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.

I die every day! –the Apostle Paul, née Saul of Tarsus

For the first time in I-don’t-know-how-many-years, I battled my ongoing need to stay relevant (as though this blog even accomplishes that, LOL) and skipped a week of posting. Our family was on the Gold Coast, which is the Florida of Australia and no I will not explain further.

We spent Easter weekend there, in the sun and intermittent rain, mostly sitting by the pool; I mostly waited for drinks to be brought to me. It was not the most somber of times, given it was our first real vacation in what feels like years (trips “home” do not count as they include too much travel, vomit, and obligatory events that involve talking). But there was plenty of time to think–a rare luxury these days, afforded mainly by the fact that the boys are now obsessed with reading, Praise be to God–and reflect on what shape Easter takes in our lives right now, after two years of an ongoing pandemic and its associated displacement from formal church and, well, life.

What I came away with, between Citrus Splashes and episodes of The White Queen, was this: I don’t have a hard time believing in resurrections because I see them every day.

I don’t know how it works for people who haven’t repeatedly watched their identity–the self-forged version that is user- and social-media-friendly, polished and pleasing–go up in flames. It’s likely harder for them to buy into rolled-away stones and empty tombs. But I’ve burned my own shit to the ground (accidentally, usually) so many times that, now, I just sit by the fire with sticks and marshmallows and wait to see what emerges from the ashes.

I’m still afraid of failure, which is hilarious because I’ve accomplished it so many times, and when I remember that, I am free. But that remembrance–that re-membering–most often occurs after a dismembering brought on by trying to avoid failure at all costs: to write, or believe, or parent, or live, perfectly. How cute of me. How desperately-in-need-of-resurrection of me.

This week, after the vodka had run dry and the pool was just a memory, we were getting the boys ready for bed. Our routine has, as of The Kid’s most recent psychology appointment (which has turned into a session with Little Brother and me too, #efficiency), been prolonged due to a therapy-mandated mindfulness exercise. In much the same tradition as my sprints from work to yoga class in New York City, which involved me dodging human traffic and muttering under my breath for people to hurry up so I could f*ing RELAX, this new addendum has increased our (my) stress quotient before reducing it. TK was particularly tired after a day in which I dragged them to a magical secret garden and bought them donuts (the nerve of me, making them do real shit during school holidays), and kicked off a complaint session that quickly overrode the calmly-voiced instructions of the Zen woman on my phone.

So I lost it, naturally, and apologised, por supuesto, and was forgiven, thank God, because that is how dying and coming back to life works on a daily basis: these moments of flames and ashes and rebirth scattered just everywhere. I’m trying to avoid the flame in the first place, though you can guess how well that usually goes, but I’ve been burned enough to know what’s on the other side. Might it be that there are no real wrong turns, when all roads lead home?!

Later, the boys and I were in the car and LB began to explain how he thinks TK’s autism works. TK was silent for a moment, then whispered, “Wow. I didn’t know you understood.” And I nearly stopped breathing (another way to die, if you’re keeping count) at the beauty of it. Death, resurrection, death, resurrection–I can’t stop seeing it.

And today, after five minutes spent at a museum exhibit that we paid way too much/waited way too long in line for, we spent the last few minutes of the sunny part of the day walking to the car, climbing in, and making a wrong turn. “Why are we going this way?” asked TK, and I explained that wrong turn I’d taken, then pointed out a part of Sydney we’d never seen but were currently driving through. I held my breath (not a mindfulness technique, FYI) and wondered if this would be the beginning of a tense and regretful exchange.

“It was a right turn,” he said. “A turn for seeing things.”

“Doesn’t the sky look so close?”

Little Brother said this from the backseat on the way to school two mornings ago, the last time it didn’t rain. We weren’t used to seeing the sun–La Niña has made sure of that for weeks now–and his interpretation of that development was a super-close sky. I often notice how The Kid sees light differently, how neurodivergence opens his eyes to other beams, but on this morning LB let me into his particular brand of light-gazing.

We set our clocks back an hour over the weekend, and that’s changed the light too: earlier sunsets ending our daylight hours sooner. Light falling in different patterns at different times as winter here approaches. It’s both disorienting and illuminating.

Tuesday, the day the sun was close, I headed to my harbour beach for the first time in about two months for an ocean swim, the water murky all around me, the rising sun’s shafts barely breaking the surface. I had to raise my head, look up rather than down, to see where I was going.

There is less light, all around us. But it isn’t gone. What remains stands out. It reaches into every spot.

“He never seems to tire of the glorious work of deliverance,” Beth Moore wrote recently on the work of grace in her life. “Sometimes we have no idea how much darkness we’re living in because our eyes have long adjusted to the dark. I just want to remind you today that he is there with you. There is no place so dark he would not enter to bring you into the light.”

I know this form of rescue. Often? It hurts like a bitch. We enter darkened cinemas or bedrooms or caves of our own making, places we sought for enjoyment or rest or safety, only to be rudely expelled from them into the glaring light, where we’re forced to bear the beams of love–the brutal, beautiful beams of love.

My children are so often the conduits of that brutal grace. I don’t know why it still surprises me, that I make mistakes with them that I regret later but that lead to moments of such searing redemption–the Kanye-less version of the wrongs that helped me right my songs. These moments of seeming darkness–expletive-laden exclamations over disastrous morning preps while the plumber sealing the shower upstairs pauses to listen–followed by tears, followed by rides to school drenched in forgiveness and new understanding. There is no light without the dark. When will I learn? I bring one, grace brings the other. Always.