I’ve been here before.

I’ve been in the car hours before dawn, one piece of my heart sleeping upstairs, another in the backseat, another driving. I’ve been down these roads that I could navigate in my sleep, the turns I know through memories painful and good: the nighttime drive to deliver Little Brother, the morning one for The Kid, and countless ones to take him to the Children’s Hospital where they’ve poked and prodded and hurt and somehow helped.

I’ve been in this waiting room before, or one like it, holding him still, assuring him all is well, both of us sweating, me through my clothes and him through the gown they gave him. I’ve taken him back before, heavier each year, held him as they’ve pushed the liquid through the IV and his head has rolled back. I’ve kissed him after they’ve laid him on the table, unresponsive, told him I’d see him soon as I prayed for his safety through tears.

I’ve been here before, and yet I haven’t.

I’ve been on the couch–our Atlanta couch–watching Mickey with TK and LB, and I’ve waited as the characters urged responses from the viewers, and I’ve yearned for TK to talk back, to say just one word, and I’ve waited in vain. But this time, on this couch that is ours yet also not, I”ve heard him respond, heard him answer their questions easily. And not only that, but I’ve seen the additions to what I’d hoped for: the jam dance they learned from their Aussie friend, butts wiggling in front of the TV, laughter punctuating their movements.

All the other things we’ve picked up across the ocean: the growth, the friends, the early-morning texts as they are going to bed, frantic mornings that, when we return there, will be replaced by frantic nights and mornings of messaging. People on both sides of the world, our lives richer than we’d hoped.

“Did you ever imagine your life would be such an adventure?” The Dad asked the night they got here, and since sarcasm is our family’s first language, I’d waited for the punch line–but it didn’t come. He meant it, and it’s true, the waves that have swept me to New York and Atlanta and Sydney, that constantly resuscitate me to grace. The truth: that there was never a time it wasn’t there.

We melt into each other on the couch, these jet-lagged moments that we never would have had were it not for the waves. My boys and I, a unit so much stronger and more blended than we were before we left this house. Before my “no” followed by my weary “fine.” Fine: do it again. Upend my life. Destroy my agenda. Love me fully.

I waited for years to hear the sounds I heard the other night from The Sis’s kitchen: my boys playing with their cousins, the boy and girl laughter, the friendships forming. We only had to move across the world for it to take hold.

And now I sit, waiting again, suspended between his going in and coming back. Like we were in the hammock in the backyard that is now both our home and a place we visit, willingly held by the ropes that keep us aloft while digging into us. Like we are between time zones, between cities, between continents and days. I know I’ll think it when we get back, as I stare out my bedroom window into the night: How is it possible that they’re beginning the day I’m ending? How is it possible that we have more than ever before, in so many places?

How can it be that I should gain? That this grace that will wake him up and return him to us in an hour will fly us to New York then Sydney, will hold our hearts even as the ropes that keep them aloft dig in, hurting yet healing and bringing us always to more, to life.

This family spends a considerable amount of time (in Australia, you might say heaps of it) smashed together in hotel rooms.

This one particularly, the one in which I’m now writing, our layover host-with-the-most near LAX. We enter it early morning, post-Sydney flight, and often leave it late at night, to return there. We’ve mastered its restaurant menu, grown familiar with the staff (at least enough for me to recognise some of their faces, I mean), know where all the good poop bathrooms are.

Still, when we arrived here around 8 am Saturday morning after a 14-hour trek across the North and South Pacific Oceans, The Kid made a declaration: I want to go home.

Suspended as we are between two of those, between two destinations, I asked him which home he meant. “Australia,” he answered easily, then provided our street address there, just to be clear.

“I do too,” I confided to him, even though that’s not the whole story. It rarely is. For I, too, want to be where things are most familiar and at-hand. And right now, that is likely our home in Sydney. But there’s also the house in Atlanta: our first home as a family, the place where we’ll welcome friends and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. The place that welcomed us, when The Husband and I left New York and got married, then brought home from the hospital two healthy boys.

Oh, New York. That’s another one. The place where TH and I met, where we’ll be returning next week, for the first time with the kids. Where my writing partner and I will promote a book two years (and two lifetimes) in the making. Where we’ll board a flight back to LA then remain in the airport for a flight back to Sydney.

It’s complicated, this trans-continental, trans-hemispheric, trans-season, trans-home life we lead. Complicated, and pretty beautiful, in between (maybe because of?) the messy bits.

The night before we left Sydney, I pushed a stroller full of Little Brother while TK walked beside us. Fuelled by champagne and friendship, I descended a hill overlooking the ocean and talked to friends while their kids ran ahead. We arrived at an evening full of kids dancing and parents eating/drinking/talking, and in my joy at this life of ours I overdid it, waking up the next morning hungover.

I forgot my wallet. Left it right on the table at our house in Sydney. My, and The Sis’s, first reaction? At least I have my passport in case I get carded.

Now we’re in LA, with a flight to Atlanta tomorrow. In this hotel room, we sleep, and shower, and screech at each other, and stay smashed together, and there’s something wonderful about it: waking up to these three favourite faces, this story of ours so ours, these moments known just by us. This childhood TK and LB are having. Lost in the day-to-day-ness of regular life is, often, the beauty of our stories. I relegate memories of how TH and I met to the recesses of my mind, choosing instead to wonder why he can’t close a damn cabinet. I forget the moments of the boys’ births when they ask a million questions and fight with each other. But here, in this room, we remember: we like each other. We are for each other. We are, always, together.

Yesterday we went to the Santa Monica Pier. Ugh. Beautiful view as long as you look to the left or right. As someone wise once said, it “makes Seaside Heights, New Jersey look like the French Riviera.” I looked up and saw the word harbor on a sign. “That’s not how you spell it,” I thought reflexively. “Where’s the U?”

This story is changing us, and not just our spelling. It’s stretching us, demanding more than we can confidently give, and forcing us to make space for grace to do…well, everything. “Everything” being the exact amount we can’t do. We are between so many places and grace, it is within them all, waiting for us to get there, waiting for us to come back, and just waiting with us, as we forget and remember and live the best parts of the story it writes.

And now, a word about Little Brother.

I think it’s fair to say he gets short shrift around here–here being these weekly blog entries, not our life in general. This inequity stands to reason: he came along second, after all, and he’s thus far coasted through life without any of the challenges his older brother, The Kid, has had to face (though that ear-tube surgery back in ’16 was kind of a bitch). Lately I’ve been watching him, and listening–he makes it hard to NOT do either, larger-than-life as he can be. And I’ve made some notes for your reading pleasure and, hopefully one day, his.

If birth stories are predictive of future personality, then TK and LB’s stand true: TK arrived early and quietly, so many things about him unexpected yet subtle. LB, on the other hand, kicked me until my water broke all over the bedroom floor, forcing me out of the house WAY past my bedtime and officially entering the world at 1 am after I vomited all over a nurse due to my (his) unbearable contractions. What I’m saying is that he makes his presence known. And how.

He is both a perfect mixture and, always, his own person. Mixture: he can be The Husband’s doppelgänger, all furrowed brow and concentration one minute, laid-back glee the next; he can also be his mother’s mirror, reflecting back to me a short fuse and bent toward easy frustration. The will is strong with this one: relaxed one second and stubborn the next, his temper often leads TH to turn to me and grin: “I know where he got that from,” even as I was just about to point out that they look like twins.

His own person: ask him if’ he’s anything–hungry, hot, a silly bear–and his reply is standard. “NO! I WILL PHILLIPS!” He knows who he is, even as he’s figuring out what that means.

I can relate.

As an oldest child, I often can’t relate, though. I was the first to do most everything: have a particular teacher or take a certain class. I was known on my own, a quality the younger doesn’t always have. LB is often known in the context of being TK’s brother, and I wonder how that can affect a person. (Maybe I’ll ask The Sis.) I watched him recently as I went with him to TK’s school to talk about his special Apple brain. LB sat on my lap, happy to be in central viewing territory of the class’s eyes. He inserted comments about his own goofy brain a couple of times lest any of us forget he was there. He tickled my face and bounced on my knees. A wallflower he is not.

If TK is a quiet little Mozart, focusing intently on his tasks, then LB–though not without Mozart moments–is more often Yosemite Sam, blasting around our house with a ferocious energy that seems to wane only when he’s sick or there’s an option to be carried and held. He always wants to be held. This is exhausting and endearing, indicative as always of the wide-ranging spectrum he inhabits. This week, he’s been sick–coughs in the night and raspy voice in the day, more carrying than even usual, need amplified to reach my breaking points. And yet. I’ve been afforded more moments with him, this second-born who, when faced with the possibility of growing up in another's shadow, both defiantly emerges from it to cast his own while never failing to come back to that bond: "That's James. He's my brother."