You got no time for the messenger
Got no regard for the thing that you don’t understand
You got no fear of the underdog
That’s why you will not survive

We are back to regularly scheduled life, for the most part, and as with most things this is wonderful and hard and everything in between. Reentry paired with warmer weather and longer days? Wonderful. Reentry paired with anxiety and hyper-vigilance? Hard.

We’ve talked about it, the boys and I, about how this is a process and will take adjustments. How we need to be patient with ourselves and the world, that there will be hiccups along the way. And how. A few nights into his return to school, Little Brother woke me up with the coughs of a forty-year pack-a-day smoker. The next day, he and I received a couples Covid test (negative, tks) and he proceeded to bounce off the walls all day and ask what we were going to do next (the answer: watch me fold laundry).

The Kid’s adjustments, like mine, have veered more toward the internal: anxiety (forever and ever amen) and our manifestations of it. My body likes to awaken me sometime in the hour prior to 5 am, then assault me with everything happening in the next week or two until I finally give up on going back to sleep. TK has been struggling with feeling overwhelmed too, which he expresses through outbursts of frustration, loud and emotional. It’s been…a lot.

He had one at the beach last week, at the spot we haven’t visited since before the lockdown, where we met friends after school. Something happened that made him feel slighted, and he lost it. Luckily, we were among people who know us and are in too deep to bail now, so we all rode it out together and soon exited the storm and hit smooth skies. He had, as I’ve told him, endured one of his triggers (feeling unseen)–even during his outburst, he said it: “This is one of my triggers!”

Then we endured one of mine. Champagne glass in hand, heart aching. I watched as the kids all played together, and TK occasionally joined in, and some of the others also popped in and out of the group. But I watched his differences play out socially in a way I hadn’t really in some time, and it hit me afresh–in a triggering way, if you will–how he often struggles to be seen and heard and understood; how friendships that were easy when they were younger have taken different shapes since then and often pass him by or leave him out, without malice from anyone, just because that’s how things sometimes go. And it hurt.

Seeing these truths with open eyes, it pierces us. It reveals our wounds, our vulnerabilities. Our triggers. But I wouldn’t have made it this far (which is to say, alive, and hopeful) if I didn’t believe that these are the exact places where we will also be healed. Where new life will be found.

Because not seeing? Not seeing TK, or others like him, or our own flaws and wounds….this is where I’ve been before, and where I’ve been taken from to be where I am now. It has been brutal, and harrowing, and hard and wonderful. I’m learning that a willingness to be disrupted is essential for a journey through grace. And wouldn’t you know that being disrupted is one of my triggers?

I’m beginning to think it’s also one of my saviours.

My swim this morning sucked.

It was just after sunrise on a day that had been predicted to be rainy. Instead, the glowing orb’s rays bounced off the water and shimmered on top of it and altogether blinded me on my laps headed south, as it blasted my view to the east. Too much sun was my problem.

Also, my goggles leaked. And my ear plugs wobbled. And the water’s visibility was terrible because we’re approaching summer and boats are stirring up sand. But mostly, it was the sun.

Is this what five years of living on some of the most beautiful beaches in the world gets you: an assumption that every swim will go smoothly? Views that you begin to pass by on your morning run or drive without even seeing? All the things that enamoured you upon your arrival now becoming just white noise in the background of your life?

It’s been a hard week. LB has loved plunging back into school, but he’s tired–and TK and I, we’re anxious. Anxious about the dropoffs and pickups that are back to being part of our days and the elements of traffic and timeliness and social interaction they reintroduce (and that we’re rusty on). Anxious about his own return to school next week and the mixed feelings it will bring, the adjustments it will require. For his part (and mine, and Kevin the Dog’s), he’s missed his brother and playmate.

All of this has led to a week of Big Feelings, culminating yesterday in an Epic Tennis Lesson that ended up being more about emotional regulation than hitting shots. We were all ragged and weepy at the end, and I had my usual “I’m not cut out for this” doubts about my own parenting, about my own choices in life that led me here and not to some solitary existence on an Italian shore, writing from an apartment overlooking the sea. In my best moments, I come through for my kids with all I’ve learned from therapy and personal growth and meditation; in my worst, I resent all they demand of me that I struggle to give and that doesn’t involve handing them an iPad to numb their–and my–feelings.

We’ve had breakdowns. Meltdowns. Undoings. Rage-filled screams and apologies and all the emotional rollercoasters over everything from the existential pain of being fundamentally misunderstood, to being told we’re going to the beach after school (I wish I had a photo of LB sobbing at the school gate after TK delivered that devastating news. #privilegedAF). Which means that after I read this quote from Alain de Botton, I felt seen:

“A breakdown is not merely a random piece of madness or malfunction; it is a very real–albeit very inarticulate–bid for health and self-knowledge. It is an attempt by one part of our mind to force the other into a process of growth, self-understanding and self-development that it has hitherto refused to undertake. If we can put it paradoxically, it is an attempt to jump-start a process of getting well–properly well–through a stage of falling very ill…In the midst of a breakdown, we often wonder whether we have gone mad. We have not. We’re behaving oddly, no doubt, but beneath the agitation we are on a hidden yet logical search for health. We haven’t become ill; we were ill already. Our crisis, if we can get through it, is an attempt to dislodge us from a toxic status quo and constitutes an insistent call to rebuild our lives on a more authentic and sincere basis.”

Let’s give it up for breakdowns, for without them (according to de Botton, and me, now) we’d be gliding along to the white noise without even living.

I’ve found this to be undeniably true. So often, I have to be shaken awake from the safety I’ve constructed around myself. I have to be decimated to be rebuilt into something new, something better. I have to be moved from where I was to where I’m meant to be. I would almost never make these choices myself; life (grace) makes them for me. And I hate them, until I don’t.

I stopped my laps early this morning because it was just too hard, all the sun and water in the spots I didn’t want them to be, and instead of continuing, I stayed. I stayed in one spot and treaded water there, floating where I was, turned toward the beach. In The Turn of the Screw, Henry James writes in the voice of the governess narrator regarding her charges–the children she now loves–“Instead of growing used to them…I made constant fresh discoveries.”

It’s so much easier to get used to things/people, then demand they stay that way. So as not to upset the status quo. Then you’re stopped, or moved, or decimated, and you look around and finally, again and maybe anew, see. I floated in the water this morning, finally and forcibly disconnected from my goal, my plan, and felt the blasting sun at my back. William Blake’s words rang in my heart:

Look on the rising sun: there God does live…

And we are put on earth a little space,

That we may learn to bear the beams of love

There in the water that assaulted and held me, I turned toward the sun.

The other morning I finished a run in the usual spot, an off-leash dog park near our house. I was waiting for The Husband and the boys to show up with Kevin the Dog, and while I waited I was treated to an appearance from the local pug and her owner. We started talking, and he told me about a friend of his who has been taking their dog to a dog therapist. I’m all for therapy, but this just sounds like flushing money down the toilet, right?

Or…it’s the most brilliant subterfuge ever! The pug’s owner went on to say that it sounded, from his friend’s description, that the therapist was dealing more with the issues of the dog’s owner than those of the dog itself. Immediately, I began thinking of all the people I could refer to “dog” therapy.

The Kid is, as they say here, “going well” with his own psychologist, and I realize that I’m benefitting by proxy. Last session, we worked through some strategies for settling ourselves, and she emailed a book that I read through with TK and Little Brother. Strategies meant to ground us in our bodies in the present moment, and I’ll be damned if I haven’t been giving them a test run.

The first was to look around at your surroundings and locate two blue things in your line of vision. The second, close your eyes and identify two sounds. The third, take two deep belly breaths.

We’ve been trying these with TK to varying degrees of success, and I’ve found the same success rate with myself, but…it’s something! It’s something to be both grounded in what my body is experiencing, and at the same time to observe my body’s experiences. To be within and without, together and separate. This is the groundwork of meditation, and it’s also been the mechanism of action of Lexapro, and I find prayer does that trick as well. In fact, it seems to me that sanity itself involves some balance of these apparent extremes–of many extremes, actually. My sanity, at least.

I’m beginning to understand that I don’t live life so much in the middle as a function of being even-keeled and…well, just being balanced already, but as an alchemy of various extremes: depression and euphoria, anxiety and calm, fire and ice, what have you. “Happiest and saddest, inside and out,” writes Miranda Cowley Heller in The Paper Palace, and don’t I know it.

The feelings book sent by “our” therapist made the point in kid-friendly language: that it’s hard to be angry and curious at the same time, or mad and able to laugh. The boys and I agreed, because it’s true: how many times in my life have I been so committed to one extreme that I lost the ability to be curious, to explore other ideas, to ask questions, to not take myself too seriously? These days, I think, I spend more time vacillating, travelling–recognising that I’m on one extreme before seeking to balance it with the other. Maybe this is some form of health, or at least adventure: wandering purposefully from one side of the see-saw to the other instead of sitting all balanced and pristine in the middle of it.

It makes for stories, to be sure. And apologies. And forgiveness.

And so it is with children who have been in lockdown, from LB who travels from tears one second to proclamations of love the next; from TK who–when we’re at the beach one cool and cloudy morning that doesn’t make for warm swims yet somehow, in its extremes, leads to the best wave-riding I’ve done in awhile–complains grievously about the toddler who’s interrupted to “help” build his sand castle; a few minutes later, I see TK reach out and give the boy a pat on the belly and a big grin. And his mother and I start talking, and I tell her about my boys, and TK tells her he has autism, and within minutes we are telling each other our stories. The day has gone from sun to clouds, calm to wind, in a matter of minutes, and we have travelled within it, and sometimes these unlikely ones are the best beach days. Then we say goodbye, and as we walk to the car I notice my two blue things: ocean and sky, always there.