Motherhood is inflicting violence upon me. It’s forcing me into (gag) optimism.

This is an uncomfortable spot, this seeing-the-glass-half-full hunt for silver linings. I am much better–and more experienced–at pointing out flaws. But lately, The Kid especially has grown frustrated with his corner of the world and all of its injustices: traffic, lack of parking spaces, people who say “one second” when they do not mean “one second.” And his frustration has ample room to fester within his comfort zone of home and family, since that’s virtually the only zone we can inhabit during lockdown.

Cut to us on the hunt for a park at the packed beach on this beautiful spring morning, and his protests from the backseat as we couldn’t locate a spot. My already-peaking (thank you, PMS, brain chemistry, and life) anxiety hit new highs with each protest. When we finally found a spot, it was “too far away.” My response: “We get some exercise.” Later, I heard all about how our sand neighbours had trampled our castle. “It was accidental,” I offered through gritted teeth.

Yesterday, this same child announced that he’d had “the worst day of his life” at the park just after he won a round of hide and seek. I heard this pronouncement from the ground as I was picking up the dog’s shit. The day was on its last legs, and so was I. I want to be the one to complain, not the one who has to buoy everyone else’s mood. I need to have space to break down.

It’s almost like I’m being asked to…change or something?

Or maybe it’s just that parts of me are being uncovered.

Little Brother leans in at bedtime and tells me, “You’re the one who makes me laugh the most,” and though I feel he may be lying because he also told me I’m “calmer than Dad,” I believe it when he whispers, half-asleep, “I love you.” And TK, in the darkness of his room that is pierced by the light of a street lamp that is “so annoying,” goes on to explain to me what’s going on in his mind when he gets frustrated: the thoughts that overtake him and don’t let go; the way autism can be a blessing but the disability part is when he gets overwhelmed. And I am overwhelmed: by how well he knows himself, and by the work we are doing together to make that happen.

One of our mornings this week at the beach–and this spring break, there have been many–I stood beside the boys as they each did their own thing: TK sent a plastic ship out to greet the waves and be hurtled back to shore, where he ran to retrieve it. LB jumped over the returning waves, shouting in glee. Years to get here: unasked-for twists that felt like deviations that were actually paths to this moment, to this life, where both of my kids are growing up on the beach and we can ride waves every day together.

We watched as a group of swimmers pushed a woman in a beach wheelchair out into the surf. Just straight into it. They removed her from the chair and held her under her arms for a few seconds (definitely not one second), and then she let go of them and dove under the water before paddling around and being brought back to shore. I thought of all the waves that have swept over me, that would have drowned me if I hadn’t been held. Sometimes we spend all our energy trying to make it past the breakers, or back to shore. Two weekends ago, that’s what TK and I did, and it was glorious once we reached the calm.

But other times, we stay still long enough to meet the break and survive it. And after we learn we can survive it, we figure out we can ride it. Then the sun hits the spray and, for one second, a rainbow appears. And we didn’t even have to hunt for it, because we just happened to be standing in the right place.

This morning, one of the boys’ teachers called for his weekly check-in. the last of this ten-week term. (For those who are counting, and I AM, that’s twelve total weeks of lockdown, ten of them spent learning from home.) He thanked me for my help in delivering education, and I gave silent thanks that he hasn’t been around for The Dryer Incident or the myriad psychological tussles between me and The Kid. (He also told me that the last assignment turned in by TK, the one that had prescribed the invention of several silly sentences with changing verb tenses, had included ones involving TK showing his butt: I show my butt. I showed my butt. I will show my butt. I wait daily for child services to knock at the door.)

But we’ve learned, all right. A little about verb tenses and noun groups, some about time conversions and area and perimeter, a touch of writing descriptively and a smidge of Olympics trivia. But mostly, we’ve learned about each other. And ourselves. And this form of learning has occurred via the hard way.

Gone, for twelve weeks and counting, are the distractions and activities that filled our days before. Before, when there was soccer and swimming. Now, there are family walks and hours of stillness. Gone are babysitters and social events; now there are iPad supervision and cocktail-accompanied virtual escape rooms. Gone are restaurants; now there is curbside takeaway.

On Sunday, I finally connected with a friend who lives literally down the street when we both made it to the farmers market. My most public appearance besides the grocery store in months. I was complimented on my mask. It was wonderful, and kind of sad that it was so wonderful.

I’m having to hunt down the symmetry and themes and surprises that used to just show up when life was “normal,” when my brain wasn’t fuzzy and themes about which to write materialised as I moved about life, unimpeded by necessary restrictions. Before my arm had been jabbed twice with the fruits of scientific rigour, before the word pandemic was a part of daily life. As some sort of dawn looms ahead, with this week’s provision of legal picnics for five double-vaxxed adults (champagne outings are being frenetically planned) and the return to school on the calendar and the opening of hair salons oh please God yes sometime in the next month, hope springs, eternally but confusedly: what will the world look like? And don’t use the words new normal or I’ll barf.

For my part, I’ll be dipping my toes in slowly, both to stave off panic attacks and to, hopefully, preserve and maintain what good has come out of all this: the secret beaches we’ve found and frequented. The “surfing” the boys did on the shore of one last weekend, standing on their boogie boards in the inches-deep water while tiny waves pummelled them and they dissolved into giggles. The return we made to Manly: The Husband and Little Brother digging on the shoreline while TK and I braved the freezing (to us) water out past the breakers, riding the waves for another season, he on my back as we faced the open ocean. Both of us relearning how to reenter, together.

So yeah, we’ve learned verb tenses. But we’ve also learned what makes each other cry and laugh, what sets us off and calms us down, how to apologise and how to forgive. What we each have in common. How we learn. And today, we made a homemade volcano, so I figure I’m pretty much done with homeschool anyway.

The other day at TK’s speech appointment, as I sat in the waiting room, I heard his therapist taking him through scenarios and prompting him to name the appropriate feeling associated with each: happy, nervous, etc. She provided the example of “walking into a room of friends on your birthday and they all yell out.” The “correct” response was surprised. TK answered, “Scared.”

This surprise of an unplanned pandemic has been scary. It’s like walking into a room full of people yelling while also holding bags of flaming dog shit. Which is to say, not a party. But also, it’s been educational, and not always in the ways expected. It’s been comforting, definitely not in the ways expected. It’s been strangely fortifying and revealing and destructive and reparative.

Walking into a room and being yelled at, as any introvert (like me or TK) will tell you, is terrifying. But eventually the noise subsides, the fire (from the shit or the cake) flames out, and you’re left with what remains. Which can end up being everything that mattered in the first place.

Spring has arrived.

September, formerly the time of pumpkin spice and football, is now longer days and perfumed air. A half-decade of this reversal and it’s still a bit strange, to be experiencing the opposite of what we used to know–of what our families and friends across the world are experiencing.

But the same could be said of the lockdown we experienced last year, globally, and the one we experience this year, locally. Of our inhibited travel while I watch friends on Instagram hop flights to Italy. Meanwhile, I exult in discovering Rick Steves on YouTube, and I travel with him to Positano without leaving my bed (that sounds wrong, but you get it).

There’s a stretch on my morning run route, between Manly and Shelly Beaches, populated by brightly-coloured gates and cafes, and it feels European. I pretend I’m in Capri: the coffee to my right, the sea to my left.

This is the most we get right now.

It’s somewhere between nothing and everything, but far from both. It’s the memory of what we once had and the promise of what is to come, both only hinted at and surviving upon wisps of hope. It’s waiting to see where the debris lands even as we look around at what still stands. We are in the eye of some kind of hurricane, of a fire not yet dissipated, wondering what will need to be rebuilt–how we might be rebuilt. Right now, everything is foreign.

This is convenient, in a way, for those of us who have faced our own forms of trauma, who have been counselled through the repetitive unexpected of our stories. It doesn’t mean we’re fine–I mean, for my part, I broke the dryer last week after slamming the door shut so hard that something broke off and now it only stays shut during the cycle if it’s duct-taped–but it’s a language we’ve spoken some dialect of before, its words both unfamiliar and an echo, new and bearing recognition.

Spring hasn’t always come in September, but it has always come after winter.

We ran into some friends at the park last week, and The Kid and Little Brother ran up to the girls they’ve known since we arrived, who match their ages exactly, and wrapped them in hugs. The older sister turned to me and explained what I already know–and she does too–about TK: “He doesn’t like it when I start the hug, but he’ll hug me if he starts it.” Learning his language. And LB, this force of nature, he rattles off stanzas-long rhymes, freestyle-raps his way through the afternoon as though he’s been enrolled in one-on-one instruction with Lin-Manuel Miranda, and there was a time when it shocked and amazed me; now it’s just amazing. And known.

We are waiting, and living, and knowing.

TK and I, while LB sings beside us, talk real estate–his current top interest–and as LB performs a rap interlude, TK says to me: “We both like real estate–another thing in common!” Because he’s keeping track. We take turns putting them each to bed: LB, on my night with him, whispers in his half-sleep, as I walk away, that he loves me in response to my utterance of the same. On my night with TK, I talk him through some situation from the day and tell him that even though it doesn’t always feel this way, it’s true: there will always be someone who understands. He pauses, then says, in recognition, “That’s you.”

Both of them saying the same thing in different languages.

“Without your wound where would your power be? It is your very remorse that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of men. The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In love’s service only the wounded soldiers can serve.” –Thornton Wilder, “The Angel That Troubled the Waters”

The toys are still missing from the waiting room.

I observed this fact during The Kid’s weekly speech therapy appointment, the one appointment we keep in person these days, the one forty-five minute span of time each week when I sit indoors, masked, and hear him battling through l and n sounds and social stories in the adjacent room. Whenever I’m in a waiting room, I feel at least a brief echo of all the waiting rooms: of the hospitals and doctors’ offices and therapy clinics, and of the struggles and victories they provided. And on this Monday, sitting in this room, I thought about what a cruel version of reality we’re living through, that these rooms into which life’s wounds hurtle us–these crucibles with couches–that they can’t even offer toys right now.

We are living through such a period of intense loss, though I’m not sure we all realise it. Loss is one of those words that gets misunderstood, like freedom. Loss isn’t a singular event. Right now, it is our daily reality. We have lost so very much. If we aren’t grieving, we aren’t paying attention.

I was watching the first volume of the second season of this anthology, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t rip my heart out right in front of the TV and stomp all over it. And I was so weirdly grateful for that. Ever since I jumped onto the medication bandwagon during a season of postpartum depression (that was a cousin of the regular old depression I’ve always battled) and popped that first Lexapro, I worried it would render me flatlined emotionally, devoid of the highs and lows I was used to feeling. So now, anytime I do cry, I feel a strange relief: it’s still there. I’m still me. Because, in the end, I’m not interested in our storied strengths as much as I am in our unveiled weaknesses. If you’re broken and on nodding terms with it, come sit by me.

Anyway, this episode was, as mentioned, a real tearjerker, and as I indulged a good cry there on my bed (not dissimilar to the one I had last lockdown, after a panic attack, but who’s keeping track), I heard one of the characters tell another, “”We get lost together.”

Maybe that’s the point in all this loss: that we feel it together. That we’re not alone, ultimately, because we have the people who are willing to get lost alongside us, and the grace that holds us all. The people and grace whom we see and who see us–and how lost can you really be if you have that?

We went to a new secret beach a couple of weekends ago, the four of us, and I wonder how many of these secret beaches we would have been motivated to find had we not lost all other options of activity? This one was at the bottom of some rocky stairs: it opened out in front of us, and for a moment I was lost–which beach was across the way? In which direction were we pointed? Where were we exactly? So The Husband and I sorted that out, and the boys sorted their snacks out of the backpack, and I inched into the cold salt water, looking ahead.

Once I made my way back to the sand, The Kid and Little Brother emerged from their rock picnic. LB leaned forward off the rock and I grabbed him, because I still can, and placed him on the sand. TK scrambled down on his bottom and stood beside me. “You looked beautiful,” he said, and he pronounces it “beauty-full” which may not be entirely correct but absolutely is, and he continued, “when you were standing out there in the water.”

He saw me, and that’s what he said, and don’t we all need a word like that right now, and the recognition that accompanies it? Of all the things we’ve lost, in that moment, my breath was one I didn’t miss. Beauty-full.

This morning I was running through some fierce winter wind that nearly blew wig off and definitely made me want to quit. That’s when I looked to my right and saw a shipwreck; or, rather, a small boat run aground on the cove beach. It was gathering a group of onlookers who were shrugging and pointing while it sat askew, tipped nearly parallel with the sand, unmoored from its original spot and cast to shore.

A few minutes later, I passed another, smaller boat, in the same predicament. The winds can be rough around here.

One of my favourite stories from the Ancient Near East starts off as a travelogue of a group’s journey around the Mediterranean; the group even landed at a place called Fair Havens, which sounds delightful. It was their last stop before setting sail again and heading straight into a storm. One of the louder members of the group–a prisoner, no less–told the rest of them, after days of starvation and all hopes dashed of being saved, that there were still rocky times ahead but that they would make it. Then he rounded out his good news/bad news speech with one of my favourite lines: “Nevertheless, we must run aground on some island.”

I feel like this could be a through-line for my life. Nevertheless, we must run aground on some island: New York. Nevertheless, we must run aground on some island: anxiety. Nevertheless, we must run aground on some island: autism. Nevertheless, we must run aground on some island: Australia.

In the story, the statement was fulfilled because the crew chose to shipwreck; it was the only option available other than death. And though less dramatic, my own choices (or lack of them) felt like they had similar stakes: stay who you were (and die to who you could become), or run aground on this island that is not called Fair Havens and live.

Sometimes it’s the shipwrecks that save us, is all I’m saying.

Author Diane Dokko Kim writes, “But had my child been like everyone else, I wouldn’t have discovered how passionately I could love, how bitterly I could weep, how desperately I could pray, or how fiercely I could fight. Disability demolished my pride and self-sufficiency; it remapped the boundaries of my narrow mind–and even smaller heart–to grow expanses of sorrow, surrender, and submission.”

I have been forcefully unmoored from so many safe spots. Lockdown, with all its gifts and uncertainties, is currently jerking me around. A move across the world with its ensuing reflection-from-a-distance of everything I used to believe? That’ll do it too. I run now, literally and metaphorically, along waters that were at one point in my life completely foreign to me. Now they’re my everyday.

And when I really, I mean really, look around at where I’ve currently been grounded, there’s an element to it that feels like protection. Because sometimes that’s what a lack of other options, what forced stillness, is: protection from the howling wind found only in running aground, the fierce surf no longer able to fling me around recklessly. Because I am trapped? No. Embedded.

When The Kid was four and in pre-K in a special needs class in Atlanta, I was speaking with a couple of the other moms of kids in his class. One of them mentioned their family’s future plans in some generalised way and then added about her daughter, “that is, if she snaps out of this by then.”

The statement jarred me even as it revealed a tendency of my own: to plan for the future according to several possibilities at once, all depending on how independent TK would be, all my anxiety brought to a point and diverted into a load that he would unwittingly bear.

In some ways it was the wake-up call I needed. In some ways, that was when I snapped out of it: out of the denial I’d been mired in since his diagnosis, out of my hiding from terms like autism and spectrum, out of a purely fearful posture that was informed by misplaced shame.

Now we talk about autism most days in our house. TK has proclaimed it “a blessing and a curse,” but to be clear, at this point, for him, it’s all blessing: it’s his “cool brain” that works like an Apple computer. His self-awareness growing daily, he’ll often stare into the distance with a smile playing on his lips and remind me of how, last year (all the way back in year 3), the other boys in his class would look out for him while they played tip together.

I know it’s more complicated than that, and that as he gets older he, and all of us, will see the nuance and shades of grey that are right now supplanted by a black-and-white view of the world. But we’re starting early with rejecting shame around here, and if this is what that looks like right now, then I’m good with it.

Anytime those kind of “snap out of it” thoughts try to intrude on our present moments–and they still try–I have to remember what’s true: that, in my life, the way home has always been the scenic and winding one, the one with hills and mismatched terrain, the one that I didn’t choose but that chose me. I was bounced from the straight, flat path awhile ago, from Plan A and predictable outcomes, from certainty suffusing all our choices. I didn’t pack for much of this journey but somehow I’ve always had what I needed when I needed it: views to take my breath away, people to share them with.

Alternate time lines are not just the playground of Marvel screenwriters; our anxious selves toy with them constantly. Right now, in Sydney, the case numbers rise exponentially and we all readjust our expectations for a return to school (and, more importantly, departure from homeschooling), a “normal” Christmas. The future flutters beyond our reach but we try to define it anyway. It must be a mistake, an aberration, this darkest timeline in which we are currently tangled, right? We have to just get out of it.

It’s impossible for me, though, given my story, not to hear shades of “snap out of it” in that. Not to hear a wishing away of what’s real, and a missing of its beauty in the process. There have to be gifts here. I know it because, for me, this is where the best gifts have always been.

In her weekly trove of wisdom, Maria Popova writes, “Great storytelling, then, deals in the illumination of complexity — sometimes surprising, sometimes disquieting, always enlarging our understanding and self-understanding as we come to see the opaque parts of ourselves from a new angle, in a new light.” To me this contains echoes of what Lamar Hardwick, an autistic American pastor, has written: “…there is no need for a second edition of me…autism and all the struggles that come with it may at times keep me from loud rooms and long meetings, but it won’t keep me from my best because I am exactly who I am supposed to be” [emphasis mine].

Who I am supposed to be, where we are supposed to be. No Plan B waiting in the wings, no alternate timeline to jump into. Because, for some currently unknown and endlessly annoying reason, we wouldn’t be who we were made to be without this one, and we won’t be allowed through it without all the gifts it has waiting for us.

I heard a rumour.

I heard it while I was turning on the TV yesterday to stream an episode of The Durrells, my latest lockdown binge. Before I could click on ABC iView, the news flashed on and I heard the anchor mention that we could still be in lockdown through Christmas.

My insides collapsed, imagining all the life that should be happening between now and then: dinners, Halloween, birthdays, the ballet, Phantom of the Opera at the Opera House, school, the Friendsgiving I was hoping to make an annual event, a holiday on the west coast. Now it’s all cancelled, up in the air, or waiting to be cancelled. This was not supposed to happen–we were nearly back to normal here.

Tomorrow (I’m writing this on Wednesday) I’ll be celebrating my birthday with a rescheduled mammogram, getting my boobs pancaked in a machine. It’s unlikely we’ll get to do the camping trip Little Brother envisions for his birthday. This all sucks, and there are only so many ways to write about it before I just want to give up and lose myself in Netflix.

To avoid this turning into a “Count Your Blessings” post (ugh), let me share that Little Brother, and now by extension The Kid, has gotten obsessed with a 12+ game on his iPad that involves animatronics coming to life and jump-scaring people. It’s awful and I hate it but when I tell you he loves it…I mean, it makes him come to life. He and TK are connecting all the plushies (stuffed animals, if you’re American) associated with the game and they play it with The Husband every night.

“Do you like how it makes you a bit scared?” I asked him, and he grinned and said yes. I can relate. There is a deliciousness to the kind of scary that knows there is distance between us and the cause of our fear. That we are ultimately safe. There is fun in thrills. For my part, I began listening to a podcast about hauntings over the weekend and I’ve been watching a Spanish TV show about ghosts on a cruise ship, just to mix up the wholesomeness of The Durrells.

Beyond the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other, one-day-at-a-time kind of existence in which we’re enmeshed right now, though, the world itself is scary enough. We live in a country in which each death is mentioned on the news, which in a way is comforting (that there aren’t so many they’re all just lumped together), but in another way hits closer to home in the details. We have the promise of spring around the corner with little of the hope usually attached to it. We are all, in one way or another, at the ends of our ropes and ourselves. This form of living is not sustainable. It doesn’t even feel like life.

But. Today while running, I saw an acquaintance across the wharf and we waved, and that did feel like life. And, later, I sat on the deck and, with Kevin the Dog, watched the boys play basketball, and that felt like life too. Tomorrow I’ll eat cake and drink my favourite champagne, and this weekend we’ll do a virtual escape room with friends and if that’s what passes for a birthday celebration these days, then I trust there will be life in it too. I’m learning new things about my kids and myself and the world (book list forthcoming if I feel like it).

I never thought the road home–the story of my life–would take me to New York. Through autism and depression and anxiety, through a faith de- and reconstructed, through Atlanta and away from the family I grew up with to my own family of four in Sydney. Through a worldwide pandemic and repeated lockdowns. But that’s what forty-four years have been made of so far.

Forty-four. Now that’s scary. But also? It feels like life. Funny how those two things often show up together.

My skin is tingling and my joints are aching from the first dose of Astra Zeneca vaccine I received yesterday. I’ve been supervising year four writing assignments and year one maths, my head on a swivel like I’m a spectator at Wimbledon and anxiety ping-ponging around my chest until I walk away to breathe. I haven’t seen my extended family since Christmas 2019 and I don’t know when I will again. In a couple of days, The Kid has his first session with a clinical psychologist who specialises in autistic children. I miss cities.

I’m thankful.

I try to remember that when it all becomes too much (so…every five minutes or so), when the overwhelm nearly drowns me and my mind considers the possibility that nothing will ever be the same again.

I’ve faced “nothing will ever be the same again.” And I’ve learned that it can be more painful and piercingly beautiful than anything that came before it.

I’m considering the idea that this worldwide pandemic that has led to so much separation and sickness can also be the source of some healing. That we’ve had two significant stints of lockdown now to show us how we were ill before, what we were doing wrong and how we can live differently afterward. And I’m not just talking about washing hands.

In the relative (not to be found online) quiet, truths rise to the surface. Truths about our unwillingness to consider the collective over our own convenience. Truths about the ways we fail to love each other. Truths about the ways we rely on our own comfort and control rather than putting faith in those who know more than we do.

I’m angry, and I’m okay with that, because when it feels like the world is on fire it’s only fair to look around and wonder who lit the match. I’m tired of reading opinion pieces (from pastors, no less) that both-sides an issue that I happen to think has a right and wrong take. I can love you (or rather, I can rely on a supernatural source for that love) without respecting your idea that the government is trying to kill you (pretty narcissistic, btw) or that vaccines cause autism (ableist much? Also, you should be so lucky as to have discovered a shot that gives you a kid like mine).

I miss walking down West 11th Street in New York City. I want to take the kids to the Tower of London (we love creepy). I wonder when I’ll get to sit in my sister’s kitchen with a glass of champagne and laugh with our cousins until we cry.

At the same time, I’m reading and hearing things I never would have read or heard had life gone on like before. I’m going down pathways of neurological health and dismantling the patriarchy and fighting racism and the toxic reach of evangelicalism, and I feel passion for every little thing I am doing (except my kids’ zoom meetings. Those are getting old).

I’m being pulled in new directions, and stretching is painful. It involves the loss of comfort, of what came before so that it gives way to something new. I am counting on something new.

This morning, TK turned to Little Brother and asked him if he wanted to come with us on Friday to see the therapist. Like it was an invitation to a long-awaited holiday. And when I described it to LB the way I had to TK, his eyes lit up. ‘Yeah, that sounds good,” he said.

It’s the broken who find healing. It’s those of us who feel cracked inside who feel so much of life, deeply. “If you have not learned to lament, you have not learned to love,” writes Jemar Tisby. On our way home from a walk last week, I heard the strums of a guitar and saw our across-the-street neighbour sitting on his front stoop, playing. I lifted a hand to wave at him as he did the same. I miss live music, I thought, and ached, and considered how much more beautiful it is now than it ever was.

I am not okay. I am not okay.

That thought bounded around my brain on repeat once I’d climbed back into the car last week after a gruelling shopping run. And by gruelling, I mean just a shopping run, but these days that includes QR check ins, masks, and many more people than usual stocking up on necessities like flour, toilet paper, and wine. I deep-breathed my way through the shop and to the car and sat there, reasoning that this is a pandemic and another lockdown and of course it’s all overwhelming. I tried to show myself grace.

I received more grace, a couple of days later, when I realised that on that shopping trip I’d unwittingly been on my third day of cold-turkey Lexapro withdrawals. I’d done five days in total, which more than explained the struggles I’d been experiencing: anxiety expressed emotionally as anger and physically as piercing, permeating currents throughout my body, leaving me breathless and panicked.

I had thought it shouldn’t be this hard. But then, sometimes? It is?

We just had four weeks added on to our already month-long lockdown, and texts with friends have gone from consisting solely of funny memes to now running down plans to divorce, run away, and/or drink ourselves into comas. The humour is present, but fraught. The tension is palpable. We are all on the edge and it’s hard for one of us to pull the others back when we’re in the same spot. It sucks, hard, and I want to deeply and profoundly acknowledge that.

It’s just that sometimes, inconveniently, the best stuff comes paired up or tied into the worst stuff, and I hate this but management is not open to my suggestions on the matter. So I find that along with the beautiful weather come obligatory trips to the playground, a locale I’ve always been avoidant of because…well, there are people there. And not only are there people there, but my children want to (gasp) talk to those people while I stand creepily nearby, breaking into hives.

And then something happens. The Kid practices his conversational skills and his self-advocacy in one fell swoop: “I’m autistic and have speech issues.” Little Brother finishes off the one-two punch with his own form of advocacy, gently telling another kid that he should treat his sister properly. We leave having made new acquaintances, if not friends, and often having other people’s stories now to carry along with our own. (Except for yesterday, which was an emotional bloodbath because of a game of hide and seek gone awry, but you can’t win them all, right? GLUG GLUG.)

So we head home, fresh from what I’ve heard referred to as an AFGO (another fucking growth opportunity), and the only thing that provides relief is a full lie-down on the floor by the fire and the thought of a glass of red wine to pair with it. Thoughts about their well-being, whether they’re keeping up, whether they’ll get a job one day, whether I’m doing enough, whether everything is just totally going to shit skitter across my mind, and then: a louder yet gentler one breaks through. A thought that is also a voice: What if it’s not about what you haven’t done? What if this is the most important work, what you’re doing already? And images sweep my brain: their laughter. Our talks. The time on the couch as a family, watching The Mysterious Benedict Society. The hallowed ground of the dog park that we walk together.

Les Mis voiced it in typical melodramatic fashion, this idea that what happens naturally is, in the end, weighed down with more import than we ever imagined: “To love another person is to see the face of God.” What if we often get it wrong, and the things we give the most thought, actually deserve it the least? And the things we call “little” add up to being…everything?

And we talk and take in the view

We just talk and take in the view

When The Kid was young–but old enough to be speaking, and wasn’t–his therapists told me to talk to him. Constantly. Like, narrate everything that was happening. Which was…not comfortable for me? Because I know people who fill every square bit of silence with words, and I do not enjoy these people. (I prefer to fill every square bit of internet with words. Thank you.) But it was for my kid, and I’m a hero, so I did it: talking my ass off about the trees we drove by or whatever. He would look at me from the backseat, and I was pretty sure he wished I would shut up.

Now, though? Now he’s the one doing the narrating. He learns all he can about a topic, or a situation, by asking questions (so many questions) or watching videos or reading until he’s basically an expert on that subject, and then he recaps it for everyone in the vicinity. The other day, before Extreme Lockdown 2.0 happened, we met some friends in the park and he gave one of the other moms a briefing on…architecture I think? And when he walked away I told her about it, how this is his way of conversing and connecting, and I watched her eyes change as she understood.

I hear people’s voices change as they understand–as they hear the story, because stories change people. A friend called (gasp! Phone ringing?!) the other night to share their own story because of something I’d written about TK, and it was a story I hadn’t heard before and yet had. Every story is a glorious retelling in one way or another because we know–and can, when we really look, somehow find ourselves within–them all.

Here’s one of mine: crushing losses of identity giving way to something better. That story was what led me to New York. It was what changed me from the mother I’d planned to be into the one I am, hopefully, becoming. Last week, it was what happened when I came home from a run with a suddenly injured foot and a plan to rest it for a couple of days then resume normal life–specifically, the runs that keep me feeling like myself, or at least the sanest version of myself. So after a regime of rest and heat and expectations, I set out for my Saturday morning run and, a few strides in, realized I would not be making it even around the corner. I hobbled home, defeated. The thought actually formed in my mind: But who am I if I can’t run? I needed the boost to my sense of self, the rush of endorphins that would sustain me for at least a couple of hours, the assurance that I’m not that old and infirm and out of shape.

I swam instead. Through clear water churned by a rough wind. It was not exactly the same, but it was not less. It was just different.

There will come a day when I can’t run anymore, when everything else upon which I’ve staked my identity will fail or flounder or disappear. It’s a story told and retold over the years. It makes me cling too tightly until I remember what Anne Lamott said: “Every single thing I’ve let go of has claw marks on it.” And my hands? They’re not in much better shape from the gripping.

The good news is that I’m starting to feel the clinging, the clawing, the gripping: when I’m relying too much on dopamine surges from social media likes; when I’m demanding a structure to the day that eludes it and me; when the kids aren’t behaving the way I thought I’d ordered to be programmed into their factory settings. I feel the surge of frustration, the anger that can both define and undo me. And I’m learning what to do about it. What story to tell in the face of it.

It’s usually pretty simple–it involves a glass of water, or apologising to The Husband for being a bitch about the vacuum cleaner, or walking away, or taking deep breaths. Dwelling more on Little Brother’s faithful grin than the fact that he and TK haven’t finished writing their fucking sentences yet. The universe expands a little–my corner of it, at least. And with it, my story.