“It’s horrific and it’s beautiful at the same time.” –Don’t Look Up

You guys, I think the call may be coming from inside the house.

Remember my neighbour who told me about his friend, who takes his dog to a therapist and really the therapist is treating the dog’s owner? I think that may be happening to me with The Kid’s psychologist. I’ve been hoodwinked into therapy.

I mean, not really, because a) I don’t actually think that’s what is happening, and b) I don’t need to be hoodwinked into therapy because I would go/will go/have gone willingly. But after his session yesterday, when she and I had our little recap that started with her telling me to take a seat, I may as well have been on the metaphorical couch for those ten minutes.

Cut to bedtime. I asked him about something he’d mentioned earlier, a game of basketball at school when he’d felt excluded, and in those dark and tired moments just before sleep, out came the avalanche of feelings: how he feels invisible, how people will walk away before he’s finished talking, how hard autism can make things for him and he doesn’t understand why he has to have it.

My own heart breaking, I fought my way through a prayer over him, a prayer giving thanks for how he’s made and the story being told by his life, and once he fell asleep beside me I sent up my own private prayer: a cocktail of what the f–k and help that I’ve gotten quite used to over the years, uttering it after romantic collapses and professional crises and, well, during the throes of motherhood nearly daily. It’s a prayer you won’t find among polite church groups or in venerated prayer books. Formally, it’s called a lament. For me, it’s the most honest secretion from a rent heart.

I’m so thankful to have someone to get mad at when things hurt.

“Relating to God in a way that seemed disrespectful is one of the most powerful ways I experienced his grace,” writes my counsellor (and performer of my marriage ceremony) Gordon Bals. Lament, like smiling for Buddy the Elf, is my favourite, because it’s a counterintuitive expression of faith: “LOOK at what you’ve allowed to happen. It HURTS. Now SHOW UP HERE.”

Australians have a fun turn of phrase that opens many of their sentences when they’re making a point. Unlike when disingenuous politicians use it, it’s more of a deepening of the conversation, an opening meant to gently draw attention to what comes next: “Look.” It’s followed by whatever point they want to make and isn’t meant to be a bullhorn or showstopper, just a nudge to get attention (or maybe even a verbal/cultural habit, like in America when people say, “I’m not racist, BUT”).

I’ve been saying “Look” to God for awhile now, but it’s not gentle. It’s the bullhorn version. His reply, however, is the Aussie version. His “Look” is a beckoning, an invitation to see how he has shown up, which means that he in his grace will continue to. It means that he already sees and is gently nudging me to see, as well, what I didn’t before. His response to my lament is kindness. Brutal kindness.

–“LOOK at this caterpillar sting” (seriously, how do I go my whole life without even knowing this can happen then get a double dose in a week?!).

—Look at how it’s not a redback bite.

–“LOOK at how you’re forcing us to leave everything we know and move across the world.”

—Look at all I have for you there. Also–nice beach, right?

–“LOOK at motherhood being way too hard and breaking my heart.”

—Look at the healing and redemption of your own story that these moments with your children bring. Also? They’re going to be okay.

After a bedtime of heartbreak and a night of lament, I wake up to an enraged caterpillar sting–the area has gotten worse. Rain pelts me on my morning run. BUT. I beat The Husband on Wordle. I hear Little Brother and TK playing basketball in LB’s room and remember that brotherhood means there’s always a game you can join. I walk the boys to the gate and see TK approach one of his friends who was playing basketball yesterday, walk right up to him the way we practised, and I don’t hear what he says but I bet that’s what we practised too, and I see the friend put an arm around him.

I look. And in the constant heartbreak and lament, I still see, and give thanks for what I see–and for all that lies beyond it.

I’m so sick of pretty, I want something true, don’t you?

The Kid has a pretty strict policy when it comes to guests. And by that I mean, when it’s time to go? He lets you know. It’s hard to overstay your welcome when a ten-year-old is telling you on repeat that you need to leave, or when he stage whispers to his mother in front of you, “This playdate has reached its end.”

I love this, and my friends accept it (many of them also love it), for its honesty and for the fact that it’s often what everyone is thinking anyway–he just gives voice to the thought. TK is chock-full of boundaries, and at least some of this must come from me, as I, too, never met a boundary I didn’t like…and hold close like a warm blanket.

But also, I shun them–or at least am forced by life to reject them. A month spent in hotel rooms as a family has led to industrial-grade clinginess from the kids, their voices shouting “MOM?!?” anytime I’m not in view, their footsteps clambering up the stairs whenever I dare ascend them. Every shower I take has “Alvin and the Chipmunks” as its soundtrack (though yesterday they read, TK silently while my bath was accompanied by Little Brother’s narration of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.)

I know this will change with time: they’ll feel safe in their own home again and won’t follow us around. One day, they’ll even reach that stage where they don’t want us around, privacy their preferred state. But for now, the boundaries are sparse.

I think the boundaries I gravitate toward are the ones (that I hope) keep the bullshit out: the avoidance of surface-level conversations (Sartre could have been more specific: hell is not just other people, but a specific kind of other people), of Instagram-filtered moments, of a life reduced to memes, rather than the raw reality of truthful encounters. Like the time last week, when my hairdresser mentioned the loss of her daughter three years ago, which was news to me, and instead of talking about what we might each have for lunch that day, we got down into the verbal trenches of life.

Of course, these moments aren’t always possible; boundaries must often be erected (see: me begging The Husband not to use the word penis again during this year’s parent-teacher conference, don’t ask); not every creature recognises or respects personal space (did you know that caterpillars can sting the hell out of you? Because I just learned this information the hard way).

So my boys will know more about tampon usage than I did at their age even as I circle the block to avoid another talk about the weather (there is an app for that, you know). Life is too much one moment, not enough the next. My head spins at my own double standards and contradictions: rigidity followed by flexibility, a strong pull toward home in a life filled with wandering, doubts pockmarking deep faith. All held by a grace that leads us, on a Sunday morning, to the water, where the four of us float and ride, drifting away and reconnecting, held by boundary-less love.

“What a journey this life is! Dependent, entirely, on things unseen.” –James Baldwin

Before the boys were born, I read books–several of them–about generalised topics: sleep training, what to expect when you’re expecting, mommy brain. Now that they’re older, I’m still reading books, but these are more targeted to the realities we’re experiencing on a day-to-day basis: emotional intelligence, neurodiversity, what to expect about puberty (we’re reading that one together, and you haven’t lived until you get your kids to say the words vas deferens).

And autism, natch. The upside to this book I’m reading now is that it elucidates so much of what The Kid goes through every moment, as he can affirm when I recap it with him. The bad thing? I get to see everything I missed over the first decade of his life, which in turn allows me to see how many moments I mishandled.

This is a grieving process. But with grief, there is hope. Death and life so often come hand in hand.

My Amazon purchase history and wish list would, I am convinced, have scared the shit out of Pregnant Me. How to manage meltdowns? Middle grade fiction about being different (actually, I could have used that one myself, growing up)? Stories for kids with autistic siblings? That was never covered in Babywise. (Then again, neither was “what to do if none of this shit works, your baby won’t sleep, and you yell at your husband that you want to kill either him or yourself.”)

I did not order the nights that come with yelling and apologies and tears over being constantly misunderstood, but with them and their heartache comes a healing I never ordered either, one I never experienced until now: the aftermath. The moments cuddled together in a single bed passing forgiveness back and forth; the new understanding (you might call it new life) after hard conversations, the breaking-through to new dimensions of relationship, the opening of new doors within my heart just when I thought it couldn’t grow any more (or that I couldn’t endure it growing any more).

I don’t have any of those books I read when I was pregnant. But the ones I read now? I know I’ll keep forever.

I have become teachable by encountering all I never knew back when I thought I knew everything. I have been pushed, ground, birthed into a new way of being, of breathing, of believing. The world is so much more terrifying and beautiful and big, and I have seen so much more of it. My eyes, which had to be torn away from all my certainty, now willingly roam and scan for everything I might have missed.

I am more, before becoming so much less, afraid.

“I miss being right about everything,” DL Mayfield tweeted the other day. “But man, that is one toxic drug.”

Same, girl. Being right was like a warm quilt wrapped around me at all times: comforting until it was stifling, warm while choking out the sun. Now, admitting I’m wrong? That’s yet another door to freedom.

The other day, the boys were reluctant to enter the school. One anxious, the other sad. Nerves and tears. And these kids of mine, who would make my life so much easier if they’d just be like the others and walk in without all the feelings? One watched as his teacher came to the gate and walked him in. The other waited until the bell rang and the principal grabbed his hand, and later he told me that they spotted a rainbow together on the way to his class.

You don’t get that service if your kid walks in on their own.

Pregnant Me would have felt guilty that the staff had to take such pains for her kids, but now? My vision being forcibly changed, I can see beyond what I would have chosen into what is and I know that this gift of being wrong, this life-after-death teachability, this hard-won freedom from fuck-giving, this seeing what was unseen is faith. Which is also hope. Which is also love. And all of it is wrapped up in grace.

At about the halfway point on my running route, on a path between two beaches along the water, are multiple signs that read, “Warning: Freak Waves May Break on Path.” And every time I see them, I think, I am every part of this metaphor.

Indeed, freak waves do break on that path, and the other day I alternated between dodging and embracing them as they sprayed upward toward my feet in the summer heat. Other people on the path giggled and dodged as well; it was a bonding experience akin to the time I ran through Central Park in a blizzard: “Doesn’t this feel crazy and a bit unsafe and fun? And aren’t we lucky to be the ones doing it?”

We’ve felt lucky the last few days, soaking up the end of summer break on the beach with ice cream cones and beside pools at backyard barbecues and sitting on the deck while the kids peacefully assemble LEGO over the table inside and just being at home. Relearning that word as it applies to our lives: being in America with extended family, being here with our core unit, moving about our world as we know it, the familiarity of our surroundings wrapping us in settledness.

But school started today, and with it come big feelings like they do every year, but this year we’ve not been away from each other in weeks, not out of each other’s sight for longer than an hour at a time, and our being jerked (by our own choices) from winter to summer, north to south, break to school, has its own emotional whiplash. Both boys walked away from us in tears this morning, and I feel the invisible string that we talk about, that connects us, stretching tighter even as I revel in solitude but for Kevin the Dog at my feet.

Freak waves may break on the path.

And maybe, freak waves will break so often on the path that they become part of it, their spray spotting the far reaches of concrete and completely darkening others, seasons where the path itself never dries for the frequency of them. Seasons where we breathe prayers of thanks for the railing as we grit our teeth–which can end up looking weirdly like smiling, sometimes–and wonder if we’ll stay planted where we are, or if we’ll land somewhere new, and where.

Sometimes the freak waves are the story, not its interruptions.

The boys know that nothing is off-limits for discussion among us, especially feelings. I’ve found that a surrender to limitations in conversation is a surrender to limitations in relationships, and while these boundaries must sometimes be set, they leave pockmarks, empty spaces that must be dodged and manoeuvered around, and relationships that include dodging and dancing…well, that sounds a lot like performing to me.

So home, I guess, is where we don’t have to do that, among people we don’t have to do it with. “A big piece of self-acceptance depends on refusing to tell easy stories that are forged from shame,” Heather Havrilesky writes, and I am working on this: on living, and telling, not the easy story that I already know the ending to, the one that there’s a ready-made meme for, but the one whose ending remains to be seen; the one where freak waves may break on the path and create a mess, but that path–those stories–are populated by people who know how lucky they are to be there. To be living in the mess, in the confusion, in the questions, in the off-limits conversations. “This will feel unsafe,” Havrilesky continues as I nod my head. It will. It does. Also? It feels utterly real.

The path where I don’t have to fold myself into a shape that takes up less space or is more agreeable to the most people. Where words are chosen based not on fear, but kindness. (Still working on this. All of it, actually.) The path where, on the way to school, we talk about the big feelings until we find that the Encanto soundtrack is queued up and “We Don’t Talk about Bruno” (a song where, the boys hastened to point out, they do nothing but talk about Bruno) is up next, and now it’s time to sing.

Back to summer. Back to driving and walking on the left-hand side. Back to the Christmas decorations we didn’t take down before we left. Back to school starting in February and supplies being purchased in January.

Back to missing family. Back to reconnecting with friends. Back to drinking less during the week. Back to familiar runs and our own beds. Back to smaller washing machines and more loads of laundry. Back to not living out of suitcases. Back to having room to breathe.

Back to being a day ahead. Back to calculating the time difference by moving backwards. Back to voice messages and texts with those we left behind.

Back to not sharing one bathroom, thank God.

I hope those people we went to see, then left where they were, know what we went through to be with them. That, despite our (my) complaining, we must love them a hell of a lot to go through what we did, what we do with semi-regularity: the late-night, glassy-eyed trudging through airport security. The shoving of our lives into suitcases until they literally pop open. The jet lag both ways. The waking up on planes to the sound of our children crying out for us just before barfing all over their seats. The disoriented and repeated stumbling through the dark to airport bathrooms. The suspension between time, between days, between hemispheres of our hearts, minds, bodies, that never truly subsides even once we’ve landed. The evading of the question “will you ever come back?” because you’re not sure and you don’t want them to think it’s because you don’t care, but you know what a gift this place is to you all, and you can neither imagine leaving that or not ever returning to them.

It’s not like travel is the Oregon Trail these days, but it’s still harrowing. Before, during, and after.

Our last full day there, after my last Santa Monica-Venice run, after we played Marco Polo in the hotel pool and while The Husband worked down the street, the boys and I found a restaurant and sat down for lunch. “I’m tired, hungry, and bored, all mashed up,” The Kid said, and Little Brother and I agreed with this apt description. A month away from our dog and home and we were done. But not yet, because we had a few things ahead of us: an incredible meal served by a waiter from Atlanta; two final vaccinations; the news that our PCR results were all negative; a hotel dinner and a shuttle to the airport; a ten-hour flight filled with vomit from The Kid and tears from Little Brother (“I just want to be HOME!“–same, boy); a traffic-filled ride to our house with tense words exchanged before we finally washed all the travel off and convened on the couch to pass out.

Afterward, it all feels sort of like a dream. The memories have piled up and been reshuffled into the past, and for a moment everything here looks and sounds and smells and tastes and feels new. Like a gift. That first night of sleep–heaven. My run that first morning–easy, and capped off by a rainbow. The reminders that we are where we’re meant to be. The twinges of sadness when the Christmas cards from loved ones back in the US arrive. The thousand daily realities of life, of love, spent in more than one place.

Our first family walk with the dog, when we pass the ladies whose own dog knows him, and TK and LB show them their new shirts. “What’s that say on yours?” one asks TK, and he answers with what I had failed to see when I bought it: “It’s what on the inside that counts.” Sometimes you have to travel there and back again to see what’s right in front of your face.

Sometimes I wish my kids had a different mother.

I don’t mean this in the (darker) way it may sound–I certainly don’t actually want anyone else mothering them, particularly in my absence, and I have cancer nightmares to that effect frequently in both wakeful and sleeping hours. What I mean is that I often wish I were a different kind of mother to them: a more consistently patient and tender version of myself. A version not prone to peaks of anxiety, whose skin didn’t crawl when she is surrounded by the cling-wrap “vacation” versions of said kids.

Let the records show that this trip? Has been difficult.

We are nearing the end of it–hopefully, Covid-tests-pending. I’ve got a rapid one processing upstairs just for kicks before the highly sensitive airport version we’ll be taking tomorrow. I don’t know what I’ll do if one of us is positive. Have a panic attack, for starters. Family and friends notwithstanding, I am ready to get the hell out of this country that birthed me. It is crowded, and agitated, and aggressive, and really super cold right now. The boys and I are itchy all over with dry skin patches. I’ve had too much wine over the past month and not enough water. I’m tired and want to sleep in my own bed. I’m irritable–PMS for the second time this trip, along with the usual flare-ups of temper compounded by all of the above.

Even as we are surrounded by familiarity, it is time to go home.

I miss the ocean–our side of it. I miss the hill runs I know, and my ocean swims. I really miss my dog. I miss having my own space, and my kids having theirs, rather than being crammed together and sharing a toilet for a month.

I will miss, once we leave, my sister’s Peloton, though. Oh, and her. And the others. But it’s time to go home.

I’ve learned some things, though. About myself, and just how much I can take. Turns out that I can keep running further in Anaheim than I think; that I no longer like roller coasters (farewell, Space Mountain); that Disneyland is both magical and a fever dream and that after an exhausting day there when all I want to do is leave, an Elsa- and Anna-laden float might wheel by and as both women sing “Let It Go” while looking directly at my children, I may cry when no one is looking.

I’ve learned that one reason mothering is so hard is that there is no limit to my love, and this is awful and beautiful at the same time. Like all the most important things.

I’ve learned that my children never stop asking questions, even as they’re falling asleep, and that while Little Brother thinks himself into unconsciousness beside me, The Kid’s own brain is seeking assurance by repeating queries he already knows the answers to. I officially have nothing left at this time of night–I’ve been out of steam for hours, actually–so when he wants to know, again, how long it would take to drive from LA to Chicago, I tell him I don’t know even though I gave an answer earlier in the day (one that was apparently wrong by, like, half). So he answers: “Twelve to fifteen hours, I think.” Drawing on all the patience I have left, I tell him that sounds right, and that he’s pretty smart to know that. Or remember it, as it were.

He thanks me. As if I’ve done anything. As if I’ve done everything.

“Don’t call our hotel room HOME!”

The protest from The Kid (one of many from his backseat perch, the rest having to do, typically, with traffic) in the backseat came just after The Husband mentioned we’d be home soon. He was referring to our beachfront-and-now-extended-stay hotel in Santa Monica, a place we were meant to remain for three nights that have turned into (at last booking) five more, ever since Little Brother tested positive for Covid three days ago.

He woke up with a headache that turned into fatigue and a fever, and later that day we located a drive-through testing centre down the street that delivered the dreaded result fifteen minutes post-swab via text. We couldn’t believe it, but also…we could? Because we’ve been on a few planes and in a few public places since we arrived here in our ancestral homeland, including the spot where we theorise LB picked up his dash of Omicron: a flight from Park City to LA where he was seated across the aisle from–and carried on a flight-long conversation with–a football fan headed for the Rose Bowl whose mask was dropped long enough to down a few rounds of Jim Beam and Coke.

Two days later, TH started feeling poorly (and out came his sick uniform of hoodie and sweatpants). Today, I’ve been decimated by aches and chills. TK, as he puts it, has felt “strangely fine.”

So we’ve made this corner of the hotel, of the country, of this trip, our home of sorts: drives to the testing centre followed by car tours of Bel Air, Beverly Hills, and, today, Malibu (and Kanye’s beach house there). We’ve had way too much iPad time and an ungodly amount of Spongebob Squarepants. The boys have fought and made up and fought again. TH, before he got sick, ventured out to the local grocery store and purchased a bunch of cleaners and cleansers and shit since we are now housekeeping for this room.

It is not the vacation we planned, but travel with family never really is a vacation, is it? It’s just life in a different location.

Yesterday, before the aches and chills hit, I headed out solo to the beach. The other side of the Pacific has become home, and this side was unfamiliar, with the sun setting strangely over it and the sand stretching out seemingly forever. I stuck a toe into the wintry water, expecting a shock, and was surprised to not be–shocked, that is. In the past year, in our home across the ocean, I’ve gotten used to colder wintry water than that, it seems. Home, it can change a person.

I walked barefoot back across the sand and headed back home, that is, to our hotel room, where TK asked for a back massage and LB called out, “Hey Baby Girl,” and much like Pam could feel God in that Chili’s, I was–am–pretty sure his grace abounds in Swiffers and Netflix and the Southern pie shop down the street that delivers through Uber Eats, and Sudafed, and this very makeshift home of the four of us.

This morning I swam laps in a pool for the first time in awhile and for the first time in a pool surrounded by snow…well, ever. I dodged The Husband and The Kid and Little Brother as they played basketball at the hoop in the shallow end (and sometimes ran directly, purposely, into them), and then we all jumped into the hot tub after as snow fell and the twenties (Fahrenheit) temps refrigerated the air around us.

This is all very strange, and we are used to strange. We are used to hotel Christmases and cross-world flights and jumping from one season to its opposite in the course of a day. Or, this year, in the course of the longest Christmas Day ever: one that started inside our house in Sydney, continued to the airport Covid testing centre, onto a flight to Fiji and through the airport there onto a flight to LAX.

And what a flight it was! In between viewings of A Christmas Story and Christmas Vacation, I slept fitfully with LB crammed into the seat with me and occasionally hopped up to hoof it with TK to the bathroom to dispose of his motion sickness. That flight was not our longest, but it felt like it was. TK said as much when he announced, in the opposite of a Tiny Tim “God bless us every one” moment, that it was time to leave as we had been on that plane “for ten fucking hours.” Hashtag blessed.

We ate Christmas dinner in our hotel’s bar and, the next day, woke up to a flight that had not been cancelled despite rumours to the contrary. We made it to Salt Lake City and its fast food cornucopia of Wendy’s and Taco Bell, and then to Park City, where we finally–finally–made it to a mediocre Mexican restaurant to meet The Sis and Bro-in-Law and Nieces. Breathing Covid-saturated air the whole time through our masks, probably.

Since then, we’ve inhabited the dead zone between Christmas and New Year’s with more eventfulness than usual: The Sis’s panicked texts that they had found, upon arriving there, that their AirBnB had not been cleaned (let it heretofore be known as Pube Condo); sledding in inappropriate clothes then braving the wilds of Wal-Mart to purchase cheap appropriate ones; sledding more and eating snow upon falling; not skiing, every, enduring one perilous car trip through a squall (a squall!?!) to Pube Condo; reunions and re-unions over wine and dinner and kids. Breathing more Covid-saturated air the whole time, probably.

Oh, and we saw Spider-Man. But that will have to have its own post because I loved it so damn much. Mainly because of how, like planes and vomit and car drives and so much effort and even more grace, it brought together people I haven’t seen in too long and reminded me that home? It can travel.

My kids still believe in Santa.

At seven and ten, they are both beyond the age I was when I asked my mom if Santa was God (I had analysed the logistics; any other scenario was impossible) and she dumped the E! True Hollywood Story: St Nick on me. But I’m in no hurry for them to learn the truth. For them, the magic is still alive–and for me, this is everything.

And who knows how long before it runs out? Before they realise that there’s no way that many houses can be covered in a single night; before they figure out the creepiness of some fairy collecting teeth (though I’ve amended that one for them, telling them that dentists–even former ones–have a special arrangement with the Tooth Fairy in which we get to keep said teeth. Not creepy at all), before a big-ass bunny breaking into their house in the middle of the night to deliver eggs sounds more crime than cute.

We’re feeling a few lasts around here of a different nature, too. Yesterday we went to the water slides with some friends and upon leaving, kid hugs were exchanged all around with Little Brother sighing as we got into the car, “I’ll miss my friends while we’re gone.”

And when we pulled up to our house, The Kid remarked that it was our last Wednesday here before leaving for America. For my part, I count down the last time we’ll view each Christmas movie this year; my last trip to the godforsaken mall to pick up something I forgot; the last swim I had this morning at my favourite harbour beach; my last run tomorrow morning; our last full day and night at home with Kevin the Dog before he’s shuttled off to spend time with friends.

This time of year always feels fraught to me, with the sentimental becoming monumental. Especially when a cumbersome trip across the world (to our Covid-stricken homeland, no less) waits in the wings, with its associated pre-trip drive-through tests and their lines and waits, and the airport experience (minus lounge, as a friend recently warned me; THE HORROR!). We’re going? But also, we might not? If we test positive? And if we get there, we’re definitely coming back in a few weeks? Unless we don’t, because we test positive there? There is knowing, and a lot of not knowing. There is faith, and hope, and they are both different things and the same, separate and inextricably part of each other.

And there is a lot of doing, which I do not excel at because it implies a certainty I don’t feel, with my sphincter so tight I could shit diamonds, the anxiety coursing through me alongside the carols. I pushed through the waves this morning, thinking about how I will return to these waters, then hoping it wouldn’t be via a plane crashing into them or my American-bullet-and-Covid-ridden ashes being scattered across them. Thank you for coming to this reading of My Current Fears!

Then I reached the end of my swim, and I did that thing where I float on the water for a few seconds to remind myself that, as Sandra Bullock and Harry Connick Jr proved, hope floats. That I am held. That I have not been undone, been sunk, by all the uncertainty, which is really just a cynical word for mystery, which is itself another word for magic. I emerged from the water and watched as yet another couple–must be the third in as many days–held their baby just above the surface and dipped its toes in. The baby cried, as they always do, and the parents smiled, as they always do, and I saw myself there: suspended over the unknown that will become the known, crying though I’m held there by love. I can’t have my shoulders raised in anxiety and shrugged in surrender at the same time, so I try to choose the latter, trusting that there is beauty in all the not knowing.

There is the moment after the candles are blown out and the wrapping paper is tossed into the bin and the leftover cake is crammed into Tupperware and the presents are stowed in their new spots, after the noise has died down and the singing has subsided, when you’re left with your thoughts. And these thoughts often consist of two questions:

How did we get here?

And where will we go from here?

I am no stranger to accepting flights of fancy, fantastical stories of angels heard on high and shepherds in their fields and men following stars across continents. Yet I’ve somehow gone through much of my life with a blind acceptance of the story highlights that leaves out room for questions, for mystery, for the nuance of all that’s not known.

Ten years ago, grace did a number on me that disabused me of my intolerance for mystery. It was, and is, a long and painful process with moments of searing glory. I am not enough for it–or, as I read recently, maybe I am enough, in the way that the loaves and fishes were enough: not until they were split apart by miracle, into miracle.

The wonders of my children’s minds and bodies never cease, never have since that day ten years ago when the first emerged from me: their coos giving way to conversations, their teeth falling out then quickly replaced, the endless pairs of shoes they’ve outgrown, their why’s that sometimes have answers and often don’t. When The Kid was born ten years ago, his first few years set us up for a deviation from plan, which I should have been used to after a deviation from Alabama to New York, but I still held the developmental milestone sheets in my hand and requested a sit-down with management. Initial defiance gives way, daily, to an acceptance born of the awareness of the gift we’ve been given–twice–in two healthy sons who have their own ways of looking at the world.

What else could matter? Oh, my anxious mind can find plenty.

Especially when it comes to that future-oriented question from above, one that wakes me up at 3 am and fills conversations with The Husband after they’re asleep and sits in the air between me and a friend and our cake and champagne on an unseasonably cool December afternoon. What about high school? What about this camp thing? What about independence? Alarm clocks going off in my brain as I clamour for a certainty that has never been my lot: I left those shores long ago.

Mystery feeds us: bread falling from the sky, darkness giving way to light, salt water surrounding a home ten thousand miles from where we started. The quiet cold of Christmas is what I’m used to and we’ve had a taste of it here recently, an aberration for the natives but somehow, for me, a gift. A mystery. Maybe–a gift because of its mystery.

The winter toward which we are headed, in a couple of weeks, as we fly back east toward our people even as our people remain here, the people who have emerged for us not through blood and DNA but because they see us, and we see them, and we sit across tables and in parks, me sharing champagne with one, the other answering my children’s questions as they converse on a patch of grass. Winter, to which I’ve grown a bit partial with age maybe because it strips down to the bare essence the way naturalist Anna Comstock wrote about trees:

In winter, we are prone to regard our trees as cold, bare, and dreary; and we bid them wait until they are again clothed in verdure before we may accord to them comradeship. However, it is during this winter resting time that the tree stands revealed to the uttermost, ready to give its most intimate confidences to those who love it. It is indeed a superficial acquaintance that depends upon the garb worn for half the year; and to those who know them, the trees display even more individuality in the winter than in the summer.

A life that lays us bare by not giving constant answers but instead feeding us mystery is one that opens us to the sight of those brave enough to venture into mystery themselves. Soon, God and Covid willing, we will fly toward winter then back to summer, our people in both places. On an afternoon when this finally became real to me, I fought waves of anxiety over all the packing to do, all the planning, all the layers needed. I looked up and saw TK walking by, smiled and told him I love him, and he responded by giving himself a high-five. “That’s how I say love,” he answered, this decade-old mystery of mine who makes me believe in all sorts of things I never did before.