My point of destination’s different from where I was headed.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single woman about to become a wife and mother has no idea what the hell she’s getting herself into.

(Or maybe it’s just a truth that I’ve recently begun to acknowledge.)

Yesterday I was pushing the boys in their stroller–ahem, pram–in the summer (YES, SUMMER) heat and humidity down the baking sidewalk as cars and buses roared by. We passed a bus stop where a teenage boy and girl were openly making out, going at it in front of my children’s innocent eyes, but more importantly my not-so-innocent ones, and I wanted to stop right there and yell at them–the girl, specifically. Not because I was offended. I mean, I’ve made out at my share of bus stops before, YA HEARD? But because I wanted to issue a warning to this girl that she would remember, one that would stand out among the thoughts of makeup and prom and college entrance exams and would crawl from the recesses of her mind every time she wanted to turn a huge decision into a small one and a small one into a huge one, a warning that would echo within her brain for years to come until, at the wise age of thirty or above, after years of bad blind dates and information gleaned and continents traveled, she would finally settle down with the right person and without any misconceptions of what that should look like. I wanted to pull her aside in the sticky heat and tell her that she better have some damn good birth control and a grasp of reality because otherwise she could end up like me a decade-and-a-half early. “Like me” meaning a middle-aged woman saddled with a husband and two kids, sweat running down the backs of her legs and from her armpits (because she can’t find an anti-perspirant ANYWHERE that actually lives up to its job title) and from every other conceivable spot on her body, headed toward a home where she would listen to those two children play and fight outside while she made them a dinner they would barely touch and would clean it up after them like some sort of shitty restaurant owner and would then bathe their dirty asses before her own collapsed into bed at the hour of about eight o’clock.

A woman like me. A woman who finally has everything she prayed and dreamed for and is not above feeling ambivalent about it all.

Let me be brave or awful enough to say it, and the rest of you can either a) pretend it’s never true; 2) act like you’re somehow above it; or III) come sit by me and pour a glass (bottle) of wine: this life isn’t all it’s made out to be. The women I know are often living lives of quiet desperation (yeah, looking at you, THOREAU–it’s not just the dudes), struggling either with what they want and don’t have or have and are struggling to hold together. In other words, living out the human condition. They are tired of IVF appointments or adoption waitlists, they are sick of their husbands working too late or their bosses being asses, they love their children madly and want to drop-kick them out the window. They are not crazy, though they feel like they are and their hormones and exhaustion aren’t helping matters. They have #firstworldproblems but they’re still problems, thanks. They are a little confused as to why they don’t know who they are all the time and under whose jurisdiction they are expected to have become different people because they now wear a ring or had babies removed from their bodies. They are high and low and up and down and all over the place in any given moment. Or maybe these are just the women with whom I care to do life. Either way, it is life. And we’re living every second of it, long days and short years alike.

All of which is to say that this second week of our new life in Sydney has been all of the above. You know–life.

The boys and I are together all day, every day. The Kid doesn’t start school until February (which I both anticipate and dread, go figure), and Little Brother’s occasional childcare situation is being figured out. Lately we have hammered out our own little routines to structure our days: walk to the gym followed by a trip to the bakery followed by a trip to the playground. Come home for Mommy’s desperately-needed shower. Eat lunch. Play on the deck. Go out again. Come home. Give the boys the screens they’ve been screaming for all day. Pour Mommy a desperately-needed glass of wine and pair it with the obscene coloring book one of her favorites back in ATL gave her. Dinner and the rest.

It’s been mostly good, peppered by TK’s frequent upsets and freakouts and general emotional processing of, you know, BEING MOVED ACROSS THE WORLD. It’s been good, and beautiful, and awful and sad. It’s been exactly what we’re meant to be doing even when it sucks ever so royally. We have had moments of sublime grace: playdates with a friend and her son, conversations while our boys play that identify our lives as wonderfully similar. The shoe-store employee who fit the boys with sandals and sneakers then realized we live in the house she occupied with her family JUST BEFORE WE MOVED THERE. Drives to therapy that end with TK and me arriving alive without crap-stained pants (mine). The guy at the car wash who witnessed TK’s meltdown and handed him a super-soaker to help. The dad at TK’s therapy center who just struck up a conversation with me because he’s also American. Slowly recognizing streets without maps. A cupcake shop. The crest on Awaba Road that gives us a view of Balmoral and the majestic Pacific beyond it and which leaves me breathless over how grace will just not leave me alone until I see the beauty it takes me by the hand and leads me to.

The complicated love I feel for all of it: for The Husband, whose gifts led us here and whose kindness looks out for us even as he can’t fully understand how it feels to be plopped into a foreign existence with the kids day in and out, handling their minute and large adjustments, finding them sitters I can trust and trying to manage the anxiety of it all and all their damn fights all day long. (Also, trying to cook in Celsius.) Love for those children, whose well-being is my absolute oxygen but whose happiness is often annoyingly independent of that in any given moment until the whole story plays out. And grace itself; rather, the giver of it, whose grand idea all this was. And it is grand–grand in its scope, complexity, ambiguity, and emotion. It is everything. It is life.

The other day the boys sat in their pram and I beside them outside that cupcake shop. As we inhaled out baked goods, I remembered Carrie in Paris, who wandered the streets, not sure of what to do with herself. I remembered myself in New York, sweat sticking to the backs of my legs in the July heat as I wandered the streets, not sure of what to do with myself. Neither of those women had children she was pushing uphill while breathing gutturally. Both were looking for home.

I’m the one who’s found it. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, but I’m counting on that being because somehow, it’s more. Complicatedly, blessedly, painfully more than what I would have come up with.

The other night the four of us headed upstairs and I had a fleeting feeling of familiarity: of how this can, will, be home for us. And yesterday, I dared to get behind the right-sided wheel alone with the boys and we drove around our neighborhood. LB slept in the backseat and TK yelled directions, just like old times. Just like new times. Then “Freedom” blared from the radio and I’ll be the one who’s brave or awful enough to say it: I turned up the volume, belted out the lyrics, crested another hill, and let TK choose the next turn as the wind (A/C) blew through our hair and the sun beat down mercilessly, mercifully, on us all.