You can’t keep safe what wants to break.

“This must be killing you,” she said.

We were standing in the kitchen with our husbands, glasses of champagne in our hands. The boys played steps away with their sitter, and the men…well, the men had placed their beers on the countertop so that they could take a look inside the hood above the stove. To see if a dead animal was there. Also, we were all in costume.

It went like this: days before, I had noticed a burning smell coming from the kitchen even though I wasn’t cooking. A few days after that (on my birthday, no less), I had stumbled downstairs in dire need of coffee and was greeted by the smell of death wafting from…where? The trash can? We emptied it. The flowers wilting on the countertop? We chucked them. The toaster? We cleaned it. Candles were burned, surfaces were wiped, and still it remained.

Until that evening, the costumed champagne evening, when I was making dinner for the boys and saw it. It was a dot on the counter, then it wiggled. I yelled up the stairs to The Husband.

IT WAS A FUCKING MAGGOT, Y’ALL.

And as I shrunk from its writhing body, I scanned the area around it and noticed more. A half-dozen of them lurking in the crack between the backsplash and the counter, mocking my attempts at cleanliness and order. Which is why she was right, when she said it must be killing me: “I know you love things to be clean.” Endless bottles of spray, countless nights of wiping, a possible Swiffer addiction, all leading to this: what would later be discovered (by TH, as I got the hell out of there while he looked) as a dead rat all up in that hood.

Jesus help us.

It’s embarrassing, really, to know that that rodent sat decaying up in our wall for a good week before we (he) disposed of him; that despite my daily and nightly efforts, something was still rotten in the state of New South Wales. That there is no amount of scrubbing that can get rid of the hidden skeletons.

There’s a metaphor here, I just know it.

Earlier that day, I’d gotten a text: The Kid’s therapist was ill and couldn’t make it into school. Neither of them could, actually, and this year not being last year (i.e. this year’s teacher not being last year’s teacher, and Year One’s grammar not being Kindy’s play), a quick chat with TK and his educators wasn’t going to cut it. Little Brother and I had plans with one of his many “best friends” and his mum, one of mine, involving a ride into the city and an art gallery, and the three of them waited patiently on the playground while I tried to sort it all out. Once TK was, against all odds, settled, I made motions to leave. That’s when I heard the sobs. And our plan changed.

The four of us went to the beach instead, to the playground there and its coffee kiosk, and for an hour endured the sunshine and water views (and my anxiety, nonetheless) of Plan B. I wanted to salvage what I could, so I took TK back to school while LB and our friends went to their house. I watched gymnastics class. I helped with some grammar. I situated him into music class. And then I left and headed for my friend’s place, where LB and his mate were engaged in Nerf wars. I sat on the grass in the sun and told the truth: how hard it is sometimes, when you see that things aren’t what you were maybe telling yourself they were.

She displayed her typical more masterful grasp of objective reality, tempering my purely emotional-based one with some truth of her own, and I was once again pulled off the ledge by love, which is a nice little recurring theme in my life. And when I picked TK up a short while later, he was better than fine, despite my frayed nerves and sore heart. We do this: our family, and our friends-as-family, we survive the spectrum and dead rats and maggots, because this is what we do, this is our story. Even when I try to hide or deny the parts that make it ours.

Sometimes the challenges that TK faces feel like a direct punch in my heart. My fears for my children’s feelings, for their being loved and enjoyed and never ever made fun of, for my deep-seated and insecure need to never fly above the radar despite that being where I’ve found the most grace–they are targeted by the spectrum, laid waste and left to die and be eaten by maggots.

Is the metaphor working?

What I’m saying is this: autism and changed plans and anxiety, they are killing me, and my fears alongside them. And they, because of how grace infuses them, are also bringing me back to life.

It’s messy, and it often smells, and there is so much struggling and searching to find where the rotten parts are, but then there is the morning after, when it smells and feels like home again because I’m not trying to cover up or deny what was meant to die and be carted off, and what was meant to be there in the first place.

We saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire Saturday night at the Opera House, where it was accompanied by an orchestra playing its score, and I had forgotten so much of it: how this is the one where Voldemort comes back to life, how somehow this is also (consequently?) the one where it starts getting good, how this is the one where Hermione says tearfully, at the end, that “everything’s changed now, hasn’t it?” And Harry responds, matter-of-factly, “Yes.”

Afterward, we came home to two sleeping boys, and I climbed in bed between them, and thought of all the ways they’ve changed me. All the boundary lines, the Before and the After of their existences, the deaths and the resurrections. I listened later to the truth: that “difference is a teacher.” How my sporadic and flailing and fearful efforts to make TK “like everyone else” would rob the world of so much, of him–one of my favourite teachers.

In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. –Albert Camus

It starts within seconds of my waking up.

There is the initial stirring, the feeling of being warm and protected, and then it shifts. My consciousness peaks, and the load lowers: the weight of the day, week, month ahead, coming to rest squarely on my shoulders, heavy yet raising them to my neck. My muscles tense–the tension always comes with it, this tightening I’ve only recently learned to become aware of, to attend to, to intentionally release. Lower the shoulders; open the palms; breathe.

This is anxiety.

For so much of my life I’ve felt alone, yet this companion has always been constant. Now, I’m not alone in any way, the prayers of my youth answered in the form of a man and two boys, at least one of whom is typically beside me when I wake up, this forever sharing of space. And this, this wonderful blessing, it also can undo me, this coming to the surface struggling to breathe with a foot in my belly or hands on my legs, my body no longer my own, and there is the focused reinterpretation of it: not as violence, but as love. This sounds crazy to some people.

All of this will sound crazy to some people. Buckle up.

Adrenaline powers me out of bed, a list of tasks already forming in my mind: make the bed. Make breakfast. Clean breakfast. Vacuum the floor from breakfast. What if there’s traffic?! Make lunches. Pack backpacks. What if other kids are mean to them?! Get three people dressed. Lay out their clothes for tomorrow. Get everyone everywhere on time. What if we’re late?! It all arrives at once, along with some attendant fears thrown in for fun. This is how anxiety works.

Breathe.

Some of the tasks sound unnecessary: why not just cross a few out? Who needs a made bed, after all?

I do. I need the made beds, the wiped counters, the clean floors. I need the toys put away and the shoes lined up. I need the order because it smacks away at the anxiety. Simply put, it makes me feel better. I need straight lines and uncluttered surfaces and I see this need in The Kid and I don’t always receive it, living with others. More anxiety. Breathe again.

There are things that help, besides the order. There is classical music. Prayer and meditation. Exercise. Time alone, oh blessed time alone. (“Is there anything better than time alone in your own house?” The Sis wondered recently. “It’s like therapy.” She is an ally.) There is the beach, two minutes away and a gift I still can’t believe to be our daily reality. There are water views in between beach visits. There is medication. There is wine–but not too much wine (this is tricky).

There is grace. There are the unexpected reminders that, contrary to what anxiety tells me, everything does not hinge upon my orchestrations, my performance. There is the car that backs out of its driveway three seconds after TK has already run past, mere feet ahead of me and under my watchful eye yet–I am reminded–ultimately protected by someone else. There is Little Brother, safely clinging to the side of the pool and bringing himself back to more shallow water as I watch, breath bated and heart stopped, knowing this is how he will learn yet hating it all the same. There is running into a friend and her girls one morning when we take the back entrance to school, walking and talking together, my self-imposed rush slowing down. There is the manic joy of TK’s morning time before the bell, the smiles he brings to people’s faces. There is the self-aware goofiness of Little Brother that he knows will make me laugh–and it does. There is the way The Husband bends to my craziness because he knows it will help–the handheld vacuum now part of his routine too.

All my life, I’ve had this companion, this anxiety that I thought was something everyone dealt with, but now I realise it is the other, the extra, the thing that doesn’t belong but is here anyway and not likely to disappear. So, yes, there are strategies, but there is also this:

I don’t know that I want it to disappear. Because it is part of me now, for better and worse. And if there is this companion that has never left, somehow that is what makes it easier to believe in another companion that never leaves, in a mystical balance that grace provides. In the moments at the beach that I feel forced to fill, to produce–how can I put this into words?!–as an unheard but felt voice tells me to just be. That in this place, staring at this water, warmed by this sun, is where I am allowed to let go and just be.

Know this, when you see me, when you see any of us who are afflicted and accompanied: we are constantly doing battle.

But there is this: that somehow it makes my life richer. There is TK, demanding the way we took yesterday, the back way into school that leads us to our friends, the long way. Yes, I prayed for this, and I also prayed for patience, and I saw Evan Almighty too, and I learned that we are given situations that make us patient, but the scooter he had to ride to school is now swinging around, tripping me up as he drags it, and I’d like to change my request for patience into one for a bottle of wine and a desert island. Maybe some Xanax on the side wouldn’t hurt either. But we walk together, and I see that the long way, though it can feel crushing, is filled with more: more scenery. More “chance” encounters. More moments together. More talking, and more quiet.

And I know that this God-forsaken anxiety, this long way home, it is not God-forsaken. It is somehow given, and it is where I am met. It is how, and where, I am taught to breathe.

I remember the preliminary visit in the receiving of The Kid’s diagnosis; the prelude to the bomb that later dropped. The doctor, accustomed to a range of reactions after years of thirty-minute appointments spent barely observing a child before slapping a label on him (#notbitter), had fine-tuned his process so that his nurse/assistant/social worker spent the bulk of time with the families first: asking questions, dispensing surveys, and this: mentioning all the celebs who were likely on the spectrum.

Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Bob Dylan…the list was varied and esteemed, and designed, I suppose, to soothe us before the sucker punch. I took it in, nodded obediently, feigned being impressed. Acted like we were receiving a gift from them rather than getting the air knocked out.

It was only later, midway through the denial and grief, months down the road, that I received the phone call that was everything that visit had tried to be: a friend of a friend with a kid like The Kid who had actually been there; the effort of putting a brave face to it didn’t ooze off him because there wasn’t any effort, only truth: One day you will realise you’ve been given a gift.

The words fell so much differently, later. They always do, on a heart that has been softened by time and tears rather than toughened by defence. Later is when it usually all happens.

We went to a birthday party on Sunday, and when I recapped it to a friend later, I explained how much easier birthday parties are now. How hard they used to be: first with just The Kid, who would circle the perimeter and study the goings-on from afar; I’d have to follow him closely but not too closely while fear and anxiety followed me, swirling around in a cocktail of frustration. Then Little Brother came along and I’d run interference between the two of them, exhausted physically in addition to the former emotional drain.

Not to be melodramatic.

Now, though? Well it was a bowling party. I assumed we’d give the lanes a shot then retire to the arcade, the three of us separate as usual. Instead, both the boys bowled alongside their peers, their friends, and each turn was a mini-celebration. TK decided, after LB scored a strike (with maternal aid), that “X’s are bad. You don’t want to knock down all the pins because X’s mean you’re wrong.” So we cheered for his partial removal of the pins too. Later, they sat at the table and scarfed down nuggets and cake and I was there, watching them and talking to friends. It felt like a Carnival cruise–and only because of the years prior.

LB has his own way of seeing and saying things too, the way he replaces B‘s with V‘s, refers to the villain Two-Face as Toothpaste, calls computers pa-yooters. They’re both into superheroes now, but especially LB, who lines up his Marvel and DC squishies in an impressive array of costumed powers. They are defined mainly according to the Good vs Bad distinction, and when they fight each other, the result is predictable: “Always the good guys win, Mommy.” I listen and agree, this oversimplification (and often non-truth) resounding in my brain with the follow-up, Eh, we’ll get into it more later before I let him knock out the villain I’m holding. (Always he gets to be the good guy.)

Because it seems like it should always be true, this idea that karma holds; that we do the right thing and are rewarded without fail; that the good guys always win. It feels like it should always be true, but it also feels like it isn’t. People get sick or in accidents; you look out for the kids in your kid’s class and still get angry parent emails; Netflix stops working (these grievances may not carry the same weight).

But underneath it all, I know it to be true because I believe it is. I know that just as anxiety has dogged me relentlessly all my life, something else has pursued me not only equally but harder. More unfailingly. Beyond karma, and fairness, and predictable outcomes, I believe that there is a later that changes the now. That sometimes things have to feel wrong before we see they’re right. Grace deserves the fullness of time to reveal its beauty.

The other day we found a new playground and trail and the four of us, our family, followed it down to the water. Awhile ago TK would have faltered, rejecting the unknown. On this day he went ahead of us all, declaring himself the leader. The birds–the ones who startled us all when we first arrived with their scream-like sounds–squawked above us on their own path, and we barely noticed, their voices a part of our normal, our later that is now.