“The word ‘however’ is like an imp coiled beneath your chair. It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen, and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin. There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.”

I am terrified of my boobs.

And not just them, but all the other accessories of being a female; these organs that allowed me to become a mom: ovaries and uterus and the whole lot, sitting there now not waiting to fulfil, or fulfilling, but like ticking time bombs. These are the places that are checked yearly with pokes and prods and massive machines that squeeze them within an inch of their life–and I thought nursing was painful.

I check what I can and leave the rest to the doctors and God, wondering secretly, pessimistically, if any of them will ever betray me. Though I threaten, within my own thoughts, to run away quite often, my worst nightmare is not being given a choice in the matter: of being forced by death to leave my family.

Uplifting, isn’t it?

But this is how I operate, I’ve come to realise: waiting for the next shoe to drop, the next big thing to happen, the next disaster to strike. If I get ahead of it, you see, I can pre-empt all the unwanted! Just like I sat in The Kid’s room while pregnant with him, my copy of Babywise at my side, and prayed over everything I could think of.

Turns out I didn’t think of everything.

I never do. And maybe this propensity to obsess so inefficiently is why, one month before we leave for America for Christmas and less than one month before we have to be out of our current house, I broke down in laughter last night over the fact that we haven’t found a place to live. “Hey, remember that time…WE FORGOT TO FIND A HOUSE?” I giggled to The Husband last night as he smiled, tersely, at the ridiculousness of our life right now: living year to year, day to day, moment to moment, planners with no concrete plan. We were meant to be returning to America to stay this trip. Now we’re returning to leave again. To come back to…a home we haven’t discovered yet.

This is insane.

The things that used to work on my behalf–boobs, day planners, calendars–now sit empty, mocking me, illuminating with blinding fluorescent light my lack of control.

I’ve decided to start laughing along with them.

“When I’m an adult, you’ll die,” TK said to me the other night as Little Brother snored beside us. “Or maybe we’ll die at the same time,” he concluded, and I had to stop myself from telling him, “Dude, that’s best-case scenario,” since I had earlier told them both, accidentally, about Hitler and I had no more room for questions and panic. LB has been going through enough at school with a friend who, by growling and hitting and yelling, has transformed into enemy and left LB drained of confidence and joy about his formerly safe home-away-from home. Just yesterday, I drew a love heart button on his wrist and mine as TK proclaimed, “I don’t need those anymore,” and I thought about how time makes fools of us all: fools, and champions, and wiser, and realising all we don’t know. It changes and it leaves the same.

And I’ve been doing it–time–all wrong.

The diarist and author Sarah Manguso writes, “All I could see in the world were beginnings and endings…I knew I was getting somewhere when I began losing interest in the beginnings and the ends of things.”

She goes on: “The experiences that demanded I yield control to a force greater than my will–diagnoses, deaths, unbreakable vows–weren’t the beginnings or ends of anything. They were the moments when I was forced to admit that beginnings and ends are illusory. That history doesn’t begin or end, but it continues…I began to inhabit time differently. I used to exist against the continuity of time. Then I became the baby’s continuity…the agent of comfort that was always there for him…Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments–an inability to accept life as ongoing. It comforts me that endings are thus formally unappealing to me–that more than beginning or ending, I enjoy continuing.”

I have a fixation on moments, but not in a “let’s savour this and take a mental picture way;” more in a “let’s get to the next one” way. Let’s get past the next boob-smashing mammogram. Let’s get past the part where we don’t know where we will live, where we have boxes stacked up in our living room, where LB is afraid to go to his last few weeks of preschool, where TK has his next MRI.

Meanwhile, my own mortality sounds like a gong in the background. I get a death-defying sunburn in the one place I forgot to slather cream. I have a funny pain in my chest. My cycle is…off. And I think to myself…what if I just stayed here, in this moment, the one time will surely take away and turn into something else, but for now the only one I have?

Sometimes I succeed. Often I don’t. But when I do, I’ve noticed how much it can glow, suspended from yet connected to all the ones before and after it, like a sparkle on the ocean water that seems to disappear…yet always comes back.