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.