“…but to me it’s the timeless and universal concept of shelter. And so, finally, I am home.”

I’m writing this from our dining table, my laptop the lone technology amidst a sea of play-doh and tiny boy hands, classical music in the background because I’m fancy.* Little Brother turns to me occasionally and says, “I’m sad,” while The Kid keeps his feelings internalised for now, and I sit between them on the emotional spectrum, each of us dealing with the grief present in the empty space, the area vacated yesterday by The Sis and The Niece.

*it helps my anxiety

I am not one to mourn visitors’ leaving. I am of one mind regarding their exits: relief. The ability to fully inhabit our own space again, to function independently of others’ questions and need for entertaining and meals. But this was different. This was the closest to not having visitors that a visit can be. I have not a memory without either my sister in it, or at the very least inhabiting my universe. We were born twelve months and three weeks apart, and I often think we share a brain (and she got the bigger half). To have her here was to have my own reactions to life reflected back to me, validated. It was as though this Australian adventure wasn’t completely real until she saw it too.

They became a part of our routine, the first to repeatedly join us on school drop-offs and collections, the first to sit around our table with friends as part of Champagne Fridays, to play with the other kids who have become my kids’ friends. There’s something about having your present witnessed by someone who knows your past. It’s all-encompassing and whole. It’s comforting, but more–it’s healing.

I thought about it as we ice-skated around the rink on their penultimate night here: how much time and experience we were covering just by being together. I remembered the days of our own youth, when we’d join our friends on the ice rink at the mall and slide around inexpertly but freely (as freely as a child with the pangs of anxiety can). I watched as our own kids struggled through their learning experiences: how LB spent fifteen seconds on the ice before declaring his displeasure; how The Niece raced around with more confidence than skill but totally free; how TK gripped my and The Sis’s hands tightly, talking through his anxiety, tiny and cautious movements defining his laps around the rink. I watched as LB exited the rink with The Husband’s help and they took off for wild rides while we continued our loops. And I thought about how long I’d known them all, am still knowing them.

This Sis: how I knew you when we wondered whether we’d have our own kids and family. I knew you when surprises jumped out on our paths and the conflict and pettiness that defined our youth gave way to what was lying underneath the whole time: a kinship that defines definition, an unwavering support for each other even as we do things differently, as our lives–husband, two kids, home–look alike yet, ten thousand miles apart, can veer apart drastically while remaining tied together.

Little Brother: how I knew you when you showed up in the middle of the night, explosions accompanying your arrival; when your days and nights were reversed and I thought I’d go insane; when your skin was soft and you loved the word “butt” more than anything; when you said “hold me” everywhere we went; when you grinned at me with a mixture of mischief and delight in perfect proportion; when you challenged my ideas of how much I had to give and showed me reserves I didn’t know existed; when you were TK’s biggest cheerleader and confidence-builder.

The Kid: how I knew you when you were shuttled between waiting rooms and from doctors’ offices to hospital rooms; when the ignorant psychologist declared you, at three years, to have the intelligence of a three-month-old; when you choked after a feed one of your first nights home and I was hurtled into a world of fear and love like I’d never known; when you faced down a cross-world move with triumph after triumph after only just beginning to utter words; when you crawled into bed with me every night and woke me with your feet even morning.

The Niece: how I knew you when you were the first of your generation and we toasted your arrival with contraband champagne in the hospital; when news of your days and nights, related by your mom, was the first honest assessment of motherhood I’d been given; when you grew from baby into girl, your limbs lengthening and your vocabulary growing and your sassiness knowing no bounds; when you proved that it’s not just boys who make unending physical demands of parents; when you cried upon our leaving, then yours.

The Husband: how I knew you when we both looked young in photos; when we rode with the top down in spring on a smaller island toward a future we had no way of predicting; when nights in hotels were trips, then escapes; when we texted to check in on each other, then on kids; when we were two, then four. When we were more than we had planned, and it was hard and wonderful.

How I knew love when it was a feeling, then a choice, and grace when it was a word, then a breath that saved me and kept me alive. When it all came down to this: that we were together, and we are, and we will be, and this sticking around, it is the hardest and the easiest and the everything.

They left yesterday morning, tears in their wake, and the boys and I ventured back to the beaches we had shown them, and pushed even further, into empty inlets and caves that we then filled with our voices and bodies. We came back home and there were flowers waiting, from a friend I know now and knew then: when we were strangers in the schoolyard, when we bonded over wine, when our kids’ friendship mirrored and extended our own. All of these surrounding us, answering the prayer I prayed on a teary track of my own two years ago: that there would be people here for us, our people. These people meeting and knowing our already-people, so that the hellos grow as frequent as the goodbyes and the empty spaces never stay that way for long.