our doctor (not government)-provided immunisation form. Which I have to get signed by a justice of the peace. Which has to happen by tomorrow.

TK starts school next week: Year One, aka first grade. He’ll have a different shadow therapist this year, which I’m still crying about, and new people along with old friends in his class. We’ll walk the same path to both a new and different experience, one that beckons and looms, that leaves me hopeful and anxious.

We’re swimming this summer, every day, and The Husband turned to me last night from the pool and asked, “Could you have imagined last year that they’d be this far along now?” The question resonates across the facets of our life, these boys becoming seasoned travellers, students, friends, toilet users, nonstop talkers, and for over a month every waking moment (and some half-asleep ones) of my days have been consumed by them: their demands, their questions, their laughter, their fighting, their tears. No, I couldn’t have imagined where we’d be now, with LB leaping from the side of the pool and TK shooting underwater without floats attached, these boys who had to be carried around in water a year ago.

I could never have imagined it.

We have visitors, the Yankee Mom and Dad, and as we show them our city–our home–we revisit so many places we’ve shown other people, and places we frequent ourselves: favourite restaurants, the Opera House, our beaches. We see these sites through year-old eyes and new ones, knowing them and learning them all over again.

And these damn kids, man: as the summer rolls to an end, at least the non-school part of it, I want to hang on to what is beautiful about it even as I don’t have a square inch (centimetre) of mental or physical or emotional space to myself. I stifle screams when I’m asked to tell another of the same stories: James eats all the toys in the world and goes to jail; Will eats only junk food and becomes like the guys in WALL-E. The same narratives over and over, and I tell them to ears that know the ending but still need to hear it anyway.

Yesterday, when I was at a breaking point, I left LB with our guests and took TK to therapy and ventured out to a branch of my gym near his centre, one that I’d never visited. It was gloriously empty but for one or two others, and after my workout I wandered to the women’s locker room, which held signs pointing to a relaxation area. I hesitantly pushed the door open and inhaled the scent of eucalyptus and the sound of silence, and though I couldn’t stay, I was renewed.

Later, after a day full of joy and regret, patience and seething, I approached the boys as they sat on the couch. “Hi, Mom,” TK greeted me. “Sit by me,” said LB. And I sat by them, these two people who always welcome me back home to the same stories, reminding me of all the ground we keep covering and the grace that keeps meeting us there.

“One has to be done with the pretence of being just fine, unscarred, perfectly self-sufficient. No one is.” –Anne Lamott

My children are driving me crazy. My children are filling me with joy. My children are squeezing the life out of me. My children are bringing me to life. The king is dead. Long live the king.

It was winter a week ago, and now it’s summer.

My friend the Internet told me last week that this year’s colour (SINCE WHEN DO YEARS HAVE COLOURS?!) is intuitive violet. Isn’t that pretty? I’m confused, though, because I was pretty sure this year’s colour, based on recent life experience (recent meaning for the past six years) was a cross between urine yellow and fecal brown.

Potty Boot Camp 2018 started last week, and Little Brother was the only, and an unwilling, attendee. We were back from America and the kids’ club at the gym was closed so I figured if I were stuck with LB and The Kid, we might as well make it a productive time. And since I don’t do crafts, then toilet training it was. Which meant three days of housebound bliss (read: despair) filled with confusion, tears, standing piss on the floor, and boxes upon boxes of Swiffer wet. Like, seriously, I should get an endorsement deal. Three days of nonstop Netflix and DVDs, of my stationary exercises (read: hundreds of jumping jacks and a return to my kickboxing days of the late aughts), of never-ending laundry. Three days of disappointment and despair and looking at the clock to determine how early was too early to start drinking. Three days of taking breaks to swim and, while outside, saying things like, “Who wants to wee in the garden?!” Three days of LB proving himself capable of holding gallons of urine but unwilling to empty it where it belonged.

God rested on the seventh day. But LB? He finally got toilet training.

I had given up. I was wondering if we should call the preschool he starts next month and ask just how stringent their toilet-trained requirement is or I just send him anyway and let him decorate their floors yellow and brown. Then, yesterday, he turned and told me he had to wee. Later, he told me he had to poo. I’ve never been so happy to accompany someone to the bathroom. There were dances, lollipops, stickers, calls to The Husband. It was glorious.

But first, I remind you (and me), it was awful.

It still is sometimes. Last night, he dropped a turd in his undies and I tagged out on that one to let TH take over while I stared into the depths of my red wine and listened to Ed Sheeran sing about the past. Meanwhile, TK decides it’s time to rebel against his own training and drop trou on the couch for a golden shower. Today, it was LB’s turn to show ass in the barbershop chair.

I guess what I’m saying is that it’s not just always something, it’s always a bunch of somethings mixed together in a cocktail of alcohol and dirt, glory and pain, joy and disappointment. This is what life looks like, even though when I look back on my years in New York I seem to remember only good times without hangovers, dates without assaults, shopping without near-bankruptcy. I think it’s deeper than a grass-is-greener thing. I think it’s an inability, or unwillingness, to contain nuance: to make space not just for the intuitive violet but for the shit brown. We will polish those turds until we think we see the vague hint of a sheen and then keep polishing if it means a happier report or better Instagram rendering. But we won’t sit in the mess, in the standing wee, and admit that sometimes things just suck, and that this is just as vital a part of the story as what doesn’t.

Shit and love go together. Who knew? And why didn’t they warn us in the life manual?

I would like to now mention that I have spent a solid month with my kids–their summer break so far. That I’m writing this at the dining table while Paw Patrol plays a few feet away. That last week an electrician apparently let a bird in our house and it shit everywhere (because we didn’t have enough of THAT already). That I probably have PMS because this morning at the gym a Sam Smith video came on and I was reminded of how much I want to punch him in the face to make him shut up.

But I would also like to mention that it’s summer here. That I’m staring out at a harbour while my children (for the moment) sit quietly beside each other. That they’re both smashing their swim lessons. That the three of us go into our pool every day. That all of this makes it so different from last summer, when I was sitting on a hot deck feeding them iPads so I could drink rosé by myself and cry over This Is Us because I was on the precipice of a depression flare-up.

This summer we have friends over, and while their kids played outside with mine and we talked over wine, one of them asked me if I was able to relax while all those people were over. I feared for a second that she had spotted my butt sweat. I started to respond with the shiny turd answer: “Sure! It’s wonderful!” Then I ventured closer to the truth. “Oh you know…sort of…” Then a storm interrupted and we all gathered the kids inside and watched it from the window.

The next night, another storm. TK huddled next to me, all “Keep me safe” between ventures toward the window. The clouds were awful and beautiful, violet and yellow, and they made for the most glorious sunset.

The four of us sat around a bar, two on one corner and two on the other, because there was no room for us in the inn…or at least at the table one of us had reserved for the occasion, where four other women remained, lingering over a gift exchange. No worries, though, as the restaurant provided us with free cocktails for our trouble, and now, an hour into our time together, it was as though no time had passed since we saw each other months ago. The only thing that had changed, besides hairstyles and a delivered baby among our lot, was that we’d grown closer. So we talked, about family and friends and our favourite antidepressants, as always, and it could have been the same dinner as last year.

It could have been the same sendoff as last year, too, when our exit to America from Sydney for the holidays coincided with the end of The Kid’s school year and he and I stood in the schoolyard among friends, tears welling up in my eyes as they poured down the face of his therapist, a grown man who’s moving on to have his own kids, and I embraced the women who have become my friends, my life, their children an extension of my own. It could have been last year because we left feeling loved, feeling known. In two places now.

There are these reminders all around, repeats really, that pop up and each in their own way convince me further that there is design in this grand, beautiful mess of life. There is TK telling me he wants a dog named Max and one day, I’ll tell him that I had one–for one night during my residency–and that the next morning I was so sleepless and overwhelmed with the not-being-ready-for-it that I drove to the breeder and gave him back, my tears sourced by both grief and guilt, a fitting reaction and prelude to becoming a mother of anything. There is the trip to the grocery with TK while Little Brother, my usual companion, is at school, but on this afternoon TK has absconded early due to a Christmas assembly and early pickup, and as we amble conversationally through the aisles I remember trips here before that were not so similar, meltdowns barely managed and anger not even concealed, and I think that the repeats also serve to show us how far we’ve all come. How different things can be. Like the morning after a rough night with LB, when I left him to The Husband and exited his room to the sound of his crying and my seething after an hour spent lying beside him, trying to get him to sleep, and upon waking a few hours later I hear his tiny feet padding up the stairs. Next he’s at my bedside, holding his hands out, and I lift him and place him beside me, where he nestles in: all is forgiven. All is different.

Then TK enters the scene, grabs the iPad and lies down with us, and the familiar strains of Super Mario reach my ears both from this moment and from my own childhood. Everything old is new again. I read about the miracle of the loaves and fish, how Jesus snuck that one through management twice, the second time to a lesser degree, and after a moment I wonder, instead of why, if: if maybe these reminders are themselves acts of grace; there’s a reason the words assurance and reassurance both exist. I so need the re. The fact that it is given–through fish or moments–is a gift that feels made for me.

And at our Atlanta home, we’re lying in the same beds we were a year ago, yet so much is different. Outside the air is cooling and the day darkens and it’s Christmas once again, this season of second acts, and chances.

I’ve never associated the scent of gardenias with Christmas. But this year…it’s a bit different.

It was the first thing that hit me as I approached the new house we’re renting for the first time since we’d gotten the key last week. The fragrance of the white blooms by the front porch took me by surprise–I’m always surprised when there are things here that also exist in America–and I took it as a welcome into our new home. Much as I did the bottle of champagne waiting on the counter with a note to that effect, left by the owners. “I think we’re going to be very happy here,” I thought, atypically and unabashedly optimistic.

In the past week we’ve packed up one house, moved to another (one street over), unpacked there, and hosted The Kid’s sixth birthday party. The physical and emotional whiplash of such a combination of efforts has been eased by the fact that we love this house, and it’s on a street full of kids from TK’s school. And the party…it was like almost everyone we’ve come to know and love in Australia was gathered in one place to celebrate TK, and it was beautiful. Beautiful enough to bring tears to my eyes. Beautiful enough to give me a hangover the next day. Beautiful enough for me to see how far we’ve all come–like when TK’s friends started singing the Happy Birthday song and he ran around the corner, overwhelmed by all the attention, and when I went to encourage him back in, I was greeted with his grin–then we were greeted by the knowing laughs with, not at, him, the “Oh, that’s just James” acceptance that has been such a touchstone of our experience here. Not long ago, his running off would have wrecked me. Now, I laughed. That’s just James.

Also last week was his school’s dance performance, with each class performing their own routine, and The Husband and his therapist and I waited, not knowing for sure how he’d do. It was our moving day, and I was sweaty and tired and irritated, and then his class came on–and he was amazing. Not because he was perfectly coordinated or didn’t miss a step, but because he was there, doing it. He belonged. And most importantly, he loved it. At both (yes, both) performances. I sat beside TH and friends and we celebrated our kids together, from the one who nailed the whole thing to the one who overcame a history of stage fright to push through.

And his therapist told me later that at school, they had been talking about what makes each of them beautiful, and TK had said, “My brain is special. That’s what makes me beautiful.” Later in the week, his teacher told me about all the other teachers who had commented on his comfort onstage, and she said, “I know what his gift is. He makes people happy.”

It was a different week. It was a hard week. It was a wonderful week.

At another visit, I was talking to his occupational therapist about the adjustment to having a Christmas season in the heat–how different it feels. The beating sun and long days, they don’t feel like Christmas to me, as back in the States the snow falls. That feels like Christmas. Butt sweat does not. She articulated what I’d been trying to–that it lacks atmosphere here–and I realised that sometimes it helps just to name a thing. Different. The simple act of identification can lessen the grief over what isn’t.

So I listen to more Christmas songs to compensate, and stare at the tree a lot. The view from our new home doesn’t hurt, either.

When TK was born, and then Little Brother, they were the first boys in the family since my parents’ generation. I’d always wanted boys but quickly realised that some babysitting in my teens had not prepared me for the difference between growing up around girls and learning how to, for example, dress circumcision wounds. Or toilet train with different appendages. The differences to what I was used to were glaringly obvious, and I wondered what I had to offer this generation of small men. I’m slowly coming to understand that being around women much of my life is exactly what prepared me to raise them–that this is what I can give them, this different perspective, an awareness of who women are and how to treat them. The different, it becomes the integral. It becomes the beautiful.

TK often screeches in frustration, “It’s a bit different!” when he encounters a situation that presents him with the unexpected. It’s a negative commentary, usually. But last week at school, his therapist told me, there was a day where the schedule was chucked and everything was out of the ordinary. And at one point, TK turned and–with a glee-filled smile on his face–exclaimed, “IT’S A BIT DIFFERENT!” His joy at the new and unusual becoming an act of celebration.

Sydney is currently seventeen hours ahead of my beloved EST, the time zone occupied by my former homes of New York and Atlanta. Funny how waking up so many hours ahead can leave me feeling so far behind.

Most days our king-sized bed holds three to four people by the time of my sons’ circadian-induced awakening around 6 am. Our older son is burrowed underneath the covers between us, his feet unfailingly within inches of my face, and our younger boy is typically planted on the pillows between my husband and me, or upon my husband’s chest, telling the “lazy bum” to wake up (can’t imagine where he learned that turn of phrase). By 7 am, we have broken a half-dozen of the rules I set before having children, chief among them screen limitation and sharing our bed. Meanwhile, my anxiety over that thickens with the addition of overnight (for me) messages I’ve received and the urge to respond promptly (not because I’m such a good friend, but because I’m afraid my people back home will forget me).

What I’m saying is that what seems to be my biggest personality trait–anxiety–starts the day at a baseline level of “off the charts.”

Read the rest over at Mockingbird!

In this week’s episode of Bad Theology and Good Intentions, a podcast/film/concept album I have no intention of actually creating, I read a friend’s post on social media in which she admitted grappling with her short temper around her kids. She cited having a newborn and a young toddler and not getting any sleep as contributing reasons for her blown fuse and confessed to yelling at her children and feeling horrible guilt about it. The flood of responses that followed were wholly supportive–but with an undercurrent of law. I saw verbal nudges to take a rest wrapped up by barely veiled threats–but they’re only young for a little while! I groaned over Bible verses transformed into memes with swirly writing: “Be slow to anger.” I read pep talks on the order of “chin up, you can do better tomorrow!”

I wanted to write my own comment: “Chin up! You may do worse tomorrow! You’re definitely screwing them up one way or another! And a swirly Bible verse isn’t going to save you from your worst self, which parenting totally brings out every day because we suck at it!”

But I kept silent. I’m getting more restrained in my old age.

Read the rest over at Mockingbird!