Last Friday, the last day of Year Two, Term One, The Kid emerged from his classroom with a huge grin and some extra baggage: a bean plant he had been growing throughout the term in his science class. The other kids popped out with their own plants, in various stages of growth. A friend’s daughter lamented that her bean, for its part, had basically not done shit over the last few weeks: “Why is mine still beneath the dirt?! Why didn’t it GROW???”

Naturally, I was thrilled that TK’s little green stalk had made something of itself; that’s one less question I have to answer. It’s the small things, right? But not every growth experience yields similar results. Not every pathway through the muck leads to such visible length and light.

We arrived home and found a sunny place where the plant could continue living, and the next morning TK noticed that the bean had appeared to grow overnight. “It needs the moonlight too,” he concluded, his typical observational simplicity covering the depths beneath it; profundity masked by brevity.

I’m going “on holiday,” as they say here, in a week’s time, flying solo across the Pacific Ocean and most of the continental US to arrive in New York, where I’ll meet The Sis and give a talk, and a couple days after that we’ll hop down to Atlanta for me to briefly reunite with family, friends, and Super Target. The trip fills me with anticipation and anxiety, unsurprisingly: I can’t remember the last time I ventured through an airport without The Husband trustily holding my passport; nor can I remember the last time I sat inside a plane without a small hand tugging at me to go to the bathroom. I’ll be savouring every moment while counting them down until I see my three men’s faces again. It will be wonderful and tough; sunlight and moonlight.

One of my favourite (read: most outrage-inducing) parts of this journey is how people have stepped up to ask how TH will manage. I’m not talking about friends who offer to have the kids for a play or to check in; I’m talking about the acquaintances who ask whether they should bring meals by as if someone has DIED, or the ones who question if perhaps TH needs some live-in help? Like a child carer or cook or maid? Turns out that in 2019, some are still aghast at the thought of a man taking care of his own children solo for a spell. I love TH and will acknowledge at every turn the incredible husband and father he is (unless that turn occurs at 6 pm on a weekday and he hasn’t arrived home from work yet…), but do I think he should be immortalised as some kind of GD folk hero because he steps up to give me a mental break and mind his own offspring? I most decidedly DO NOT.

Props to TH for changing hundreds of diapers compared to my own dad’s ONE (love ya, Dad) and for making his own sandwiches, but let’s not contact the Nobel committee just yet when sisters have been doing it for themselves for centuries without an effing Meal Train delivery schedule, JUST SAYING.

That said (and now with me searching for a place to live for the next week), I’m interested to see what shape everyone will be in upon my return. The boys, for their part, will miss me while having a wrestling, physical, nugget-filled good time with the Fun Parent. TH will miss me too, but likely will enjoy leaving his half-empty water bottles wherever he damn well pleases and allowing cabinets and drawers to remain open whenever he wants.

Yin and yang. Tit and tat. When one side of the equation is missing, the whole thing gets lopsided and starts to crumble. When TH was away a few months ago, everything was in its place around our place, but we were woefully incomplete and–even though the laundry didn’t pile up–we wouldn’t have lasted much longer without him. I need the calm to my uptightness, the blue to my red, the “it’s fine” to my “EVERYTHING IS FALLING APART.” I need the kid whose favourite word is penis and the one whose favourite is why; the one who demands I watch him as he watches his iPad and the one who pushes me away (“But I still love you!”). I need a TK and an LB, and the world does too: TK’s friends need their calm port in a storm and LB’s need a PJ Masks-enthused dance partner. And they need each other: LB clinging to TK’s neck and begging him for a hug (“Brothers of love ALWAYS HUG!”); TK teaching LB about manual versus automatic transmission along with all the other nuances that people can overlook while dancing to PJ Masks.

We all need plants that grow slowly, beneath the soil, and those that emerge through it early, when we’re barely ready.

I returned from a run this morning and, keyless, rang our doorbell. Cue the pitter patter of small yet growing feet, the door handle jangling, and LB’s face appearing through the screen. “Mom, I need to tell you something!” was his greeting, before exclaiming frustratedly, “How do I get this OPEN?” I heard TH patiently (what’s that, this patience thing you speak of?) prod TK to help his brother, and seconds later, TK’s face appeared and the door was quickly opened. As I stepped forward, they both grinned their particular grins at me, leading me inside to my place, where TH waited. To home.

I haven’t been honest lately.

I haven’t been totally honest, at least, which is the same as being dishonest. I haven’t been honest here, which means I haven’t been honest with myself. When I write here, I try to let it all out: be open about the struggles I face, we all face, and describe them in their ugly and beautiful totality. This is therapeutic for me, because it’s real. Because it’s a process, getting to the end and pressing “Post,” and usually by that point I’m feeling a sense of relief at the journey having taken place: events and thoughts transcribed, grace observed.

The appeal of tying things up neatly is irresistible. Plus, no one wants to be a Debbie Downer. People talk about Debbie Downers (so I have been informed). And my penchant for order always pushes me in the direction of a tidy, if not happy, ending each week.

It’s just that that’s not always possible. More importantly, it’s not always true.

I’ve been overwhelmed by anxiety lately. And through conversations I’ve had and stories I’ve beheld, I know I’m not the only one. So consider this a pit stop, a bench to sit on together, if you’re anything like me: short of breath, an inch from losing your shit, taking it out on your partner and/or kids, full of regret, battling an eyelid twitch, suffering from insomnia, having the shakes, feeling…crazy.

And if that’s not you, chances are it’s someone you know and love. Life is unrelenting, in all the ways.

I developed my eyelid twitch (not to be confused with my actual eyeball twitch, #blessed) when I was living in New York and I had to quit a dicey job. Along with the twitch came some fun heart palpitations that sent me to the doctor, who in turn sent me out with an external heart monitor. Good times. After I shed myself of the job and its issues, the twitch and palpitations disappeared. But lately, my eyelid has gone haywire again. The other day, I was driving the boys to their respective schools while stuck in traffic. They were talking over each other in the backseat. I felt the old familiar feeling returning: panic, breathlessness, a need to escape what felt like drowning. I wanted to scream.

A couple of nights later, Little Brother fell asleep quickly but The Kid did…not. The Husband was out and I was all set for an hour or so of a TV movie with a glass of red. TK would not acquiesce to this plan. He was almost asleep and I got up to go when he awoke, asking where I was going.

I am not nice in moments like these. I very actively, in fact, end up hating myself for moments like these: my terse replies and emotional shutdown, my impatience and irritability with life not going according to my preordained plan. I brought TK upstairs with me and turned on Failure to Launch. It was not as good as I remembered it being in a theatre in New York with girlfriends. I turned it off and we went back downstairs. My teeth were gritted the whole time. My thoughts were dark. My skin pricked with rage and stress.

Last week, we had our Parent-Teacher meeting at TK’s school. His therapist had given me a heads-up of some of the things that might be discussed, which was a gift. Without that gift, I might have gone in expecting either the pleased surprise of his kindy teacher or the easily-discarded dumpster fire of last year. What we got was neither. What we got was a lot of truth.

That’s always the best. And the worst.

His teacher this year expects more of him, which means more is expected of us, which means there is no autopilot for parenting (how could I have forgotten?? But I did). We have been lulled by a series of successes into a resting-on-laurels state, an enjoyment of all that he’s proven himself capable of: dancing on stage, improving his handwriting, doing maths, coding like a mofo. But what used to be our main concern–his social interactions and behaviour–has both improved, and taken a backseat to the very real needs of academic and independence growth.

He learns differently, and we have to help him, and this is both hard and wonderful. I feel both suited for it and woefully inept. To put it another way: I was a star speller growing up, winning the state spelling bee in sixth grade. Spelling is not TK’s strong suit. How do I parent from a place so different to his, in this one example?

Well, last week I parented him to a nine out of ten on his spelling test, his highest score this year. This is not a brag, though, for if you had seen the carnage and screaming (his…mine) it took to get there, well…

Beauty on the other side of difficulty? I’m counting on it.

We’ve had an amazing couple of years, and now shit is getting real. Kids are getting older and new demands arise. How do we help them become who they’re meant to be? The pressure is overwhelming.

Hello, eye twitch.

TH, who is kinder than I deserve, took the boys off me for awhile this weekend and I finished my conference talk. I breathed. I walked, and ran. I used my new ALDI back massager, which is changing my life. I finished binging The OA.

But the best moment came once we were all together again, after a Sunday lunch, when we walked down to the beachfront and the boys settled into the sand. TH grabbed each of us a drink and we sat there, shaded in the afternoon sun, and we just were. Tears and laughter, anxiety and peace, all of it coexisting. Which is not to wrap things up neatly, but more to offer–to myself and anyone else who’d like to join–a port in the storm. Even when there isn’t one, overtly–some days the sun is shining and I’m wearing makeup and decent clothes–but life and weather are unrelenting. And this is grace, and love, this constant acceptance and fighting and figuring it out and messing it up, this grappling, together–facing the waves that both soothe and buffet us and remake the shoreline where we sit, day after day, nothing and everything changing all the time.

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.

The Sis called me lucky recently, in a conversation volleyed over an internet app, since we live across the world from each other (unlucky) but are able to communication instantly this way (lucky). Her description related to one aspect of my life thus far: celebrity spotting.

I know what you’re thinking: that’s some substantial shit. Enough to build an identity on! And you’re right, at least inasmuch that I’ve tried to build an identity on my knowledge of celebrity gossip (fuelled by a religious practice in my 20s and…maybe past that, sitting in the bookstore every weekend reading tabloids for free) and on being in the right place at the right time. Which is why I loved living in New York, the site of celebs living their “real lives” right where we could brush past them. I have a friend who would claim to see Tom Cruise’s brother or Katie Holmes’s cousin in each face we passed, but I on the other hand…I could spot the real deal a mile away. The Carters and Paltrow/Martins on the Upper East Side, Mandy Moore at Pastis…I should’ve kept a list. Apparently, Conan O’Brien is in Sydney right now and The Sis suggested I go find him. In that form of FOMO that sticks around long after the party is over, that part of me that still wants to be recognised for recognising led me to Ticketmaster to try to get into his show tomorrow night (spoiler alert: sold out).

I don’t have as much time (or energy) to stalk celebrities these days. I have two divas in my own home (three, if you count The Husband when he asks me if I would mind taking his dry-cleaning) who require full-time attention. And lucky isn’t a word I use much anymore, since blessed has taken its place. I am, of course, referring to the sarcastic version of that word with the hashtag in front, as #blessed is the name of a group chat of which I am a member as well as being a term my friends and I describe our lives when another kid has shit his pants or we forget to send cupcakes to school for a birthday. It’s all-encompassing, this word, in both sincerity and irony.

But lucky still pops up, like a way of hedging bets to keep from putting too fine a point on any situation, or of involving the divine in matters. Earnestness in relation to blessed, after all, implies the involvement of a Blesser and not everyone is on board with that. Which I get. But still…it’s the only way for me to survive.

Little Brother’s favourite teacher, and the director of his preschool, died last week (unlucky). The email relating the news was a punch to the gut, rendering me breathless there in my closet while the kids played in the next room and I felt a growing sense of dread over telling them. This man, who jokes with me about that carafe that looks like rosé in the school fridge, who calls LB “Groover” and tells him “toodle poodle” at the end of the day, who settles him when I’m dropping him off in the morning with a book on the sofa…he cannot be gone, but he is. Via an aneurism that leaves his wife a widow and his children fatherless and my sons with so many questions. Somehow, unlucky doesn’t sum it up. Doesn’t begin to capture the pain and loss so many are feeling right now.

The other day, on the way into school, The Kid asked me why not everyone has a therapist. I geared up emotionally, which for me looks like silent prayers and anxiety, and then he continued: “Are they just not lucky?” The breath left me, as always, at the beautiful way he sees his world.

And at the way LB said to me yesterday, “You know why I tell jokes, Mommy? To make you laugh.” This little performer, already so aware of others’ reactions, so different from his brother, and I get both of them: the thoughtful empath and the hilarious ham, each still so much more than that. Lucky.

But it’s not enough, this term. Was I lucky to have gotten to LB’s school last week in time to share one last joke with his teacher, or to arrive there that afternoon in time to witness a dance party in his classroom? Were we just lucky to have known him at all? Is TK lucky to have friends who, like this morning, bring him watches from their collections as gifts because they know he loves them? Am I lucky to smell salt water every day?

Are we unlucky to have to grieve a too-soon passing? Unlucky that I stepped on a sea urchin this weekend after a post-party dive into the ocean? Is TK unlucky to need a bit of extra help at times, or to face potential misunderstanding? Are we unlucky to be so far from friends and family across the world?

There’s no danger that I’ll stop using the hashtag version anytime soon, but I’m attempting to remember the sincere version, the one whispered as thanks in prayers over small heads, the one that acknowledges the faithfulness of someone outside myself even when I’d like to complain to management (him) about his techniques. This reality of being blessed, in the midst of loss and gain, of presence and absence, of ease and hardship, it is what connects and redefines the gulf between lucky and unlucky, what includes them both within its vast umbrella and makes them all, somehow, the same: grace.

Last night, as we were lying in their room and they were definitely not going to sleep–yet–the boys were asking me questions. All the questions. About school, zombies, our family. They like to ask about what happened prior to when they came along–calling it “Before Us”–and it goes something like this:

“Remember when it was just you and Daddy?”
“And then it was me?”
“And then it was just three of you because it wasn’t me yet?”
“And then Will came and there were four?”

“Yes,” I’ll say. “And then we were complete.”

Last night, Little Brother finished the story: “I like complete.”

I do too. I like it so much that I want to gather all the pieces of our story and make them symmetrical, matching, and done. I want to wrap it all up in a bow (or a tidy blog post) and have the ending all but written based on the parts before. I’m good at epilogues.

The annoying part is that our story is yet to be completely written, at least in chapters we can see, because we’re not the ones writing it. For example, last night as I traced my hand along The Kid’s lengthening leg trying to get him to nod off, I had a sudden image of sweaty armpits and puberty and it made me nearly hyperventilate. No, we still have story left, lots of it, God willing.

But there are themes we can count on, elements that tend to reappear and repeat.

The Husband just returned from a twelve-day trip to America, and it reminded me of his triplet of sojourns to Australia before we moved here, fact-finding and work missions. Those were the days when TK was five and LB was two. There were fewer questions about zombies, but everything else felt more difficult: unproductive toilet training, shorter winter days with longer darkness, fewer walking-distance friends to share it with. I would jump at every bump in the night.

This time, it’s summer and both boys have full school days, plus some: sport and school readiness on off days for LB, tennis on weekends for TK, swimming lessons for both. More ways to communicate beyond crying (for all of us). Friends nearby whose pools and company provide refuge. A house built like a fortress that allows us all to fall headfirst into the depths of sleep, along with earplugs to supplement.

It was easier, is what I’m saying. Not just because our surroundings have changed, but also because we have more experience–with life, with our story, with each other. We’re more of a team. We’re more us.

LB is more him, which means an innate awareness of his role as comedian of the family, his jokes–mispronounced words, toilet humour, pratfalls on the couch–accompanied by sideways glances to make sure we’re watching his perpetual show. TK as the older, more serious brother, the budding engineer who examines and questions everything, who gets a gleam in his eye when I tell him about how his teacher praised his coding skills.

There is more repetition in the responses of those around us as they continue to know us: laughter at LB’s antics, looks of empathy paired with “Are you okay?” as they see me navigating TK’s typical beginning-of-the-year anxiety and clinging to me, an anxiety I know all too well from my own childhood story. There are the studying looks his teachers give him giving way to enjoyment of his individuality, of his curiosity and kindness and gentleness.

Deja vu all over again.

And there is the familiar return of TH, the taxi delivering him safely to our driveway as the boys run out to greet him and I breathe a sigh of relief both because the workload has now lessened but also because you never truly know the ending of the story until it’s over, and ours is not. We’re complete once again, the four of us, our story continuing, incomplete as its pages keep being written yet complete in the hands of the one doing the writing.