This year, we will celebrate Thanksgiving by moving.

Specifically, on Thursday, packers will enter our home and start boxing up our possessions. There will be no turkey in the oven; by the end of the day there won’t even be forks with which to eat. We’ll spend the next few days in the in-between, split between two houses much like we’re already split between two countries. We’ll dine on takeaway and pull our clothes out of suitcases, and I’ll grow increasingly anxious and unsettled, and we’ll get a key over the weekend to start hauling some stuff over, and then on Monday–traditionally the busiest (and usually the worst) day of the week–movers will load up their truck with all those boxes and take them to our new location.

Except they aren’t called movers here. They’re called removalists. Which is apt, I think, being that what they do is remove things from your home. Unpacking those things and making their new environment a home? That’s up to us.

And we’ve done that here, twice. Two houses, each holding our family for a year. Each with its own view and features and advantages and disadvantages. I rejected this new house the first time I saw it, The Kid and Little Brother in tow, because I couldn’t see us there. Another house was higher on my list, a smaller and more traditional (less modern) one, with a turquoise backsplash that reminded me of our Atlanta home. I clung to that detail while this new, polished, marble-filled house imposed before me. I looked at the bidet and the sharp-edged stairs and the (I KNOW) indoor pool and shook my head. Didn’t suit us. Weeks later and still without options, The Husband and I took another look. This time, it suited us. Funny how things change.

And now, I’m imagining us there. I’m browsing rugs on the internet and placing wall hangings in my mind. I’m arranging furniture and envisioning dinners with friends. This morning, I took a hike.

After dropping LB and then TK off at school, I hoofed it to the new house to map out the walk from TK’s school. On the way there, I saw a path with a sign marking its entrance: path to beach. A few minutes later, I found myself on a tiny beach in front of a harbour full of boats. I gazed across at the restaurants we’ve already frequented, a short walk away. I gazed upward and saw our new house on the hill. I imagined the four of us on this beach, swimming and building castles. Right below our house. Suddenly moving didn’t seem so burdensome.

I miss turkey. I miss the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and the Westminster Dog Show. I miss wine on the couch with my sister and sarcastic comments from my dad and letting my mom clean everything up (kidding. Or not.). I miss the temperature dropping and Christmas creeping in, slowly, until the day after Thanksgiving when it barges through completely. I miss shorter days and dark, sacred nights around the holidays. I miss not moving every year. New is hard, worrisome, and often defeating.

But maybe I need to be defeated, annually it seems? Because there is also this: TK delivering speeches to his class. LB showing me rugby moves. TK’s therapists telling me they’ll be fading out of school completely in the next year. LB singing me songs from the toilet. Both of them running off to join their friends at school and birthday parties and on beaches. There is this picking up–this removal–and dropping back down to somewhere different, where new life is to be found. Life I would never have sought out of my own, as I like to stay still thank you very much.

The other day I was walking home (to our current one, anyway) after a different hike. I spotted a snake in the tree in front of the house and snapped a quick photo of it, then ran inside to tell TH. He spent the next few minutes on his phone, researching the type and danger of the animal. Turned out it could either be very poisonous or completely safe, based on some colouring patterns that we weren’t willing to venture close enough to the creature to see. Over the next few days, the snake continued to hang in the tree, unmoving. We reasoned that it had died there. But not other creatures came to pick at its remains. Could it be…? A few days later, I noticed it lying on the ground in exactly the same position it had been in the tree. Plastic. The damn thing was a toy. It had been harmless the whole time.

Much of what I’ve feared in life, what I’ve obsessed over and worried about, has been, in the end, harmless. Some of it has not. In this case, TH simply tossed the thing into the trash with all of the others things we’re letting go of as we re-move yet again to a new view, together.

Little Brother has been performing, for weeks, a song he’s learned at preschool (fun fact: according to him, the literal translation of “preschool” is “the place where you throw dirt”). Due to LB’s…shall we say, reinterpretation of many words, I’m not sure if these are the exact lyrics, but the song goes something like this:

In upsy-down town, the sky is in the sea
The rabbit’s in the nest where the bird should be
The rain is going up instead of falling down
Down in upsy-down town.
There’s a chocolate cake as white as snow
And the more you eat it the bigger it grows
You walk up on your nose, you stand up on your toes
Down in upsy-down town.

Most days I feel like I live in upsy-down town.

Navigating life alongside a kid with superpowers/special needs has been described many ways: as Holland replacing Italy, as a marathon rather than a sprint. For me, one of the defining features of it (besides getting tagged on Facebook ad nauseum when people could have just sent me the damn link in a private email thanks) has been the steps forward, steps back, steps forward pattern that, only years in, is realised to be a dance. The movements start out erratic and unpredictable at first, uncertainty reigning, and then time goes on to reveal a rhythm not initially noticed, a pattern among the pattern-less seeming days, and beauty sets in. Brutal, terrific beauty.

Example: I can no longer count on Mondays to be awful.

Last year, The Kid’s teacher was simply wonderful. On report cards she discussed his weaknesses, praised his strengths, and told us (and others) what a gift he was to the class. She credited him with bonding the kids together. I accepted the compliment on his behalf and basked in its glow.

This year, we haven’t been as lucky. At least, not at first. But as situations have developed and meetings have been called and battles have been fought (I am especially handy in war departments; see my LinkedIn profile), other teachers have been added to the mix and what started with gritted teeth and reports has led to a now-growing list of People Who Know Him and Love Him, like the teacher who stopped me on Monday morning, as I was about to lose it over TK’s distracted focus on his hangnail rather than my instructions to change his reader. She simply said, “He is such a wonderful boy. You know what? He’s going to be such a beautiful adult. He will do so well.” A few minutes later, I spoke with the teacher who was in his class last Friday, who told me how social he is (!), and how much he loves interacting with his friends.

Monday mornings have typically been the locale for birdshit falling from the sky, tearful fights, and regrets to be apologised for later. Now they’re flipped upsy-down.

And there’s the birthday party thing. Long ago, I accepted (so willingly and graciously, I might add, and not with any resentment) that, as other parents began dropping their kids off for these affairs, I’d likely be remaining at the scene for years to come. So far, so true. But whereas in years past, when I’d follow TK around the perimeter of the location and silently plead for him to join the group, now he stays close to me for a few minutes before he either jumps in himself or is led by a mate. This past weekend, the party was at an indoor gym set up with activity stations: rope swings, monkey bars, etc. He lined up with everyone else as I hastily approached one of the helpers, telling her he may need some extra help, and I watched as he took his turn at each station, held by the helper at most and smiling through it. He came up to me afterward, red-faced and sweaty, saying, “I’m so TIRED. I’m really fit though.”

But he does still cover perimeters. Last week we were at LB’s touch rugby practice and TK came up to me beforehand. “I’m going to run twice around the oval,” he announced, and I told him to go for it even as I thought that I’d believe it when I saw it. As he circled one loop, I waved at him. “Want to come back?” I called. “I said TWICE!” he shouted back, covering the not-insignificant distance one more time before returning to me and my thought that we may have a cross-country runner on our hands–this boy who took what felt like forever (seventeen months) to walk.

On that afternoon, and at the birthday party, I thought of all the ground we’ve covered to get here, to this place where our 10 still often looks like others’ 5 (but don’t let that fool you; now he’s often finishing his worksheets first in class without help which is weirdly not a skill that is acknowledged at social and sporting events). To this place where he is forcing the Me I would have been out of the way in service of the creation of a better Me: a Me who can’t rely on being the person who has all her ducks in a row (it’s hard to line them up when one of the ducks doesn’t speak until he’s four); the Me who thought underdogs were just cute until their songs became our anthems; who gets that the track “Popular” from Wicked is satire rather than instruction manual; who would rather stay in the lane with all the Differents rather than be in the one who audition playdates for their kids (yeah that’s a thing). I know now that life can amount to keeping a list of rules–of How to Fit In, of How to Maintain an Image, of How to Not Rock the Boat–that end up amounting to BS and untold wasted years.

I know that it took awhile to get here and mean it, but that I’m okay in Upsy-Down Town. Especially when it has a bakery where I take him every Monday, before that string of therapy visits that could be (and often are) trying and long but also wonderful and ground-breaking, and when he walks up to the counter and orders and hands over the coins like I taught him, the server tells him, “You’re a lucky boy.” And I know that it’s true.

Last week when I was writing I had a singular purpose, narrowed into place by anger and endorphins and all the other things I mentioned. This week my rough edges feel a bit sanded down, by different things. I have been humbled (and not in the way that word is typically misused to mean humiliated, or #humbled to have reached a million Instagram followers. Ugh).

I think singleness of purpose can be great. It can be helpful in a season of needing to get shit done, of being focused and attentive. But more often I find myself in the land between What’s Definitely Right and What’s Obviously Wrong, in a territory where people are more than one-dimensional Disney characters (circa the 90s; they’ve upped their game recently), where there is more of the story to be played out than my current scene. This can be annoying, as I’m often ready for the play to be over so I can meet everyone at the bar.

This in-between place is akin to feeling adrift, not fully anchored–say, to a house to live in, or a desired outcome regarding a school situation, or…my sanity. It involves more tension, more floating and finding, a bit more nausea due to all the rocking. It involves iffy moments between friends, meeting conflict with them and biting your lip until you reach the other side, together and stronger for it, but damn that part before the other side was awkward, wasn’t it? It involves more terse conversations over the kids’ heads. It involves more meetings and more letting go of what people think (not my strongest suit).

But the company out here can’t be beat. So there’s that.

Lately (by which I mean his whole life), The Kid has had trouble articulating himself when he’s angry or anxious (wonder where he gets that sense of frustration from…). He will wave his arms about wildly as if they’ll do the talking for him when, more often than not, they’ll collide with me instead, and reader, listen when I tell you that THIS PUSHES ALL THE BUTTONS I NEVER EVEN KNEW I HAD. There is material there that has so much less to do with him and so much with my own past, of being treated roughly or misunderstood or met with physical responses to an emotional issue, and I could get counselling on that for the rest of my life and still show up to heaven’s gates mid-therapy. So the other day, when I was trying to get him to change his reader before school and he responded with The Wave, as we’ll call it, I felt like something snapped. I asked him if he would like it if I hit him when I was mad, and I immediately wanted to die and come back to life as The Mother Who Never Loses Her Temper (Fairy-Tale Edition because that shit ain’t real) and erase the whole morning and start over or maybe just skip it and go straight to dinner. No, bed. I was humbled by my own constant inability to be who I want to be, my constant mistake-making, my constant repertoire of regrets that lies waiting for me just outside the school gates when I’ve left the kids for the day and finally have some mental space…to recount all the awful things I feel I’ve done.

I pulled him aside minutes later to have a Talk, and to apologise, and he told me to stop apologising because I already had. I told him I felt horrible. He said, “You’re not horrible,” which was less a reflection of generosity and more a reflection of his desire to go play with his friends. I beat myself up about it all day.

That night, in bed with him and Little Brother, I apologised again. LB recommended a solution: “How about we just don’t make any more mistakes?” I laughed, ruefully. “That would be nice,” I began. “But I think we will anyway. What we need is forgiveness.”

Which is inconvenient, because I’m not good at forgiving myself or others. I’m not good at being in that place between shores, where feelings are a bit icky and there’s too much uncertainty and I’m not fully Home yet, in whatever sense of the word I’m currently using.

Yesterday I went on a friend’s boat though, and while there was rocking, there was also the kind of view you can’t have from the shore–the kind where there’s water all around, and conversation, and moments you just don’t have on dry land and within its certainty. There was movement, and healing, and, though it felt like we were adrift, there was also an anchor–you just couldn’t see it.

And this morning, LB was playing with TK, and he turned to me and said, “Mommy, I just want a cuddle. James–I’m going to get a quick cuddle.” He interrupted his play to come over to me and bury himself within my chest for a hug, then went back to playing. It made me think of how movement from place to place always gets us to where we need to be. That the depths we travel, of water and feelings, when we are adrift, they can be so uncomfortable but so full, and if I don’t face those depths–the depths of my own sadness, and frustration, and mistakes, and also love–that I’ll never meet the depth of love that meets me in return, upon my return, stepping onto shore once again, for now, until the next trip.