We live down a hill, two blocks essentially, from The Kid’s school, and something magical happens a couple of times a day when I’m at home: the sound of the bell signaling break times floats down that hill to me, followed shortly after by the sound of kids playing and yelling, their glee filling the air. I imagine TK’s voice as part of that pack, floating down to me with all the others, even though he’s not typically one of the louder ones in a group. But there was a time when he didn’t use his voice at all, and we’re not there anymore. So for me, he’s in that sound. In that music.

Last week I spoke to his class about apple brains and autism, and I was amazed at how attentive they were; how their rapt expressions both buoyed me and gently pushed aside my anxiousness, unlocking a path for vulnerability. For his part, TK, sitting at the front of the group on the floor along with the rest while I perched on a seat, stayed close: he kept grinning up at me and reaching for my hand, occasionally interjecting with his own comments. The kids saw him as a baby with a tilted head; they saw him in his halo after his surgery; they saw our family as it is now, four-sided and complete. They asked me questions and laughed at my jokes. They were the best audience I could have imagined, because they really listened to the story of TK. And to think, just five minutes before I had been in the car sweating through every possible pore, trying to talk myself off an anxiety ledge.

Beauty, it seems, is most often on the other side of what seems hardest.

Also last week, the day after the class talk, I headed to the school for Grandparents’ Day because, although I am not a grandparent, I get to stand in for the ones who do not live down the street or even in the same hemisphere. The year two students perform a song on their recorders every year–it’s their introduction to instruments, this plastic noisemaker, and in case you don’t remember your own version of “Hot Cross Buns” from primary school, allow me to remind you that it’s not exactly symphonic. Along with the other parents, I laughed gently and took the obligatory video (to be used years from now for bribery purposes, and certainly not to help myself fall asleep). James’s therapist had told me that he wasn’t getting the notes quite right, but that this wasn’t unusual among the group and he was front and centre anyway, which was really what I was there for. Again, as the day before: a grinning kid, looking straight at me.

The next day, the weight of the week lifting as we headed toward the weekend, I drove the boys toward their respective days and told them–something that would rarely happen on a weighted-down Monday–a few of the things I love about each of them. True to form, they barely let me name one quality before they were asking questions, wanting more. Little Brother in particular appreciated my recognition of his sense of humour and told a couple of Fozzie Bear-inspired jokes in reward for my services. His unblinking acceptance of his given and perceived role in the world, in our family, is one of the most beautiful things about our life: when we named him William (“Protector”), we had no idea all the ways that would play out, including but not limited to his recent favourite game, which involves having either me or The Husband throw a basket ball toward where TK sits in his toy car, “driving” in front of the garage, while he (LB) runs toward the ball to keep it from hitting TK. (“Let’s play ‘I Protect James,'”, he says, making me wonder if his consciousness operates on deeper levels than I can imagine.)

One of the things that stood out to a few of the kids in TK’s class was when I told them about how he often experiences sounds and light differently than many of us. It was a concrete piece of information to which they could relate, and I was grateful for how it’s been explained to me by TK–fluorescent lights, for example, that seem to pulsate to him instead of shining continuously. It’s like he’s reaching across an invisible membrane when he’s able to tell me things like this, and I can only hope that I feel the same to him, a hand reaching across to where he is, explaining my version of the world. But so often he’s the one who comes up with his own, better answers, like recently when a playground encounter involved a student bullying TK’s friend, leaving her crying. “Why did he do that?” TK asked me later, unraveled and upset as he always is when he witnesses meanness, and concerned as he always is for people who are hurting. I told him that maybe the kid was having a bad day, or that he was unhappy, which didn’t make it right for him to be mean. TK quieted and appeared thoughtful for a moment. “Or maybe he was in Demo Mode,” he offered instead.

(In Toy Story 3, while the toys are all misplaced at a day care, Buzz Lightyear is switched into Demo Mode by a bully of a toy bear, which means that Buzz’s memory is erased, which means he forgets his friends and is unkind to them.)

Just to flesh that out: my boy, whose innocence often astounds me, reasoned that another kid was being mean because of a technical glitch. When people speak of autism as a disability, I have to remember that they don’t know my son, don’t know his depthless reserves of kindness and empathy. Disabled my ass.

On Friday we met some friends at a local beach and the kids fed the seagulls while the moms drank Prosecco, and before we all dispersed to our own homes, the pack of children were naked in the ocean. Their laughter traveled across the water and sand to us, like bells down a hillside, sounds that turn into notes that become music.

Last Friday I walked 60 kilometres (more, actually; the f-ers who mapped out the course went OVER the 60k mark) in twelve-and-a-half hours, but if it had been just me doing the walking, I’d likely still be somewhere along that course, probably sleeping under a bridge or drinking at a bar.

I did all the prep work necessary: regular hikes of increasing distances, acquiring blisters that turned into hard callouses; learning the route; carb loading; getting good sleep; even abstaining from alcohol the week before. The weather cooperated too: there was rain forecasted that was replaced by wind and clouds, that Friday the lone dry day surrounded by thunderstorms the rest of the week.

But still, on trek day, my legs felt like lead. My team seemed to be practically jogging even though we were travelling at our usual pace. I wanted to quit so badly. I could imagine myself just lying down–on the beach or in the middle of the street, I wasn’t picky–and surrounding to the aches and pains. Just letting go.

Instead, somehow, I kept going. I asked God to throw me a bone and make it easier. He did not. What he did do was open my eyes to the people who showed up along the way: teammates’ families and friends who brought food and massage sticks and Gatorade; kids who cheered us on and held out ice water; my own friends who waited patiently at the top of a hill I swore was designed to kill me and gave me an extra boost of love; and my boys, The Husband and The Kid and Little Brother, en route to McDonald’s, who pulled up beside us and grabbed my hand.

About an hour after that encounter, we crossed the finish line–the four of us, my team, together.

At the end of our first and only half-marathon together, TH turned to my excited face and announced, “That was terrible. I hated it.” I’ve always laughed at him for that, until now. Now I know how he felt. “Enjoy!” spectators cheered at us along the course as I wanted to vomit and die. I did not enjoy. But I didn’t want to be the weakest link (which I surely was). The pressure felt insurmountable, like the hills along our path. I surely would have quit were we not required to finish together.

What I’m saying is that I’m not a hero, but I am done. Blistered and sore and done, with a medal to my name and two boys who saw their mother make it across the finish line, and that is something. A lot of things, in fact. And our quartet stuck together, supporting each other, even when I seriously considered jumping from the Harbour Bridge.

A lovely friend of mine refers to her family, and mine, as “Team,” and not in the sickly sweet way that makes you want to gag, but in the “Hey, Team!” way when she and hers see us walking into school, or like, when I told her last week that I was going to lose it after being home with a sick kid for days on end, she commiserated that it can be tough having the team all together.

It can be. We know waaaaay too much about each other: how to push each other’s buttons, how each other’s farts smell. Togetherness can be exposing and hard, making us vulnerable and so seen–whether on a trek course or at home. It can be…chafing, physically and emotionally.

I took my yearly sojourn to a hotel by myself on Saturday, with my sore muscles and gaping wounds, and when I entered the blessed room I noticed how quiet it was. I lit a candle, popped the bottle of champagne TK had waiting on me (#grateful), and got to writing. It was glorious.

And annoyingly incomplete. So I texted friends. And FaceTimed my family. Apparently I can’t go eighteen hours without my teams.

“I’m so glad we get to be a family,” TK said on the way to school this morning, and it took my breath away. He is so aware–he and LB both–of being a member of this unit of four (five, when they count Google Home, which they often do; guess we don’t need a dog?), of their place in it: of being sons, and brothers. Of being part of a team.

A college friend used to joke that “there may not be an I in team, but there is an M and and E,” and it’s the me part of the team that I struggle with the most: my temper, my mistakes, my role. Along with making time for me so I don’t forget who I am, when I am so embedded in others. Others who both pull me out of myself and away from what I know of me into new places, paths that lead up hills and through forests and along spectrums and into classrooms and somehow end up making me more myself than I ever was. With the medals and chafing and heart to prove it.

When The Kid’s first school therapist decided to move on to another job at the end of our first year here, thereby wrecking my life (kidding…kind of), he wrote me a long and beautiful email detailing how much he valued his experience with TK and our family. Included in his words was a description of how TK works really hard to hold himself together at school, to the point that (the therapist believed) TK often falls apart upon leaving the school gates to head home. I think this was mentioned at least in part because the therapist had observed several of these falling-apart episodes, which had occurred when TK was being handed off to me, and he had also likely observed my frustration during the episodes. He was encouraging me by explaining TK.

He may well have been explaining me, as I too am a perpetrator of that first-world, time-honoured virtue of Holding It Together in the midst of life’s daily struggles, and my own personal ones. When I saw a counsellor here in Sydney during that first year, after my IKEA meltdown and during a depressive period, she told me (in the first of three total sessions because, reader, I ran away) that, for someone experiencing depression and anxiety, I looked to have it together–meaning, she explained, I was wearing makeup and my hair was under control and I wasn’t in a dressing gown (that’s what they call a bathrobe here).

I guess I should have shown up with head lice and rampant armpit hair and general stank? I don’t know, but the comment left me annoyed. Annoyed…and thoughtful. Especially when a legitimate friend told me she is often surprised when I describe myself as anxious because she doesn’t always see it.

I think that I put a fair amount of effort into appearing to be something I’m not.

This discovery is shocking to me, since I spent the first couple of decades of my life doing this on a grand scale: trying to be the “sweet girl” everyone seemed to think I should be; following the rules until they broke me and my quarter-life identity crisis sent me into a bad relationship and, then, New York, to escape. Old habits die hard. Maybe my efforts aren’t as epic now, but some days all they might consist of is putting makeup on a face whose natural state, in that moment, would be Tearful and Blotchy. Or slapping jokes and laughter on a social situation that I’d do better to exit completely. We all pretend, after all. You sort of have to in order to function in society. If I had, say, swept the legs of one teacher who actually deserved it, I’d be writing this from an allotted quarter-hour at a women’s prison desktop. We put on faces. We fake it. It’s what we do.

I’m just trying to figure out how much of it is necessary, and how much is bullshit that keeps us from real connecting.

Last week, I took Little Brother and his mate to their weekly sport camp and LB decided he’d rather sit with me, during my designated Thinking and Being By Myself Time, than participate. He began to perform “tricks” for me and demand my attention: “Mom, check this out!” on repeat. I felt the anger rise in me: I needed to not have to attend to anything. I needed space. And also? I needed for one of my kids not to have trouble entering a group and doing what the other kids do because the journey of that with TK has been both beautiful and also very hard. I needed to not go through an emotional crisis with LB because all my energy for that was reserved for TK. I needed him to hold it together, as he so typically does. I needed him to make life easy for me.

This is so unfair.

I felt myself wanting to withdraw from him, and ignore his “check it out”s, and shut down. And I felt gutted by self-hatred over it. I can’t allow one kid the room to fall apart and not give the other that same space. I can’t reserve all my empathy for only one of my children.

It’s easier, of course, to deal in ratios than uncertainties, in black and white than shades of grey. This is why parenting, why life, is so exhausting: despite my efforts to find a manual, it doesn’t work that way. What a crock.

I don’t have an easy child and a difficult child. At least, I can’t see it that way. I have two boys, each with huge hearts, who express themselves differently. And this is a gift that wears me down and breaks me apart. Especially in a week when one is sick and at home and I’m falling apart already because I have a 60k hike tomorrow and no space in the meantime to just breathe. There is, instead, LB asking me to play soccer and TK needing constant cuddles and me, cracking into pieces.

There is also the pair of them telling me how much they love me, unbidden and unbribed. There is LB curling into me at bedtime, throwing his arm around me like I am his (I totally am). There is TK, surprising me by writing out all his spelling words while I go to my room for thirty seconds to put on my comfy pants, his sneaky and proud grin meeting me when I return. There will be the bottle of champagne meeting me at the finish line tomorrow, no matter what time it is. And there will be the hotel room to myself the next night, meeting me for sorely needed writing and recovery. There is also some guilt about that. There is everything, whether it shows up on my face or in my clothing or is just here for now, words that spill out because they have to, because there is just…so much. Too much to hold together, but so much that when it all does fall apart, the pieces manage to gather in a new, somehow better, way.

I was looking forward to a topic other than death this week, then I woke up this morning and got my news (read people.com) and found out about Luke Perry and y’all, I am JUST DONE. Little Brother’s preschool teacher is still gone, which feels like a shock every day to me (and LB, I suspect). Dylan McKay has left the building and by all accounts, his real-life persona was a wonderfully kind man, which is always the way it goes, isn’t it? (Take some of the crap ones, PLEASE!) And apparently it’s bat mating season and our neighbour’s tree is Ground Central for Bat F*cking, so we get to watch the world’s creepiest animal circle our house every night then screech and scream us to sleep.

I can’t. I just can’t.

I couldn’t, either, when I got off a boat the other day after seven hours of drinking, swimming, and dishing with friends. I couldn’t so much that The Husband had to come get me, The Kid and LB in tow, and as I carried LB inside I tripped up some marble steps and we both tumbled to the ground. Later, I was holding TK and falling onto the bed with him and we both hit our heads against the wall. “Mommy, you were pretty clumsy last night,” they told me the next day, as I envisioned an intervention filled with only non-Australian friends because they’re the ones who started all this socialising anyway, while battling guilt over how much wine is too much yet again and searching for grace in the grappling.

On the boat, I had the kind of epiphany that sounds brilliant in the moment, when the sun is shining and champagne is flowing: “I know why we like wine so much! It’s because it’s the one thing we don’t have to share with our kids!” I cheers-ed myself to that then thought later about the fantastic podcast I heard that falls into the first of the following categories that are officially My Listening Jams: psychology, celebrity interviews, parody, and nightmare-inducing true crime. The particular episode I had listened to on a masochistic hike was about affect regulation and dysregulation and IT SPOKE TO ME, as such things usually do, about the gray areas that we try to reduce to black and white in order to simplify lives that are meant to be nuanced and colourful. Which maybe sounds like an excuse to drink more champagne and maybe is, but I’m in the “working on it” phase and that’s gotta be okay for now.

I also thought later, post-boat and knee injury and head trauma, about what it means to have safe zones in my life: things that feel comforting or hallowed or just good either because they’re mine alone, or because they buffer me from the things I fear. Things I fear: bats, social anxiety, alienation, grief and sadness, loss. Things that feel safe: family (sometimes?), wine (sometimes?), grace (sometimes–it has a randy streak, after all).

We set about trying to make ourselves safe–trying to regulate life, ourselves–in a world that is anything but. Two men in their fifties that I either knew personally or televisionally are gone, and this is not safe. It does not make sense, or line up with reports from annual physicals. I try to buffer myself from awkwardness in social situations and often…overdo the titration, let’s say. I want to be my children’s refuge, their safe space, and I end up losing my temper, or…being clumsy.

I cannot do with more to-do lists or self-improvement or guilt spirals. What I can do with is friends who laugh and commiserate, children who forgive and have wonderfully short memories, and a husband who never stops showing up. A grace that never does either.

I read recently about a British mother’s invention called a “hug button” that she devised to help ease her child’s separation anxiety while he was at school. So every morning, I find myself drawing one on my hand and TK’s (and a backup one on our wrists; LB passed on both). The red sharpie’s dye seeps into my skin throughout the day, sweat from hikes and anxiety bleeding it deeper, and TK and I press these buttons to send each other love. And it helps. He’s not crying at drop-off any more.

There’s also the kid who requested that TK be his partner in robotics because TK is the calm one–a safe space. There’s the way LB arranges the faucet handles the way he knows TK likes them–a habit that was driving me crazy until I saw the safe space LB easily made for it. There is the way at the end of the day, when the four of us pile onto the couch together, the bats screaming outside and the wind and world buffeting at the windows, and the grief and anxiety haven’t left but the grace is bigger now, our limbs digging and pressing into each other, hug buttons active, safety an elusive mystery that, for now, feels real.