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God’s acts of redemption work forward and backward, throwing fresh light on all our stories. –Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black

As previously mentioned, The Kid’s therapist has assigned him (us) a mindfulness activity to be accomplished every night before bedtime. This time period is, historically and currently, when The Worst Version of Myself takes over, full-force. I can barely form a sentence that doesn’t drip with resentment or exhaustion and, therefore, I’ve learned that the best thing for me to do is remove myself from other people (my family) and watch Rick Steves on YouTube from my bed in the hopes of giving myself the strength to handle my last requirements of the day as a mother.

“It doesn’t work if you don’t do it!” I seethed last night to TK, whose feelings about this new ritual/mandate are perfectly clear because that’s what he does with his feelings: show them. I’ve gotten myself into a bit of a quandary, too, because I’m left wondering how much of that Oscar-level feelings reveal is due to neurodivergence and how much is due to my constant encouragement that the boys talk about their feelings, to the point that sometimes I wish they’d shut up about their feelings, because there are too many damn feelings in this house especially at 8:30 pm.

“Is it worth it? Let me work it,” mused Missy Elliott right before she put her thang down, flipped it, and reversed it, and I wonder right along with her sometimes if the work of therapy, of mindfulness, of talking through everything, of feeling everything, is worth it myself. Like this morning, when Little Brother–on this first day of term two–gazed at me like I was going off to war as I walked away from his classroom with the principal, who asked how he was doing. “I don’t know shit about fuck,” I wanted to reply, even though I do know, because he tells me, because they both verbalise their feelings on the reg, and it can be a lot. Feeling things is always harder than…well, not feeling them. Not facing them.

Or facing them on your kids’ faces.

And yet I highly recommend it, this hard work of grief, of digging through the surface to the reality underneath. Yesterday, the boys and I were watching the first Harry Potter, and I grimaced when Harry approached the Mirror of Erised because we’ve trodden this territory before. Sure enough, TK watched Harry watching his parents, and tears filled his eyes. He turned away for a moment, the emotion overwhelming him–this greatest fear children have of losing their parents being played out onscreen–and then he turned back. Then he turned to me. “This is just so sad,” he said simply, profoundly, and in a moment I was transported back in time to all the emotions I internalised when I was younger because that’s what people did then–how I would more likely have seen the sadness and pushed it away, but how he grapples with it, how they both do, right there on the couch as I sit between them, and we feel it together.

This is not small. It is not nothing. It is everything, this willingness to feel, to face, to grieve well, to sit in discomfort rather than reach for relief. This week I watch through social media as some of my favourite people gather for my favourite event, and the #FOMO is real, and I let myself feel it right there in the middle of the grocery store a day ahead and half a world away. These moments that start out as pain are invitations into something even deeper than that, a joy that includes yet surpasses it, a safety that is imperturbable and hard-won yet a gift, a form of staying that we can only do because of the grace that stays with us.