Taken together, the individual zings can feel like a barrage. A full-on assault, really: The Kid gets sick at school and I cancel my day (Netflix; KIDDING) to go collect him. ZING! Flu shots (and the boys’ looks of betrayal) booked. ZING! The Husband is due to travel later this week. ZING! Something weird is going on with my hand and I should probably talk to a doctor about the pain. ZING! Intermittent fasting (IF, which these days feels like it should stand for I F-ingcan’t) has not tightened my waistline. ZING! School and personal dramas (set to coincide with the second season-release of Big Little Lies, perhaps? I SEE YOU, HOLLYWOOD!) keep my blood pressure soaring and my sleep erratic. ZING!

I’m one to get more often lost in the details, in the trees, so that I miss the forest. But these zings are piling up and, with my Lexapro backing off, I am…managing them? Which sometimes looks like…freaking out about them?

And sometimes doesn’t. Sure, my “meditation sessions” usually consist of nine minutes of panic followed by one minute of nearly falling asleep, but there are things to offset the zings. Zongs, if you will. Actually, I won’t. I need to work on that one.

It’s like this: I am being forced to slow down, in a million different little ways.

I literally chop my medication in half rather than pop it mindlessly out of its blister pack.

I analyse the triggers set off by various ongoing dramas, and with the help of wise advice, I identify the shame I still carry around via that fearful little girl inside of me who’s terrified of getting in trouble because of what that will say about her worth. (Yes, I’ve been to therapy. Why do you ask?)

I breathe, deeply. And slowly, so I don’t pass out. It’s called self-regulation, people. And it sometimes even works.

I ask myself why I’m so concerned with what people think of me, or what they post on social media. And when I find out the answer, and realise it’s not a good enough one, I let it go. Repeatedly. And then I get that song stuck in my head.

I identify the anxiety-raisers in my life and I deal with them. Specifically, an example: because I don’t have as many meds coursing through me to modulate the anxiety, I see what the internet does to me and I stay away from it as needed. Sometimes.

And there’s this: I recognise, more than ever, that the world’s need to categorise every little thing into “Good” or “Bad” or “Black” or “White” or “Right” or “Wrong” may work for them (spoiler alert: it’s not working for them; see Facebook comments sections), but lays no claim on me and how I need to function. I see Little Brother, whose growing independence is both wonderful and heartbreaking: “Bye, Mommy. I’ll see you after school.” (AKA, you’re dismissed.) And how TK’s own independence, growing at its own speed, is the same: How he forgets to look at me on his way into the classroom now, or how he leaves me standing alone on the schoolyard because he’s playing lava monster with his friends. How my own friends fill in the gap in the meantime, until he runs over to me, furiously jabbing the red hearts I drew on his wrist–“HUGS! HUGS!”–and it’s all the feelings at the same time, but I can grasp each of them too.

It’s losing relationships and finding some people aren’t to be trusted even as you find that some are, deeply. And that gain and loss often happen at once but can be felt separately. And deeply.

It’s spending my time in each moment, so when the end of the school day comes it doesn’t feel so much like the end of something (though it still does, a little) and more like a return to someone–two of them, actually.

It’s finding out that we’re signing on for two more years here, and feeling both the grief that comes with distance and the deep relief that comes with knowing we’re where we should be, and we get to stay there.

It’s all of the things, at the same time and one at a time, and when they land, it’s feeling them less as wounds and more as gifts, some just taking longer to unwrap than others–but those usually end up being my favourite kind anyway.

I don’t want to sound like an asshole but I am crushing life lately: I’ve cut back on my meds, have completed a week of intermittent fasting, am decreasing my phone usage and being more present with my kids, and have started meditating every day!

Get this: last week I only broke one bowl in a fit of anger over The Kid demanding more apple sauce (and it was a shitty plastic PJ Masks one, whatevs)! I tweaked through a Sunday of no internet like an addict in need of a fix and, that evening, devoured people.com as though it was my job and the rent was due, like, then. I set the timer on my phone for my shavasana pose on my bed and worry my way through it (fun side note: did you know that shavasana means corpse? You’d think I’d be good at that! #tired)! Being present with my kids means laughing at Captain Underpants jokes in front of the TV at the same time! Long blacks are not as good as cappuccinos! AND I’M HUNGRY!!!

And the meds…

Last week I was embracing the return of tears to my life. This week, I’m battling the eruption of anxiety. There is somewhere between overmedicated and undermedicated and I’m in the distance between them right now, using CBT techniques to tell myself that it is very unlikely that Little Brother and I will be hit by a bus while standing a metre back from this kerb (and so help me God if you correct me, that is the way AUSTRALIANS SPELL IT). The stimuli that Lexapro dimmed for me–alongside the intensity of feelings that it also dimmed–now feel more like assaults I have to manage if I want to stay at this dosage, in this space between 10 and 20 mg, between then and now. The difference this time around the 10 mg block is that I recognise the assaults for what they are. I am better equipped. I am more aware.

But they’re still assaults.

Last week The Husband pulled his vagina, sorry his NECK, and as he hobbled around with a heating pad encircling him like a scarf, I congratulated myself on taking him to the doctor and being decent to him and not killing him while considering, in my own twisty mind, the ways I’m hobbled, the ways we all are, even Bran the Broken (WTF with that ending tho), legs and necks and minds struggling to function properly as we inhabit the gap between how things are and how they should be.

“He was so popular today,” Little Brother’s preschool teacher told me one afternoon last week, and my mind jumped ahead to the potential angst of his teenage years, this one with the people-pleasing trait that I’ve passed on, to the blessing and curse that social awareness and proficiency can be. And then his brother, revealing his innocence when he recounts a playground drama at school and asks me: “Why are people mean sometimes?” The gap between between popularity and insecurity, between innocence and being hurt, not being very big. The gap between their insightful questions and my insufficient answers feeling like an ocean. I am not enough.

And I don’t have to be. Because there are the gap-fillers that show up, the agents of grace that can supersede even meds and food: the friends who show up for TK when his therapist calls in sick at the last minute, rubbing his back and enfolding him in their circle. There is LB asking from the backseat: “Are you sure there’s enough space for God and Jesus in my heart?” and I, trembling under anxiety and the responsibility of being in the front seat–maybe even because of that–answering, “Ya damn right there is.” There is LB singing his favourite lines from the song I taught him and casting me a knowing grin. There is the hand cream that TK bought from his school’s Mother’s Day stall for me, that is pomegranate-scented but somehow smells like Christmas in this Southern-Hemisphere winter without one. All of these gaps between what I am and what I’m not, between faith and certainty, between now and not yet, somehow always filling.

I lace up my shoes for my new routine, this exit from the house in the space between my waking and everyone else’s. I am not crushing life, but I am showing up for it, and somehow this current gap, between darkness and sunrise, it feels like home.

I’m approaching my four-year anniversary on antidepressants (Lexapro, if you’re nasty) this October and recently felt motivated to make a change. I sat across from a dear friend I hadn’t seen in too long a couple of weeks ago and we talked about this drug that came at a time when we both needed it: in the throes of postpartum depression, in a valley where we both had lost our sense of joy and felt like searching furiously and trying harder wouldn’t recover it. She asked for help first and guided the way for me to, and as the pill kicked in I felt a space: a space between me and the anxiety, between me and the sadness that hadn’t been there before, or else had just been filled with turbulence and anger and reaction, and was slowly (not completely, but at least partially) replaced by glorious empty space, into which moved an opportunity for me to look across and see myself as separate from the anxiety and sadness. A chance to know that they are not me and do not claim me. It didn’t fix everything, but it helped.

And when we moved to Australia over two years ago, and the walls began crashing in again and I felt, again, like I couldn’t breathe properly if at all, I sat in my doctor’s office and he told me that maybe it wasn’t supposed to be this hard. That maybe it didn’t have to be. So he increased my dosage, and that helped too.

That was two years and twelve pounds ago, and lately, as my clothes have gotten tighter and the space has returned and provided tools for my belt (just kidding, I don’t wear belts, my clothes are snug enough already), I’ve wondered if it might be time for a reassessment.

Self-guided, of course, because you can take the girl out of the controlling, but…anyway, I just wanted to try it. So last week I began halving pills. Back to my original dosage. And almost immediately I noticed an effect: tears.

(Full disclosure: when typing that, I accidentally spelled teats first. Sadly, that was not accurate.)

My tears came closer to the surface and past it. I was more easily affected, and this felt…wonderful. My friend had experienced it as well, once again lighting the path for me. I let the thickened throat and watery eyes take over at a champagne lunch for a foundation telling women’s stories of infertility and depression; I let it erupt at the ballet the next day; during afternoons with my kids when their observations humbled and wrecked me. During one unexpected moment involving the Hound and Arya.

There are times when the feelings are all too much. And there are times when they are the perfect salve, the most welcome old friend coming back.

Now I seem to be in the latter times.

Now is when the days are shorter and the evening cold creeps–or blasts, depending on the day–in, when parenting is hard but also beautiful, when we are all cutting back on our screens, when I’m cooking new things and my running mojo has returned. There may be a new Now down the road when I need the full dosage again or I have to (God forbid) return to hiking for exercise or I just don’t have the energy to be “present” enough to relegate the iPads to the shelf.

And we are waiting, always waiting, to know what our local package is, or where we’ll be in two years, or whether we need to get serious about looking at secondary education in Australia or not. Somehow along the way I had fooled myself into thinking there would ever be a time when we weren’t waiting, though. When we would be settled: into a final house, final city, final plan, where everything around us would be both Now and Future. Where I could breathe in that space.

That’s not the space, but I am breathing. Through tears, and laughter, through the way Little Brother calls us “guys” and the dearness and immediacy of it makes me stop clamouring to look ahead and grounds me in the beautiful and hard Now. Where the way The Kid’s excitement to greet me in the morning shows up in his grin and knowing look. Where I’m halving pills and turning on the heat and waking up in the dark to run and we’re possibly gearing up to sell our first home a continent away.

None of this, really, being in the plan, but in the Present.