Plans In Pencil

I think Valentine’s Day is Hallmark-created BS, but as I write that I’m staring at a floral arrangement The Husband picked up for me yesterday because he knows that even though I don’t like fake holidays, I do like flowers. Things don’t have to make sense to be true.

What does it mean to fall in love, anyway? When I was younger, I imagined it was like a Disney movie: fast and sudden, done within a day. Kids must still think this, as Little Brother came home yesterday with a report of two boys in his class falling in love with the same girl and one of them being dumped with the other accepted in the span of six hours. That’s a lot of love for a Tuesday.

Real love, for me, was less dramatic–less falling, and more being carried, gently, to a safe person and place. Quiet assurance instead of high and low emotional flare-ups. Excitement that grew into certainty. These days, it looks like a big-ass pile of flowers even though I said that the orthotics I have to buy so I can keep running (another missed neck lift opportunity) could be my present. Less falling, more staying.

But it is still a fall, of sorts. A daily trust fall, a belief that what brought and keeps us together is strong enough to hold through sibling fights and neurological meltdowns and people who don’t push their chair back under the table. Sturdy enough for us to stick our landings, or at least support us when we stumble into them.

The boys went with friends to an indoor skydiving venue this weekend, and I told them that when I was a teenager, I went bungee jumping. Thrice. That was much more dangerous and dumb than the fearsome activity I signed waivers for with their name at the top, promising I wouldn’t sue if The Worst happened. So they suited up and listened to the instructions and entered the chamber, and I stood outside and watched.

The Kid looked back at me with The Face: the one that says the tears are coming and he wants to bolt. He was basically locked into the space shuttle, past the point of no return, and I had to shrug–which I once read is the beginning of wisdom–and maybe that’s true because when you don’t have an out, you have to fall. The two adult strangers in the kids’ group returned from their flights and I watched, but couldn’t hear, as TK asked them questions and saw as they reassured him. LB went a couple of people before his brother and fell right away into the chamber, a grin plastered across his air-blasted face. He was in heaven.

At the entry point, TK was in the opposite location. He hovered at the doorway, turned back a couple of times. The group watching began to cheer him on. I shot him a thumbs-up and a nod, and I watched that moment occur when he ran out of other choices and just…fell. Which doesn’t matter at all, once you’re there–how you got there doesn’t determine how you fly, only if you do, and he did. Arms and legs splayed every-which direction, but he did it, to cheers. And we all made it home alive.

I just watched the video of both boys flying. It’s set to music and tells a seamless story (at least, after the part where TK initially tries to escape). So many stories are like that–a score in the background, edits made to show only the “good” parts. The falling, though–that’s the thing. Whether thrilling, or just like an exhale of breath, prolonged with stops and starts, messy rather than pretty–the falling may just be a step forward, this beginning that makes everything after it different.

Her face was stricken–slightly pink, mouth wide, eyes shining–and at first I thought she was on the verge of tears. “What’s wrong?” I asked my friend, who was standing outside the classroom where both of our boys are starting their third-grade year, and as I got closer I saw that I had misjudged: she was holding in laughter.

“What’s…teabagging?” she stage-whispered, wiping her eyes, and after I told her my Urban Dictionary/Sex in the City-taught definition, she nodded her head. “That’s what I thought.” Then she explained that one of the boys in our sons’ class had just yelled the word in a sentence and the teacher had responded, “Who’s teabagging who?” and other than the obvious grammatical error within that question, there was so much wrong with the situation that all we could do was break apart in laughter.

“Gonna be a big year,” I said as we parted ways.

Having kids, or maybe just being alive, sometimes feels like a series of returns to the same material, the same lessons, the same events. Like when you first hear Samantha explain a sex act and then hear your kid’s classmate scream it out two decades later, or when you find yourself waiting alongside the other parents in the sweltering heat to find out if your children are happy with their classes and teachers again, or when you note the familiarity of changing seasons–the sun arriving later, the mornings cooler. They’re all stops we’ve made before, places we’ve been before, with new details, new flourishes thrown in.

Last weekend we saw the Sydney Symphony Orchestra perform the score to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 as the movie played on a screen in the Opera House’s Concert Hall. It’s a place I frequent regularly, though it recently underwent an acoustic-friendly renovation, and it’s a movie I’ve seen several times, and it’s a series The Husband and I have seen every performance of since Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone way back in 2017 when we first moved here and left the kids with a sitter for the Saturday-night show. For this year’s show, though, we booked the matinee and brought the kids along and met friends there. The same, but different. We forgot headphones for The Kid, which was unfortunate (more for TH because he was sitting beside him and got to hear TK’s negative Yelp review of our parenting). When the show ended with Voldemort at a tomb and a flourish of flashing lights, we were all ready to go home. But it was still magical.

Not as magical is the studying I’m doing to get my Australian dental license (licence), this return to two-decades-old knowledge I’d forgotten as soon as it became irrelevant to my specialty, and then to my life once I quit work then hauled ass across the world, but here I am again, doing mock tests and reading textbooks and wondering which way this will turn out even as I explore other career options. I don’t care about dentures, I scream into the void, which in my case is actually not a void, but full, and I wait to hear back on that from management.

Because the flourishes–the differences–this time around, they are more than just details: they’re the whole thing. This time, I’m a mother. This time, kids with disabilities are not just a part of my specialty’s focus; they are a reality of my life and a source of the passion that drives me to speak to classes and help design programs and comment on Facebook posts in a voice/from a side of the issue I wouldn’t have recognised a decade ago (when I was treating autistic kids but not yet raising one) because there were certain places I hadn’t been yet–access codes I hadn’t been given–that, since I’ve been there and gotten those codes, have changed who I am and what matters to me.

Accidental activist, I should write on my LinkedIn profile. Which reminds me, I should update my LinkedIn profile.

This work–this ism of activism–can’t help but pit me against so many other isms I either didn’t notice before, or was even, shamefully, on the other side of: racism, ableism, the various “phobias” that are really just forms of misunderstanding and, yes, hate. These lines being redrawn by the fringes coming to the forefront, the quiet part being said out loud: don’t they belong in a different class/school? Why should we study THEIR history? Policies being paraded as principle by people who haven’t gotten any access codes of their own and lack the curiosity to ask about them.

Meanwhile, I’ll remember the headphones next time so that we can all enjoy the flourishes–the extra details life is full of, indeed which make a full life–together, in a place where everyone belongs and can keep coming back to, all of which makes it magical.

All the words I’ve been reading/have now started the act of bleeding

into one, into one

So I walk up on high/and I step to the edge

To see my world below

And I laugh at myself/while the tears roll down

‘Cause it’s the world I know/oh it’s the world I know

Monday was magical.

It was the last day of school holidays (or so we thought), the end of functional, if not actual, summer. The weather was meant to be awful: thunderstorms all day. But that’s not how it went. Instead, the rain stayed away and the sun broke through and the boys and I headed to the beach, where the waves were big but kind, and smiles were everywhere. It felt like an unexpected gift, one that followed us home and buoyed us through the organising of school supplies into pencil cases and pencil cases into backpacks. We were ready for the first day of school.

Until we weren’t. During a movie that evening, Little Brother turned to me and complained of a sore head and stomach. I inwardly rolled my eyes because I’ve fallen for that shit before, and I asked him if maybe it was just start-of-school nerves. He rejected this proposal, rejected it all the way to the bathroom where he unleashed the fury of a stomach bug out of one end then moments later didn’t make it to the bathroom at all before puking all over the wall.

You have GOT to be kidding me, I thought to myself, or God, or whoever was responsible for this fresh hell that definitely did not fit into my plan for the week, and I doubled up on that thought when The Kid’s nightly toothbrushing prompted his own avalanche of barf into the bathroom sink. I tripled and quadrupled up on that thought throughout the night as both boys, and their dad, popped out of bed periodically for further relief sessions.

So they didn’t make the first day of school. Instead, they camped out on the couch and I did laundry, and we survived. (Until I get it, at least.)

Before The Virus, before the beach, we went to TK’s speech session, and as LB and I sat outside together, he laughed at what he heard through the door. “It’s so cute to hear James,” he mused like the eight-year-old-going-on-teenager he is, while TK peppered his responses on the other side of the door with NFL chants. “DE-FENSE!” he intoned as LB told me knowingly, “He’s making learning funner.”

This is the kind of wisdom typically imparted to me by my children–these succinct observations that open my eyes to a whole new way–or maybe an old way I’d forgotten–of seeing. I’d been wondering if I should tap on the door to encourage TK to be respectful while LB recognised the harmlessness–the beauty–of what was actually going on. Just like he had the other night, when he asked me how I knew so much about autism. I told him of the books I’d read and he asked if James should read them too., then pondered, “I guess even if he read the book, though, he’d still do the things he does,” which was such a beautiful illustration of surrender in the moment: he had wanted to suggest a way to “fix” the things about his brother’s behaviour that he didn’t like, then realised–like I did after I read Babywise then actually had children–that reading a book isn’t what changes you.

Kids are used to this, I guess: forming ideas, trying them out, having to abandon them in the face of new knowledge. They’re much better at it than we adults are. In the throes of gastro, though; in the throes of studying for a dental exam by cramming four years’ worth of material in four weeks; in the throes of waiting to find out which teachers and friends the boys have in their class this year, of waiting to find out if I get to sit on/near the toilet for my own 24-hour stint; in the throes of life I am given these unexpected days, these gifts-that-don’t-always-appear-to-be-gifts, these moments that go beyond what any book could ever teach me: this forced dependence on something, someone outside of and greater than myself. The word that all the others in the books are superseded by and bleed into, this rhythm that lifts and lowers and takes and returns, this grace that may be unpredictable but has always proven to be good.

Maybe they’re always there, and I just miss them.

This morning the fish were out in full force at my usual swimming beach. It is Australia/Invasion Day, it is the hottest day in quite awhile, and there are more people out than any day so far this summer, so maybe it was all that? Or maybe I was seeing them, really seeing them, for the first time. My goggles were annoyingly leaking, requiring me to stop and shake them out, wipe them off, and reposition them, so the typically-building cloudiness of my lenses didn’t stand a chance. And there they were: fish of all sizes, right underneath me, the whole way through.

Along with some creatures I couldn’t spot–the kind my family referred to as noseeums during our summers on the Gulf–those invisible sources of stings that aren’t the same exquisite pain as jellyfish/bluebottles but don’t feel great either, especially with the shock value added in. One such sting attacked my nose at my turning point and I grimaced underwater, where no one but the fish could hear.

How many things do we miss because they’re missing, and how many because we fail to see them even when they’re there?

Marc Maron’s recent interview with Rob Delaney should be required listening for any who consider themselves human, and it reacquainted me with Delaney’s singular articulation of grief–a grief so profound both because it was due to the loss of his three-year-old son, and because he faces and voices it so unflinchingly. He talks about being given the “access codes” to a kind of loss that brings gifts with it no one would receive otherwise; about how anyone who thinks he wouldn’t weave the “death, and life, and spirit” of his son into his life’s tapestry can “fuck off for a thousand years.”

I have always been better at noticing what’s missing than what’s there–at least what I wish wasn’t missing but is. Like a robust educational policy and set of accomodations for neurodivergent kids, or the same within churches for them, or an open bar at any establishment I frequent. I’m less good at noticing the things that are there, but are harder to see: the beauty in pain, the blessings in difficulty. I’m getting better at it though! I’m being given some access codes of my own, through all the things I never asked for but was given anyway, which is to say, grace in all its forms: years of singlehood that led me to New York; the only marriage I could feel safe in (and that could survive me); the brain differences within my child/ren and self that force me to see the world as bigger and fuller and more complicated and beautiful than the one I’d let it be before.

The willingness to look for what we can’t see–what’s missing, for now–and the ability to trust that it will be there when we need it? Sounds like faith to me.

The concept was around even before Joan Didion made it part of our cultural vocabulary, but I only recently became acquainted with magical thinking through Stephen Colbert’s (unedited) interview with Prince Harry. The host discussed with his guest the specifics of his (Colbert’s) own magical thinking around the time he lost multiple members of his family and compared that to the fantasies Harry used as coping mechanisms after Princess Diana died. Which all prompted me to wonder about what sort of magical thinking I do, and what it actually is.

The other morning, The Kid woke up with one question on his lips: “Am I a miracle?” We’ve just watched Roald Dahl’s Matilda: The Musical a few times (and listened to the soundtrack endlessly, and bought tickets for the show when we’re in London later this year; you could say it’s a bit of an obsession) and laughed our way through the song by the same title–miracle, that is–so it was clear why it was on his mind. Like any good parent, I told him that he absolutely is one–a miracle, that is–and watched him light up in response.

This isn’t magical thinking, is it? Because every life truly is a miracle, and our children’s lives are especially miraculous to us, even if they’re entering a world that doesn’t see them as such. More magical–and miraculous–would be if TK and Little Brother became the NBA and soccer stars they’re each staking their futures on becoming, respectively (excuse me, LB is actually going to do both–focus on basketball during soccer’s off season, etc). We allow and even nurture this magical thinking because they’re young and they have plenty of time to be disappointed by the world and we also need something to get them to sports camp a couple of days a week during the summer holidays. Just like we let them believe in Santa for awhile–because magic, in its place, is appropriate.

But when does it stop being magic and start being delusion? Many people would say, for example, that my faith rides or crosses that border. I don’t blame them–personally, I think there are way too many delusional Christians (imagine thinking Kirk Cameron is a worthy leading man who makes good movies), which is why I was so hesitant to watch The Chosen upon some of their recommendations–call me Shania, but Christian cinemá thus far has not impressed me much (God’s still not dead, for those of you wondering). But approaching the stories I’ve heard all my life (and, in the process, have honestly become a bit numb to) through a new medium has been life-giving and eye-opening–especially to the condition that makes people most fit for an encounter with the divine: desperation.

In the end, maybe magical thinking is just that: desperation driving us toward a new way to hope. It’s the last thing to cling to when we’ve run out of options. The Hebrew word for hope is the same as the word for rope: tikvah, Maybe this form of hope is the only thing left to grab (or, rather, what grabs us) when we’re all out of answers, and all our wondering leads us, finally, to wonder.

“We are in a period where torture is taken for granted almost everywhere,” wrote May Sarton, “…and at the root of it all is the lack of imagination…I am more and more convinced that in the lives of civilisations as in the lives of individuals too much matter that cannot be digested, too much experience that has not been imagined and probed and understood, ends in total rejection of everything… The structures break down and there is nothing to ‘hold onto.’…Hatred rather than love dominates.”

In the end, maybe magical thinking is just thinking beyond what we can see to all that can be. Which is exactly what both imagination and hope are. And who says that isn’t real?

“Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?”

Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry’s ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure.

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

I want time to stand still.

I don’t remember feeling this way, not in a long while. An anxious, and therefore future-focused, person, I’m accustomed to always gearing up for the next thing. Getting ready to move. Being still for too long leads to restless legs and grinding teeth. When I see #timestandstill on Instagram posts, usually connected to kids’ growth patterns, I sigh a bit…maybe turn my head and gag.

But now I’m there: at the point where I want to be, well, here for awhile. Like I said: rare. Especially for a January–though that month turned upside down when we moved Down Under and it became summer. But this is even the first summer when I’m not eagerly awaiting the kids’ return to school, pushing them out the door and muttering “BYE FELICIAS” under my breath as I hotfoot it back to the car and my perceived freedom.

We’re actually enjoying each other this summer, this morning’s ill-judged outdoor showing of The Wind in the Willows notwithstanding (The Kid and Little Brother did agree on one thing: that it ranked 2/10. The humidity, and the fact that they were the oldest kids there, did not help. You win some, you lose some). At 11 and 8, they’re both at ages that are bearable, even delightful at times: they’ll each occasionally still reach out for my hand (TK no longer lets me kiss him or call him Jamesy Bear in public, though; fair enough). They can do much for themselves (more than they act like they can, at least). And maybe the best bit: they’re both at home in the ocean, TK venturing out beyond us all on his boogie board and LB content to be pummelled by the waves as long as I’m nearby to “climb” them with him.

I’m dreading the future. Not too put too fine a point on it, but it’s TK’s last year of primary school–their last year at the same school for at least three years. Puberty is coming, God help us. I fear rough waters ahead, the kind of waves they won’t be interested in riding with me. The gaining of personal space at a cost of their ever-ready current affection. We went shoe-shopping the other day; LB had jumped 2 sizes, and TK 3. His shoes are bigger than mine. I did not sign off on this.

What’s more, I just paid way too much money–money that could/should have gone for a necklift–for a dental exam in two months that I have no desire to take, and in the meantime I’m planning a coffee with the friend who sat down and devised a pathway for me to forge a new career in a field I’m passionate about, under her professional sponsorship. What’s more, I suspect that one of these days pretty soon my knees are going to buckle underneath me for the last time and that will be the end of my running and therefore sanity.

TIMES ARE TOUGH. But only, really, when I get ahead of myself–which is always, but doesn’t have to be.

Every afternoon this summer, the four of us (sorry, Kevin, it’s not dog-friendly) have been going to the beach. Clearing a half-hour or more to hunt for a park, drop our towels on the sand, and sprint toward the surf, where an initial chill gives way to a few minutes of heaven: salt spraying all around us (I’ve even given up on not getting my hair wet–truly rebellious behaviour), screams of joy, unpredictable rhythms. In the ocean, everyone–and that is a lot of everyones, and I’m not kidding when I mean everyone–is happy. Everyone is smiling. Everyone is a kid again. And there we are among them, the four of us both separate and together, each occupying our own space yet always returning to each other, to the shore, to home. Time dilates, stretches in these afternoons when we’re not watching it; when we’re carried by something else.

“Time is on our side,” TK said this morning when I told him we had an hour before we had to leave for the obligatory activity I’d planned to get us out of the house. Is it? I thought, because it doesn’t feel that way to me right now.

“The greatest danger, as I see it in myself,” writes May Sarton, “is the danger of withdrawal into private worlds. We have to keep the channels in ourselves open to pain. At the same time it is essential that true joys be experienced, that the sunrise not leave us unmoved, for civilization depends on the true joys, all those that have nothing to do with money or affluence–nature the arts, human love.”

Out there in the water, we are somehow all sharing life together: open to the full experience of it, the risk and the reward. Our phones waiting in the car, our watches sitting at home, only the waves in their rhythms of grace lifting us up as we inhabit only this moment, then gently returning us to earth and to each other. A return I have to trust will keep happening.

We’re united by our shared humanity, but somewhere along the way, we get orphaned by our individual history. –Sloane Crossley, Cult Classic

The above statement was uttered by a character who is a self-important tool in Crossley’s latest novel, but I like it anyway. I’ve been thinking and reading about connections lately. About the time we spend investigating them, being curious about them, versus the time we spend severing them–consciously or not.

The other night I was feeling nostalgic (must have been before Christmas, when memories have taken a dip in the ever-present sentimentality of the season and pop up like bubbles in a champagne glass…so maybe I was drinking a lot of champagne) and did a Zillow hunt for the two houses I grew up in. I wasn’t surprised to see updates to both–green shag carpeting shouldn’t last forever–or to realise that, especially in the house in which I spent my youngest years, everything looked…smaller. Particularly the backyard, which stretched endlessly before me when I was a child, racing across grass and up trees.

I wouldn’t say this house built me, but it is the location of so many of my early memories. The background of the narrative of my young life, the site of Christmases when Santa was still real and life was uncomplicated. There was the wall where The Sister, in a race to the end of it, rammed her forehead. There was the spot in the living room where the tree was set up every year. There was the bathroom countertop I almost fell off of but didn’t, which made me wonder if God might be real after all (and if he might be Santa?!…).

Our pasts grow complicated the longer we live, and if we have the courage to let them take more than a one-dimensional shape. If we are firmly rooted enough in who we are now to face what happened then: the joys and tragedies, the hurt and pain, the triumph and failure. For my part, I’m trying to deal with the kids’ past, well…presently, knowing they will likely have plenty of fodder for therapy thanks to all my blind spots but making requests for forgiveness and moments of restoration more the rule than the rare occurrence. People in the know say that this matters more than the moments of breakdown. I hope to God they’re right.

In a recent New Yorker profile, Emma Thompson describes her home and the people around her as providing an “unassailable context” that keeps her from venturing into a mental state devoid of self-awareness. I wonder what my own unassailable context is; if I’m creating one for my kids. I sure as hell know what can keep me from this creative work–the walls built to block out pain, to hide from my fears; the stubborn lack of curiosity to which I used to subscribe, thinking it was a form of protection, not realising it was actually sucking all the oxygen out of my soul. Thinking I knew it all, which gradually gave (and gives) way to the awareness of all I don’t know–and with it comes the space to learn.

“Communicating fully is the opposite of being traumatised,” writes someone who’s done a bit of research on the matter, and isn’t this where stories come in? Where healing happens? The “you too? I thought it but myself...” of true friendship, which is to say connection, of which he also writes: “Seeing novel connections is the cardinal feature of creativity….it’s also essential to healing.”

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission relied heavily on the principle of ubuntu, a Xhosa word meaning that our humanity is tied up in each other’s humanity; I am because we are. John Donne’s echo across the centuries that no man is an island. The similarities being more important than the differences. The connections being redemptive; being healing. The who we are being tied up in whose we are–and, among other things, that whose bringing us back to…each other.

After a full year devoid of lockdowns, a year in which we dropped our masks and entered back into society, a year without homeschool but with so many gatherings to take its place, anxiety-wise, our quartet of a family (plus Kevin the Dog) are currently enjoying a cloudy day from home, specifically the couch. The past few weeks have been dominated by assemblies and dance concerts and end-of-school-year parties and Christmas and trips to the beach and we are tired.

Were we not thrown into this year via catapult? Because that’s what it feels like, and I’m feeling it. Which is why stillness feels so good right now. It also offers me a vantage point from which to think back on the year and appreciate what it had to offer, which I offer to you now. Before we draw a line under it (and before I’ve even gotten out to buy a planner for 2023, which is not helping my anxiety), here are some things I discovered in–and cannot recommend enough from–2022.

CURIOSITY

It’s annoying that there’s always more to learn. It’s so annoying, in fact, that some people live in denial of the fact altogether, choosing instead to believe that they already know everything! I know this because I used to be one of them! A funny thing happens, though, when we reach for material beyond what we already know, or believe, to be true: we grow. We learn and change and, I think, become more generally tolerable people to be around.

I’m reading from authors and thinkers whose names/beliefs would have sent me clutching my pearls and pitchfork a decade ago, and I’m so thankful for all I never knew that they’re teaching me. I’m thankful for Esau McCaulley and Jemar Tisby and Bryan Stevenson et al and all they’ve shown me about systemic racism in society and the church; for Steve Silberman and Bill Nason and Devon Price et al and all they’ve shown me about neurodivergence and the beauty of thinking differently; for Beth Barr and Kristin DuMez and Aimee Byrd et al and all they’ve written about gender roles and the patriarchy, Biblically-speaking; for Dan Siegel and Bessel Van der Kolk et al and what I’ve learned from them about neuropsychology and self-awareness and healing. I’m grateful for the book I just got about teaching kids their place in the greater story.

In her book Advent (which is not about what you think it’s about–another favourite theme of mine), Fleming Rutledge writes about something a former colleague told her about engaging children’s imaginations: “He said he didn’t mind his children believing in Santa Claus, because it was ‘training for transcendence.'” She writes of the importance of a childlike sense of wonder, which is missing from so many of us–this ability to be humbled and awed by all we don’t know.

BETTER SEATS

For the past few years, a group of friends and I have made a habit of going to the ballet regularly. A privileged treat, to be sure, but I’ve made every effort to cut corners when booking our seats, and for the most recent show, my deal-seeking landing me in a seat in which I could only picture Juliet’s balcony in my mind. And maybe see the tail-end of a pirouette when the dancer moved to the outer edge of stage right. I decided this would no longer do. What’s the point of being there if you can’t see?

I’m not skimping on the view any more. Where we choose to sit–in the Opera House, in life–impacts what we take away from a performance, a relationship, everything. Restricted views may end up costing more in the end.

FRIENDSHIP

I’m a terrible gift-giver. I have every intention of choosing gifts that reflect thoughtfulness and a desire to please the recipient, to show them that I really know them. Then I get tired of looking and grab the first nearly-relevant item off the shelf so I can get out of that God-forsaken mall. But I’ve received so many great presents recently, like a “nervous” sweatshirt, a too-perfect doormat, a mug that reads “I have the patience of a saint: Saint Cunty McFuckoff.” I can’t look at these gifts without laughing, and feeling deeply known (and loved anyway). Which brings me to…

GRACE

It’s, like, the only thing I write about, really, because everything else comes back to it. In fact, I was going to add subheadings like Grief and Therapy (see the lyrics at the end of this post) but this is getting long and my latest Netflix obsession isn’t going to watch itself, so I’ll just roll all that into this mammoth topic of grace, that rules my life and changes my heart and dictates my path. It’s grace that led me to therapy and healing and brings me through both, still, with all their gifts along the way. It’s grace that makes me curious enough to actually get to know a person before judging them (or at least to watch their documentary, which makes me wonder why they’re filming every scene of their lives but also shows me they brought receipts and what can I say? I have a soft spot for a man who takes his family across the world to a better life; also, gingers rock). It’s grace that shows me I’m being a bitch to the man who anticipates my needs better than anyone ever has (and it’s grace that allows me to vent about him when he drives me insane and still keeps us together). It’s grace that makes space for my sadness and joy and defeats and victories and weaves it all into a story that is worth being told because that story points to an even bigger one. It’s grace that brings people in my life who see the potential for me to make a difference warranting a possible career change (a possible career, period) and that opens terrifying and wonderful new worlds and possibilities, then lets me live in the tension of not knowing what will happen–and somehow makes that safe and exhilarating at the same time.

I’m thankful that 2022 held so much, but it didn’t hold everything, which is why we can look both back and ahead, and breathe in grace the whole time.

I don’t go to therapy to find out if I’m a freak
I go and I find the one and only answer every week
And it’s just me and all the memories to follow 
Down any course that fits within a fifty minute hour
And we fathom all the mysteries, explicit and inherent
When I hit a rut, she says to try the other parent
And she’s so kind, I think she wants to tell me something, 
But she knows that its much better if I get it for myself
And she says

What do you hear in these sounds? 
What do you hear in these sounds?

I say I hear a doubt, with the voice of true believing
And the promises to stay, and the footsteps that are leaving
And she says “Oh, ” I say, “What?” she says, “Exactly, “
I say, “What, you think I’m angry
Does that mean you think I’m angry?”
She says “Look, you come here every week
With jigsaw pieces of your past
Its all on little soundbites and voices out of photographs
And that’s all yours, that’s the guide, that’s the map
So tell me, where does the arrow point to? 
Who invented roses?”
And

What do you hear in these sounds? 
What do you hear in these sounds?

And when I talk about therapy, I know what people think
That it only makes you selfish and in love with your shrink
But oh how I loved everybody else
When I finally got to talk so much about myself

And I wake up and I ask myself what state I’m in
And I say well I’m lucky, ’cause I am like East Berlin
I had this wall and what I knew of the free world
Was that I could see their fireworks
And I could hear their radio
And I thought that if we met, I would only start confessing
And they’d know that I was scared
They’d would know that I was guessing
But the wall came down and there they stood before me
With their stumbling and their mumbling
And their calling out just like me, and

The stories that nobody hears, and
I collect these sounds in my ears, and
That’s what I hear in these sounds, and
That’s what I hear in these,
That’s what I hear in these sounds.

–Dar Williams, “What Do You Hear in These Sounds”

I am officially “needs-pain-meds-after-a-run” years old.

Advil, or what they call Nurofen here, is getting me through a current season that may just be how things are now. A year ago, the same injury went away after a couple of months. Now it persists, just like that all-over-ache when I rise from a long-held sitting position (especially if it’s been on the floor). Age is showing up in my body, in my photos, in the fact that I just forgot what was going to be the last example in that list of three.

And yet we’ve spent every day of the current break (three days in!) playing soccer with the boys. The first day I was so winded after a couple of minutes that I wanted to quit (and ice my hammy), confirming my belief that my cardiovascular endurance is limited to scheduled, routine activities. We played on, though, and I watched Little Brother dramatically dive for the ball, and fall purposely and more spectacularly the harder I laughed, and I knew in that moment that this upside-down, summer-centric Advent season we live now will forever hold that image that age can’t rob from memory: LB with his bicycle helmet on (because, yes, we’re also doing bike-riding lessons–three days in!) and his concentrated squint and his ever-present laughter.

Age and youth side-by-side, he and I, and within myself, sprints across the field coupled with lessons on balance gained from years of falling. It’s never just one thing–it’s all the things together that make up a life. Ups and downs, highs and lows, beginnings and middles.

It’s all the things together that make up Christmas. This mixture of sacred and mundane: muppets singing carols and angels glowing on trees, brotherly fights in the backseat while age-old familiar notes float from the speakers, the memory of A Christmas Carol with friends at the theatre paired with a rushed dinner afterward because everyone is so. damn. tired. Especially this year, when we apparently all conspired to just jump back into normal life and act like that was normal after the previous two years we had? Like, really?

I and my hammy need a break. Because the body, she keeps the effing score. As does the brain, specifically, according to research, and it’s hard to find a better, more ready-made metaphor than the one in the association between trauma and memory–how trauma reduces out story, leaving instead a jumble of sensations and images because of the way memory is stored during these moments. How typical memory is a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. How, once full memories are recovered after/through therapy and a person can tell their particular trauma story, it often stops ravaging their brain and body and helps them, finally, leave it behind.

Stories literally heal.

And in another book, one I read every Advent, there’s this interpretation: that grace shows up in the places where we don’t believe, to convince us, which explains, for me, why it keeps showing up in the same places, in the same lessons. Beginnings, over and over, like learning to balance again and again, until that moment when you finally get it. Until you fall again, because we all, always, fall again. And there grace is again, to pick us up, sore hammy and all, to make sure that the beginning and end aren’t the same moment, but are separated by all that’s in between, so much then and now and ahead that you might be forgiven for thinking that there may actually be some stories that go on forever.

Every year around this time, the boys’ school sends out an email to a select group of parents: those whose kids are receiving an award at the Presentation Day Assembly. Every year around this time, my butt gets sweaty when I wonder if this email has gone out yet and I haven’t gotten one, or if the correspondence has yet to be transmitted–the old “is everyone hanging out without me” anxiety. I’ve been on both sides of this virtual aisle–the gifted inbox and the empty, the marking of the calendar and the leaving it blank.

This year I got two emails–the absolute best-case scenario so that one boy couldn’t lord it over the other–and marked my diary accordingly, then wondered who else of my friends had been similarly #blessed and who had not and when the awkwardness would crop up. There is an unwritten rule not to mention such things too soon–or maybe I’ve just made that up–and typically people wait until they’re about to burst either with excitement or from a desperation to know if everyone is, indeed, hanging out without them, and who exactly “everyone” is this year (again, I’ve been on both sides).

It’s all things, this process: exciting, fraught, depressing, glorious, gross. For my part, I turn into anything from a sincerely questioning individual to an avid conspiracy theorist. I may believe Biden won the election and the vaccine is legit, but when it comes to my kids I will entertain any theory under the sun regarding any information that could threaten their well-being. “My mind is like a bad neighbourhood,” writes Anne Lamott. “I try not to go there alone.” Same, girl. This has been all too easy lately with distractions like Netflix, true crime podcasts, and social media, but occasionally my forays into the darkest corners of my mental suburbs turn up some real scary shit. Did The Kid actually receive the votes to be a class leader yet was snubbed because of his disability? And this year, when all his class awards had been given out and Little Brother was still empty-handed and turned back to me like, “What the hell? You said I was getting one,” I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d misread the email or someone was having a joke at my expense.

BUTT SWEAT.

Contrast this with the school’s annual dance concerts, one day of two performances and bottomless exhaustion. Everyone gets to (read: is required) to participate, and though the routines are pretty uniform in choreography across the class groups, each kid puts their own spin on the number. Which meant that I got to watch–twice–as TK nervously approached the stage then, in true TK fashion, smiled his way through his dance while LB, fresh off complaints about stomach pain that were, I believe, actually anxiety, pursed his lips and squinted his eyes in concentration and an effort to get. it. exactly. RIGHT. They both made it through, in their own way.

And I made it through: through the dance performances, where regrettably there is no open bar, and through the awards presentation, where regrettably there was no air conditioning. I sat, the back of my dress soaked through with sweat, battling excitement and anxiety, pride and confusion (TK himself was confused about getting the PE award but didn’t turn it down). I watched people who’ve always seemed to not care about this sort of thing melt with pride about their own kids. We all thrive on recognition–anyone who says they don’t is a lying liar–because who doesn’t want to be seen? And perhaps even more, want their kids to be seen? Although is this actually, really being seen? Awards season itself can be a bad neighbourhood, and we are not given emotional bulletproof vests when we become parents (I’ve checked; they don’t exist).

So we “win” and don’t “win,” and we counsel our kids through their ups and downs as we navigate them ourselves alongside them, and I listen as the school’s staff keeps using the word learners to describe the youngest among us, knowing that we are all that: learning, struggling, stumbling around trying to figure it out and get it right, whatever that means. Let me know if you figure it out. I’ll be on the couch, rehydrating and sleeping off this latest performance and CBT-ing and praying and meditating my way through remembering what matters most.