Plans In Pencil

Who dares despise the day of small things…?

We are home. A round-trip nine-hour drive split twice over two days, countless stops at McDonald’s, a mountain of laundry, and a week of meaningful connection later, we are home. Just in time for school holidays! Which means that on the days the boys aren’t in basketball camp (which is all of the days, but for two), I’m frantically (my only style) searching to fill our time with something other than iPad screens and, in the process, usually spending too much money on things like mall toys, and some movie about superhero dogs. The terrestrial edging out the transcendent, as usual.

But also not? Because amidst the boys’ constant bickering and my perpetual tendency to turn parenting into an arm of the law rather than an avenue of grace, there comes the transcendent, the merciful, the everyday-glorious, again and again: there are the cards of encouragement that the siblings at autism camp wrote to each other, and I sneak a peek at Little Brother’s stack and am brought to tears by how well he was seen there, in a matter of just days. There’s the flood-like forecast that is replaced by a morning of sun and calm waters before the storm, and a swim that cements our return home. There are the moments of forgiveness after harsh words spoken by them and me. There’s the rainbow at the end of a run.

There’s the recounting, by LB, of how he overheard a kid at camp saying he wished he weren’t autistic, and LB marvelling at it to me–“but it’s cool to have a disability! It makes the world more interesting!”–followed by “what’s my disability?”

His is a rose-coloured-glasses view of disability to be sure, but not one I’d discount completely, defined as it is by his signature brand of acceptance. He’s currently more inclined to see the positive side of disability, which is an imbalance I can live with for the moment. There’s enough shame and misunderstanding around the word–disability–that if he wants to be its champion for now….well, fine by me. He’ll learn in time that so much of the challenges associated with disability, the reasons for the label itself, have to do with the world not being set up to accomodate those who think/learn/move/communicate differently.

He’ll learn a lot in time, but at this time–the last days of his being seven before his coming weekend birthday–he’s often the one doing the teaching. The “American Boy” from camp singing songs about a Psycho Penis from the backseat of the car (“Um…Will? I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t think that will make it to radio”–The Kid); the one who so often faces his fears silently but will celebrate loudly afterward; the one who explained to a kid at camp who was nudged by a basketball thrown by TK that it was an accident (hello, his name means Protector and he is living into it).

Although TK isn’t so keen on spending an entire day celebrating LB (he’d rather have two birthdays himself, and I am comforted by others’ tales of this same phenomena appearing in their own children; keep ’em coming), celebrate we will, the transcendent amidst the terrestrial: differences making the world a bigger and more interesting place; returns home; sun through the rain making rainbows; and the caboose of our family, who somehow so often ends up being the one who leads us.

You don’t have to go it alone…Sometimes you can’t make it on your own

“Don’t be silly,” she said to me.

It was an act of mercy, in the face of my child who was very much losing it at her, for no ostensible reason–but here, reason is not a requirement. The underneath is understood. We who have lived in the trenches–which is all of us, really, though some are trying really hard to redecorate their way into a more filtered existence above-ground–know all about the underneath. The layers. The not-readily-apparent.

So anyway, she understood. And as I walked with The Kid back to our cabin to uncover what was underneath the tears, she showed mercy; she gave a kindness born of our similar struggles and comparable journeys. 

We’re at autism camp. It’s not as common a thing as basketball camp, or drama camp, or that camp where they let your kid pretend to be in a rock band for a week, but it exists, and we found it (or it found us?), and we’re here. “Here” is many things: a hinterland setting (that’s “in the mountains” in Australian), a rustic cabin with lumpy mattresses and a tiny shared bathroom (Jesus is testing me), morning and afternoon programs for TK and Little Brother and their assigned caregivers and new friends, free time for me and The Husband. A nine-hour drive split over two days to get here, the same to get back. No wine. 

Here: surrounded by mountains and kangaroos and people who have stopped redecorating their trench, who no longer try to claw their way out of it, but who have begun to look around and make it a home, and in so doing realise that the walls are actually moveable and the roof retractable and there is more space than they originally thought, more ways for the sunlight to get in. And–would you look at that?!–it’s actually above-ground.

Last night, our fourth out of five here, we found ourselves not out on the grass playing tip/tag as usual, and not on the tennis court playing the game TH invented that now all the kids (and some of the parents) know better than real tennis, but inside the lounge area with our eyes glued on The Bad Guys. Thirty or so of us, never having laid eyes on each other before Sunday, now talking and watching and sitting and just being together, feeling very much like some sort of family. We don’t need the name tags anymore.

With spotty internet and kids otherwise engaged, I’ve had time to read. When I’m not delving further into my comfort zone of the wives of Henry VIII, I’ve been nodding/crying my way through my friend David Zahl’s new Low Anthropology, and yesterday by the pool, before the current rain kicked up, I celebrated the gift of being seen and understood—a theme for this week.

If we want the rewards of being loved, we must submit to the terrifying ordeal of being known.

The redhead whose mum showed me mercy, regaled me with poop jokes last night at dinner and calls me “yo mama” and tells me that I laugh too much. The surfer guy who is another kid’s carer asked TK this morning to remind him of which rock you use to break through a portal in Minecraft, just after the other surfer guy who is not his carer recounted the story of TK jumping on his back when their canoe tipped yesterday. LB is called “American Dude” by the kid he calls “Dutch Boy.” 

A low anthropologist is freed to interact with their fellow anxious wrecks out of compassion for a shared predicament rather than out of inferiority or envy.

This morning at breakfast, I was pouring coffee when I heard TK. “Sorry for yesterday,” he told the merciful mum (with no prompting from me!), and we all sat down together to eat our shared food over our shared stories. ”Don’t be silly,” she had told me the day before, and “it’s okay,” she told him now, as the different-than-but-similar-to-tennis game raged outside and I forgot whose kids were whose, and which families were which. “We’ve all been there.”

“For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.” —CS Lewis

“Everything was once new,” said Little Brother from the backseat this morning on the way to school, in one of those slap-you-in-the-face moments of truth that only a child can provide, the simple profundity of a mind open to possibility.

Those children of mine–they say amazing things, and they ask too many questions. I am exhausted by their questions, particularly the ones they ask late at night and early in the morning or while we’re trying to get out the door, the questions they ask over each other and through the noise of daily life. Recently I asked (ha) an acquaintance if her kid also pummels her with constant queries. She thought about it and said, “No. Not really.”

How nice of him. But also, how sad. (Then again, maybe he just goes and grabs an encyclopaedia–or what we now call Google–to provide answers. If so, how really nice of him.) Because it’s only at this point in my life that I’m learning to appropriately value uncertainty, that I see how curiosity keeps us alive, and that it’s only through questions–not knowing it all, not having every answer, but questions, and the willingness to be unknowledgeable or just plain wrong–that we change and grow.

I guess some people don’t need to do either of those things, but I sure as hell do. And I’ve travelled the terrain from offended to amused when I find myself 180 nautical degrees (not a thing) from where I was on any given person, place, or issue. When Facebook reminds me of what now are my most Cringe-Worthy Moments, my Greatest Hits of Assholery from the past. It’s enough to make me wonder what I’m wrong about right now.

We took the kids to a show about stories at the Opera House recently, and while LB laughed his head off at every swear word uttered, The Kid sat beside me and whispered, “What is everyone laughing about?” The emcee had just delivered a very average joke and TK protested, “That wasn’t even funny.” I explained to him that sometimes people laugh to be polite and spare another person’s feelings. Confusion screwed up his face. “Polite laughter? That’s just dumb. If it’s not funny, don’t laugh.”

Words to live by. I watch his divergent brain try to make sense of a typical world and know that his curiosity about it all informs and richens my own experience; that his questions are a window into the much more of his processing differences. When we stop asking questions, or stop trying to find the answers to them? That’s when we’ve stopped growing. Stopped changing. Stopped becoming.

I read it a few days ago, someone writing that longing is a form of hope. Let that sit for a minute–I know I had to. Longing being the recognition that there is more than we can see, more than we know. That this more is not a threat, but an invitation. Curiosity is, I think, an engagement with longing, a grappling with what is beyond us. A refusal to circumscribe our lives around the smallness of what we know.

“There’s a shitload of things you don’t know, child,” says Queenie in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I want to say the same to my kids, to myself, but instead, in a moment of grace, it comes out as an encouragement to stay curious, which is to invite the longing in, wrestle and dance with it, end a swim in it and float there in the salty grace of it stretching out further than I could ever see.

I remember when I found out I was pregnant, finally, with Little Brother. I was talking to a friend who had just had her second about how love works in these scenarios; how the love she’d felt for her first had overwhelmed her, how she’d worried she wouldn’t have as much to give the second time around. How unfounded those worries had been, because this is not how love works–in some zero sum game, some exercise in division–but how it grows, multiplies, to meet demands.

I found the same to be true, of course. The impossibility of loving two kids equally, in defiance of maths and logic, is somehow true. There is always enough love to go around.

Kids know this, but somehow it’s trained out of us as we grow. This morning I read with LB’s class and all the kids came down hard on one who had, they thought, read more than her share. We headed back to the classroom but she remained in her spot, where I saw her choking on sobs at being misunderstood. Before I even got to her, a group of her classmates raced to her, turning on a dime from attack to empathy mode. Kids don’t falter, weighing the cost of vulnerability; they just love.

When I was dating, every time it didn’t work out (which was every time, but one), I panicked at what was slipping away, fearful it wouldn’t return. And it didn’t, but was replaced by what was better. I feared, I know now, that there would not be enough love remaining in the world when it was my turn to receive it. Now I know the lie that fear creates: that there is not enough for me and everyone else. I know how quickly I can move into strategy mode to protect myself from loss. How this only begets more loss: loss of empathy, loss of true connection.

I wonder, if I had known when I was younger that I was headed, always, for love–that there were days ahead when I’d marvel at the sense of safety and belonging embedded in that love–if I would have managed my life less and lived it more.

If I would remember that we’ll all get through traffic to our destination, that one person getting a book deal doesn’t take away my chance, would leave some room to breathe and just be. (With less flipped birds and road rage and “you dick” muttered not-so-much-under-my-breath.)

This fear of not enough–this scarcity mindset–I find it pockmarking my entire history, and I’m kind of over it? Generosity extended toward others reveals in ourselves whether we really think there is enough in the world–whether we live from a place of scarcity or abundance, and I find so often that I can resemble the worst of it, echoing those I’ve known through the years who believed in a story of a few fish and loaves feeding five thousand but not enough money to support tax breaks and relief packages for those in need. It all seems…contradictory.

In his poem “Desert Places,” Robert Frost wrote:

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces

between stars–on stars where no human race is.

I have it in me so much nearer home

To scare myself with my own desert places.

The only emptiness, the only scarcity, is shown in what I allow to be missing from me. Because what I know to be true–what has been shown, finally, to me–is how much more there is than I can see. That, occasionally, my eyes open just wide enough to see glimpses of it, this more, and it is a lot closer to too much than not enough.

Not long (enough) ago, our family endured the diagnosis of pinworms. For those of you lucky enough not to know what that means, I invite you to Google the topic. We got through it, after some hot-water wash cycles and chocolate medicine, but not before TK–in an inspired moment of strategic avoidance–informed his psychologist during his session that his “mom has butt worms.”

Luckily, she was mature and gracious about it, informing him that it’s a common occurrence, while I wanted to scream out “WELL I PROBABLY GOT THEM FROM HIM” because, as the doctor informed me, kids are the likely source and recent research shows we couldn’t blame the dog. Regardless of the source, we all had to take the medicine, because this is a condition easily passed between family members. So we ate our chocolate squares with our meal, twice in three weeks, and came out the other side so to speak, together.

Butt worm proclamations notwithstanding, TK is reaching that age where he’s really concerned about what people think, and last weekend when we headed out to the dog park, he took issue with the fact that I was wearing one of TH’s hats. “It doesn’t look good on you,” he said, “and it’s not yours.” I challenged him on every point, until finally, in a fit of frustration, he yelled out, “I just want to look like a NORMAL FAMILY!”

Oh honey, that ship, she has sailed. And we were never on it. Didn’t even get tickets.

But I remember feeling the same way as a kid: not wanting to stand out in any possible way; just wanting to fly under the radar. I remember it, actually, as an adult, not long (enough) ago: the desire to blend in at all costs. To pursue “normal” as a virtue. It did not work out for me. Introverted powers of observation combined with the self-awareness gained through therapy meant normal was sidelined for the flattening joke that it is, and here I sit in another category entirely–one that is more populated than I expected, and by people I’d rather be with anyway.

“If we are artists–hell, whether or not we’re artists,” writes Dani Shapiro, “it is our job, our responsibility, perhaps even our sacred calling, to take whatever life has handed us and make something new, something that wouldn’t have existed if not for the fire, the genetic mutation, the sick baby, the accident.”

Something not quite…normal.

A friend dragged me off the couch last night at the ungodly, middle-of-the-night hour of 9:15 to see a play, and for about fifty minutes we watched as one woman performed a day in a life spinning out of control–not because of anything extraordinary, but because of the banalities of a normal existence. “I resemble this,” I thought, watching the woman’s mental health suffer under all the weight she carried, “even if she’s being a bit melodramatic and attention-seeking about it,” I wrote later from my weekly blog in which I publish my overwrought, innermost thoughts on social media.

The thing about landing left of normal, and realising that’s where you belong, is that you come to find there’s a piece of everyone there, whether they admit it or not. Some of the people there, the ones who finally admit that’s where they belong too, they start to look like family. Which is how you end up finding your place wherever you are: in the audience of a play, at a pub with your kids’ soccer team and their families, at the dog park on the Lord’s day, on the school playground or in the audience at an assembly. This belonging you never expected, all because you went and told (yourself) the truth…and put on the nervous sweatshirt your friend got you because she knows you like family…and stopped trying to be so normal.

Oh goody, another post about being tired.

TH and I joined some friends over the weekend for a social outing–the first of its specific kind in three years. The boys’ school fundraiser, a themed event requiring what the Aussies call “fancy dress” (ie costumes), typically occurs during the wintry month of August but has been sidelined since 2019 due to Covid.

This year they made up for it.

I did, at least, my ears pricking up at the mention of a French champagne-filled-open bar and an 80s DJ, and I flitted around that place in my Max Mayfield costume like some sort of extrovert as people questioned whether I was Britney Spears or Raggedy Ann (foreshadowing the next day, when I would be Raggedy AF). I visited tables and plopped onto friends’ laps and asked inappropriate questions as though I were some sort of psycho who gets energy from social situations, who actually enjoys talking to other people. I guess this is what three years of sporadic lockdown and perpetual panic does to an introvert?

When I tell you it wore me out…I am still exhausted from every part of it. The effort leading into it, the fine motor skills demanded by the decor setup, the suboptimal liver function afterward…it was a journey. A journey that I enjoyed (mostly) and that I’m glad is now over. “I’m just so tired,” I moaned over Voxer and to anyone in person who would listen, exchanging hangover stories and night-of in-jokes and recovery comparisons.

This form of exhaustion that I–in my recovered introversion-founded analysis–associate most readily with my age is, I think, deeper than that while certainly including it. My body is quicker to tell me these days what I already know: what is good for me, and what is not. I can no longer sleep through an early-morning headache, and hair-of-the-dog college efforts are frowned upon at 9am on the kids’ soccer field. But there’s also a nagging question further down, beneath the quips about advancing years and too many drinks:

Are we ready for this?

Because I don’t know if I am. I don’t know if the events (and non-events) of the past two years have been adequately processed–actually, I know they haven’t been. In Bittersweet, Susan Cain writes about “disenfranchised griefs” and, while I know it’s not fun party talk, I know there’s something to the idea (truth) that the pain we haven’t sat with, the difficulties we haven’t faced, don’t just go away, they simply find another place to live and pop up there. As they say, our bodies tell the story, and mine is exhausted. Overwhelmingly, achingly, existentially exhausted.

I go on a run anyway, just to prove I can. I book another show at the Opera House because I can’t miss that one. The sun comes out, radiantly, and a friend and I discuss local springtime happy hours, and I wonder if I actually know what’s good for me and what’s not. Yes, and no. And as I search for a photo to add to this post, I find one TK took of a group of cockatoos yesterday on our walk with the dog, which was exhausting and from which we came home and fell on the couch together, his memory of that walk more beautiful than mine and not less accurate and, now, something I can just see, in a moment of stillness within the exhaustion, like he did.

Last week I celebrated my birthday. I found it deeply offensive to turn forty-five, as it’s the oldest I’ve ever been and that number just sounds #ancientAF. It’s half of ninety, for God’s sake!

For the occasion, I asked a best friend whose kids are TK and LB’s best friends (this has all been legally noted) to pick the boys up from school and take them to hers. She responded with a yes, but her kids responded by getting Covid, so while shivering through a swim I pondered whether to cancel either the fancy lunch or the boozy movie that TH and I had planned.

Obvi the fancy lunch had to go.

Another friend stepped in, which is how, on the afternoon of a Friday birthday, I found myself with TH, three glasses of Mumm deep at a viewing of Nope. After that, we bought my favo(u)rite grocery store layer cake and stopped at said friend’s by to a) drink more champagne; b) eat the cake; and c) collect the children.

It was a good day.

I’m still offended, however, at being this old, even as I know how lucky I am to still be here, convinced as I was as a child that I would die early in melodramatic fashion (I watched the movie Beaches a lot). But with the offence I have to acknowledge the benefits of making it out of my 30s, and especially out of my 20s–a decade fraught with insecurity and bad choices.

There is a settledness now. Paired with it is a lack of excitement that makes a 1pm movie (in recliners! with table service!) a real treat; that makes Fridays in de rigeur and Saturdays in a consummate joy. I buy half- and quarter-bottles of wine at Dan Murphy’s now so that I don’t overserve myself (which, these days, is anything more than two). I get told (by the masseuse at the spa in the mountains that I rush off from to buy the kids Domino’s so the adults can have dinner down the hall on their own which is a wild night out) that my feet need more arch support and I’m carrying my right shoulder higher and that side of my back is in knots so I concentrate my back pillow there and buy shoe inserts and it turns out she’s so right. I feel my knees start to give way on runs, bone grinding against bone, and wonder how much longer I can do that. I put the kids to bed and wonder if I’ll still be here when they are forty-five.

I am still me, annoyingly. But I am also something different. I recognise love in so many forms I didn’t know it could take. That all the “disruptions” in my life have actually been kept promises that led me further toward a home that may feel foreign and transient but is deep and real and, often, not geographical at all. I have learned to accept, sometimes even embrace, what has pinned me against a wall (or rock, as it were) and brought me to the end of myself. I have learned that at that point–the end of self–a desperation is formed that leads to new life, because so much can grow from the seeds of desperation, depending on what you use as water.

I have found a deep sense of belonging, and not where I expected–yes, within the folds of family, but also on the edges: among the different, the misunderstood, the homed yet wandering, those in touch with both deep grief and deep joy. If faith, as Frank Lake said, is a “desperate gaze in a counterintuitive direction,” then count me a fanatic because that is exactly how I have learned to direct my eyes: desperately, and counterintuitively.

Turns out the view is rugged, terrifying, beautiful–and abounding in grace.

Recently I was in a meeting that I wish had been an email. Tensions were running high and I sat there on Zoom–my video turned off because it was after sunset at which point I lose all makeup and manners–listening to the tension erupt in frustration directed…where, exactly, I wasn’t sure. I just felt it like it was directed at me because that’s what I do (thank you, Inner Child): become Teflon with positive moments and a sponge to negative ones.

Once it was over, the business of bedtime began–itself not the most fun part of the day–and I mentioned to The Husband that I felt like I was in trouble for not meeting expectations that I never assented to, but there was also the possibility that I was misinterpreting everything, and the whole episode was just a steaming pile of shit that would definitely keep me from falling asleep. He dutifully supported me while undoubtedly wondering for the millionth time why I let things get to me so much even though I have explained to him at least a million times that I’m super-sensitive and also lovably insane, and he signed up for this.

Every time I think I’ve grown beyond my younger self, beyond my fears and misapprehensions (for God’s sake, I’ll be 45 tomorrow), beyond the ickiness of feeling misunderstood and caring about that at all, I bump up against the boundaries of myself and realise I maybe haven’t grown as much as I thought. I am always, still, often annoyingly, me, with the same tendencies and flaws as ever–sure, fewer fucks are mixed in to be given, but that doesn’t overhaul the structure entirely. I’ve learned to deal with these tendencies, to breathe and pray and meditate through them, and, perhaps most importantly, to recognise them, but as for making them disappear? No such luck.

Yet along with fewer fucks comes more: more to mix in, to dilute the fears and flaws, or even change the way I see them. The stretching of our physical boundaries, finally after a two-year wait, on a return to the Blue Mountains and Christmas in July (August, actually–thanks, Covid), this time with friends, and we share life together at indoor pools and on basketball courts and over dinner tables and bottles of wine, and I see myself in a place I never knew existed not that long ago, among people I’d never met who are now like family, and I know that boundaries–of place and self, often simultaneously–they do grow.

I get an email–“this made me think of you” in the subject line–from a friend, a fellow writer who has shared a treatise on storytelling that somehow paints in words something I’ve been thinking on exactly for weeks now, and I think of how some of the fears and flaws themselves are what led me to thinking, to writing–to growing–and that this alchemy, this chemistry of change, is less straightforward and black-and-white than I still give it credit for.

One day last week the kids were encouraged to dress as their future selves at school, and TK threw on his Pelicans jersey because he plans–as a white male of average height with coordination issues–to be an NBA player. When we arrived to the schoolyard, he expressed his outrage to me at a fellow student’s Spider-Man costume.

Too unrealistic.

I couldn’t help but laugh, at his blind spots and mine, how we grow aware of some of them as we age and how some will always escape our recognition. At how today he sees himself as a worthy contender for the NBA, and I still sometimes see myself as some version of myself I am currently not–a go-getter, a big-picture person, a multitasker, a relaxed hostess–until I realise, bumping up against the edges of myself, that I am so not that. Which doesn’t mean I, or he, is less than that. Maybe it means we’re just having to grow into the more that we actually are.

What about when you get stopped in your tracks?

I don’t like to pause during my runs because I know that if my body gets a taste of a break, it may not start back again. But occasionally, I have to take a detour to the nearest toilet, or (in very much the opposite vein), I’m startled by a sunrise or beach scene or both that is so beautiful I have to snap a photo.

I don’t like pausing in life, either, from my previously planned programming; from the way I thought things were going to be. From the steady thrum of existence, which is to say my routine, the drop-offs and pick-ups and laundry cycles and reading moments and writing assignments. From the to-do list that I often turn life itself into.

Covid has interrupted that list with its ever-magnificent intrusiveness lately, first striking The Kid within a couple of days after camp ended, then hitting Little Brother three days later (with daily-if-not-more-frequent RATs in between in an effort to secure maximum overlap). This means that for a week and a half now, one or both boys have been at home with me.

Plans paused. Unwilling break taken.

“Turn in the direction of beauty,” Susan Cain writes, and girl? I try, I really do. It helps if my face is already headed in that direction, like when I’m running toward the sunrise and beach simultaneously and literally cannot miss them, but other moments require a more intentional gaze. Like when, for example, I’m about to crawl out of my skin with the need for solitude and it just ain’t happening.

Still, though (which should be a finalist for the title of my next unwritten memoir)–“there is beauty in what is,” according to Dani Shapiro. And there are moments when this beauty must be wrangled from what looks like disaster just like the moments I’m wresting away from the jaws of LB to write this. (We’ll have to burn the iPads after this current round of sickness.)

There are moments, for example, when you take your (currently) non-Covid-infected son to his first tennis lesson with a new coach and you ask him in front of the coach if there’s anything he wants to tell the coach about himself, and predictably (and wonderfully), TK tells him about his autism, and the coach, uneducatedly and not so wonderfully but perhaps thrown off guard, replies, “That’s okay, you can still be a good tennis player,” and you sigh with all the holier-than-thou wisdom foisted upon you since his diagnosis, sit down on the bench to watch the lesson, and then, unexpectedly because it’s been awhile since you’ve had one of these moments, a wave of emotion sweeps over you and the tears come and you wish you’d brought your sunglasses.

But you’ve learned. And so, instead of running to the shore, you ride the wave, because you know you can. Because you know you’re held. And after all the feelings come, and you’ve met each of them with your face and heart fully turned in their direction, you reach the other side of the wave, where in the calm you remember again what becomes truer with every wave, with every remembrance. And to this truth you cling, or maybe it’s that it clings to you: everything is going to be okay. And what could be wishful thinking or a dismissive cliché (at one time or another, it’s been both; in the wrong hands, it still is) is, in this moment and every one from now on, a promise.

The tears dry, but not before they sharpen your vision to what’s in front of you: a boy playing tennis against a backdrop that includes rolling hills, beaches, home. Beauty, all of it.

I’ve been reading Bittersweet, and it has been at turns revelatory and affirming, just as Quiet was before it. Entering into our pain, and going a step beyond to make a creative offering of it, isn’t something our culture–even our genetics, often–gears us to do, but I am so here for it.

Longing, grief, brokenness, pain, sorrow–these are the black keys on the piano of life, the feelings that are more than feelings that we try to opt out of, avoid, because of their perceived negativity which is really just dimensionality–fullness. There is a weight to these states that must be grappled with; once encountered eye-to-eye, they can’t just be blown off. My nature, apparently, is to grapple. I am at home among these black keys, and the music they make is at first odd and mournful, and then, always, hauntingly beautiful.

It’s the odd and mournful part that comes first, though. And even if you’re willing to sit through that, not everyone around you will. Which is also fine with me, because I’m not a fan of crowds.

Last week at this time I was climbing a mountain. Or a hill. Or some inclined natural structure, one-point-five kilometres to its summit, the last third of which was, according to the sign warning/tempting me away, “unformed and steep.” Thoughts of ticks and snakes and dingoes and rapists (isn’t it fun being a woman? #blessed) pinging around my brain, I ascended, much of the time on all fours, pausing to turn back approximately two thousand times before arriving at the peak, sweaty and proud. It had only taken me about thirty minutes and forty-four years to get there.

There was a small town fifteen minutes from my son’s overnight school camp. There was three hours from our home in Sydney. There was a country of which I am now a citizen that happens to be ten thousand miles from another country of which I am also a citizen. There was through the wilds and glories of my son’s additional needs, brought to you by neurodivergence in the form of autism, and through the wilds and glories of my own additional needs, brought to you by anxiety and all the other little quirks of my own brain. There was a rental with two other friends who understand, and to some degree or other experience, all of this.

There was a spot on a mountaintop on a coastline filled with beauty I never would have seen had I not been forced onto those black keys my whole life, making music of a sort I’d never planned. There and here are the same now, this searing beauty always hand-in-hand with difficulty, difference, divergence. They are inextricable, and now I am inextricable from them.

The Kid made it through both days of camp and stayed with me at night, and this was neither disappointing nor perfect, but something beyond both–something called exactly how it should be. For him, right now. For us. For the minor keys we inhabit, the ones that require a bit of nimbleness because they aren’t each neatly beside each other but scattered about in their own pattern, producing a song that contains every note that matters.