It’s the most wonderful time of the year, and you know what that means…

We’re due to move to another f*ing house!

This, after a weeks-long roller-coaster ride of home inspections, auction considerations, banking consultations, back-and-forth decision-making… and emotions. Oh, the emotions tied up in where we live: the sadness of leaving one place that’s become home mixed with the missing of the landmarks we’ve enjoyed there (indoor pool, hiking trail down to the water in our backyard, cafes and restaurants). It’s such a gross, privileged thing to say–“How I’ll miss swimming early-morning laps in my indoor pool, Jeeves!”–but here we are, giving up some of our expat package-covered amenities in favour of a more realistic life choice.

So within the next week and a half we will do the following: manage Little Brother’s newfound bully-provoked fear of going to preschool on Mondays and Tuesdays (he’s sitting beside me as I write this, the second day in a row I’ve let him stay home); a weekday night of The Husband and me going in separate directions (he to a work dinner, I to The Nutcracker) while a sitter stays with the boys; The Kid’s birthday party; a Christmas dinner/farewell-to-this house party with close friends and their kids; LB’s end-of-year school performance; TK’s end-of-year school performance; TK’s end-of-year presentation day; and a bunch of other stuff I’m forgetting.

My calendar, typically a sparsely populated smattering of events (and I like it that way), looks like a Rorschach test this time of year and I twitch every time I go near it. I don’t know how we’re going to get from where we are now–fully settled into our current house but with extra boxes from America strewn about–to settled (somewhat) into a new house a few blocks away. I don’t know how we’ll do it, but I know that we will, because we’ve done it twice here already and we haven’t killed each other yet (though I am glad we already had those family photos taken because I’m not sure we’ll be mustering smiles by the end of this).

And there are the teeny little bitchy things I’m obsessing over in the corners of my mind: I don’t love the house. The bathrooms could use some updating (look, I’ve been picky about bathrooms since I was a kid and smelled sulfur water at my grandparents’ place in the country and need I remind anyone of my childhood camping experience? I like sleek surfaces and new toilets and SUE ME BUT THIS IS WHO I AM). I am not high-maintenance about some things–I’ll buy the shit out of some clothes at Target and I only recently started investing, after years of my sister’s derision, in higher-quality hair care and don’t even LOOK at the state of some of my underwear–but show me a mild carpet stain of unknown origin at my place of residence and THERE WILL BE GAGGING.

It’s not lost on me, how this yearly chaos and search for home (and the attendant existential crisis about what exactly home is) falls during the season of Advent. A season meant for slowing down, for slow approaches, for promises kept by being fulfilled in ways surprising, unexpected, and unplanned. A fellow expat friend said it best over text recently when she talked about how Sydney real estate constantly reminds her that we will never have a perfect home this side of eternity. (“So true,” I responded. “But the bathrooms…” I still inwardly wailed).

But the moments, the slow burn toward Christmas, are where I’m looking to live right now. And they keep turning up, if I only look. There was the pop-up elf station at the mall yesterday, manned by a caffeinated, kindly grandmother-type and a good-natured twenty-something dude, where LB and I sat and made a reindeer mask and can I tell you that twenty minutes spent colouring with him were even more therapeutic than a hot bath and some Kenny G?

And there was the email I received yesterday, the first of its kind in the three years since we’ve been here, informing me that TK has been chosen for an award that will be given at his presentation day and the tears that sprang to my eyes were the redeemed kind: born not of the responses that the parent-I-was-going-to-be would have had (“Finally! Everyone will see what a great mom I am,” or “This will be fantastic for his resume!) but the burned-through-fire, sifted-through-his-story kind that just know what kind of joy will jump to his face when his name is called.

There is the pine-scented candle I just bought, the two Advent books I return to yearly as my story changes and doesn’t and so do/don’t I; the music piped through radio and phone, the tree we will put up at our new-old house, the self-enforced slowing even as the world seems to pick up speed.

And there was the moment on Sunday, while LB played downstairs with the rest of the kids and TK sat in his preferred spot on the pew between me and TH, when they were passing the bread and wine and I realised TK had never had communion. I asked if he wanted the bread, and his main concern was whether that would serve as his morning tea and would thus mean giving up the tray of cookies waiting outside. I said no, he could still have tea, and that the bread wasn’t a snack but a sign of something bigger done on his behalf. And I know he didn’t understand it fully–hell, I still don’t, but there’s this: we believe not in our own full faith and understanding of something as a necessary precursor before acceptance is acknowledged but in the full faith and understanding of the One who accepts us already, and that providing everything we need. Because it is that–that acknowledgment, that intrusion, that grace, that shows up not at my bidding but as gift. As unexpected and unplanned. As a welcoming–a welcoming home.