Arrival. Another good word. It’s a word of timespan balance. It’s an exquisite teetering between the past and the future. An arrival signifies a journey passed and a journey ahead. It holds the weight of accomplishment and also the effervescence of yet-to-come. When you arrive somewhere, you have undergone a passage to reach your destination, and you carry with you the luggage and triumph of this endeavour. Yet, when you appear in this new landscape, there is also a rush of possibilities that jockey to welcome you to your new future. A new beginning is afoot.
For us, the queries of our arrival had already been lining up to be addressed. These questions had been camped out on the sidewalk for weeks, awaiting our arrival: Where are we going to live? When will we find a home? What friends will we find? What work will I land? How will the boys settle in? What unknowns lie in wait? What’s there to look forward to now? The whos, the hows, the whats and the whens of a new life were all advocating for their place in the plan. It quickly became apparent that the what’s-to-come could be just as substantial as the what-has-come-to-pass. Arrival. It’s a good word. But it’s complicated.
I suppose, in a way, this blog tells the former half of this arrival tale. Since we prepared to leave our house last January, it’s all been part of the journey home. Now, this final post will fill you in on the latter piece of our arrival, the jumbled roll-out of a future we’ve been riding on. The truth is, there have been many arrivals over the past three months. We’ve been conjuring them out of thin air, tripping over them in the dark, and gracefully clearing them like gazelles on the chase. Here is an update of the Wood Family adventure, the string of graceful and graceless arrivals that make up the final chapter of this Gap Year saga. The end began at Sydney Airport on October first.
Our physical arrival at the airport was a deep relief, a hissing discharge of sustained energy- like the great sigh of a space shuttle slowing to a halt on Earth’s friendly surface. After such a long road, to finally be on Australian shores again was an exquisite release of tension. In fact, when we exited the airport and breathed in the scents of home air, the little one started crying. At first I thought we’d run over his foot with the baggage trolley or something. But no. He was simply shedding the tears of a boy who had been aching for these lands for months. When I bent over to investigate his whimper, he simply shuddered out tears and said, “We’re… in.. Austral-iiiii-aaahhhh.” At the trailhead, I had thought this little guy’s resistance to our plan was just a natural response to stepping into the unknown. I had thought he would come around, that he’d see how grand all this was, that he’d awaken to the excitement of travel. But no. This boy never wanted a Gap Year, and he never budged from his position. Upon arrival in Aussie air, he released tears of joy and long-held strain. If you ask him today which country was his favourite, he will not hesitate to tell you, “Australia.” This arrival in his tense little frame was profoundly and visibly experienced.
And it turned out all my matriarchal concerns about our customs arrival and our family’s long list of destinations and potentially biologically threatening possessions had been for naught. The Australian Border Control passport officer didn’t even ask us where we’d been or how long we’d been gone. We might as well have had a week at Disneyland. He just grunted and barely glanced at our faces before returning our passports with a disinterested chin thrust of dismissal. Then, a smiling man in uniform with a magic stamp of power approached us as we were waiting by the baggage carousel. He scanned my well-detailed list of potentially illegal imports, inspected a couple of items, and then gave our arrival documents the red imprint of permission to skip the queue and breeze right on through security to the sorely awaited soils of home.
After the rushing roll-down of the Sydney arrivals ramp sent us skidding across the floor tape separating the arriving passengers from their awaiting parties, we were met by my partner’s grinning parents. They quickly packed us up in a van and whisked us away for our arrival to “where we started.” As we settled into our seats for the two-hour drive, hungover from dehydration, recycled air, and the ache of leg-room limitations, the familiar streets of Sydney’s southern outskirts started to pass through my weary vision, and with them, a current of doubt about my capacity to truly see anything anymore.
In his poem, Little Gidding, TS Elliot famously states, “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” This is an oft-quoted and alluring aspiration for the seeker soul, but those words are taunting and daunting to a deflated Gap Year mum/mom. Was I up for such an arrival? Was I able? Did I even care, anymore? And further along the highway, the weight of the work ahead began to descend upon me, like a steady drop in the barometer of my diaphragm. The starting gun of our new life had cracked at some point in the fumble of baggage and the dizzying spell of a Sydney morning sun. I only heard its echo: “Time to run… run… run…”
As usual, the arrival home was a little dream-like. Shadows of the former you pass over the current you like oddly disfiguring clouds on an otherwise sunny day. The effect is a bit intoxicating- in both the giddy and the wobbly way. The fleeting flickers of familiarity offer invitations to one’s personhood to return to whom we once were. One is confronted with characters, props, and sets that tempt you to refill your being with the casting of a performance whose curtain was long ago called. It felt good. Familiar. Safe. Yet also somehow like the scene in the movie Labyrinth, where the girl finds herself back home with every comfort she ever wanted, but she becomes infected with the inkling of a farce. Then, as realisation dawns, the walls of her bedroom cave in with earth, and she is still lost in the labyrinth, having been taken in by one of its wiles. That was us in Berry. The comforts were luminescent and inebriating, but the truth of our incongruity could not be negotiated. No matter how alluring the offerings were, it wasn’t home anymore.
When one returns to a home that is no more, what is real and what is illusory becomes blurred. Like a garden lovingly tended by little gnomes no one never sees, the weeds and sweat of the rooted life are absent, and you are left with only the fruits and blossoms of family and friendships and the familiar fragrances of home. We felt loved in this time, much loved and valued and missed. And I felt the weight of motherhood lifted some. Our village of fantastic folk and the edited memory of our expired life helped bear the weight of our tired boys. Healing began over cups of tea, home-cooked meals, morning walks, and under the dappled sunlight of mammoth gum and fig trees. The boys had playdates and familiar feasts. They underwent trampoline therapy, scooter rehab, and the great medicine of stepping away from the family for a while.
Perhaps the most cleansing arrival of all, our magical spirit pup bounded back into our world like a manifestation of all that is pure and good in the world. With squirms and wags and then cuddles and licks, she slathered our travel raw spirits in a salve of remedy no human could ever conjure. Her audible exhalation of surrender as she sits curled in our laps is a powerful reminder to allow oneself to simply enjoy the release of a breath, to simply be quiet and metabolise the effortlessness of being close to another soul. One thing, for sure, became clear in this reunion: “Home” lies in this little dog’s sighs. It’s an arrival I relish every day.
After we had filled our cups with all the cosy flavours of home in New South Wales, we hit the road again. (Yes. Again. We have questioned our own sanity many times; in case you were wondering.) This time, though, we were headed for the greatest of all arrivals: the arrival home… albeit a home of unidentified location. Last February, we had checked out the Fleurieu Peninsula, south of Adelaide in South Australia, on the Aussie leg of the trip, and it was to this summoning spread of earth that we headed off again. The boys were not particularly happy about this after so many chummy reunions with all their mates, and I too found it hard to leave such beautiful people behind again. It took a lot of buoyancy to sustain our spirits, but we did. A lot of buoyancy would be required on this final leg, it turned out. But, we managed. We, humans, usually do.
After the massive undertaking of our Gap Year, my partner and I had minimised the significance of an interstate move. We’d been to 14 different countries, stayed in over 36 different beds, logged who-knows-how-many travel hours. Yet, the two-day drive across New South Wales, parts of Victoria and into SA gave a sense of the distance we were yet to cover. It hadn’t occurred to me that we would have another culture to navigate “back home.” Having immigrated to Australia from America during Covid in July of 2020, we’d done the whole build-a-life gig in recent memory. Still. The move to South Australia was to require a lot of navigation, everything from school systems to highway systems and new words for all sorts of things: little lunch, Stobie poles, and “reception” instead of kindergarten. Our true wake-up call to this interstate variance, however, was realised before we even arrived in SA.
Arriving in South Australia is like entering another country. You are required to dispose of all your fresh produce and plants before passage over the state line. There are signs leading up to the border that explain it is a crime of high penalty to bring any botanical life in. It’s all in effort to protect their $1.3 billion dollar horticulture industry: stone fruits, apples, citrus, olives, almonds, and the wine regions’ precious grapes are all at risk of destruction by the tiny but mighty fruit fly. There are big signs instructing you to pull over at any of the many disposal bins leading up to the border if you are in possession of any fruit, veg, or plants. They have lights and red writing and photos of apples and houseplants. My partner and I, driving in convoy, failed to read any of these signs very closely.
At the border, we were abruptly awoken from our light-hearted approach to the environmental treats of foreign flora by some very serious border control officers. Having called my partner on the approach to share what I thought were our items to declare- one apple and three tomatoes- we quickly popped out at the border queue to locate and surrender our contraband. We were then promptly approached by a couple of older ladies in heavily-pocketed pants and vests with body cams baring our way and warning us that our movements and statements were being recorded. Unbeknownst to us, our guilt was already set. The South Australian border control does not want you to hand over the offending fruit at the border. This implies that you were trying to sneak them through, like handing over a firearm at the airport metal detector, I suppose. For those who read text-dense signs, it is very clear that you must deposit all plant life in said bins along the approach to the border, before arriving to security.
Like the criminal he was, my partner was escorted into a demountable, road-side office while I paced with the dog and placated indignant children. After being shown laminated photos of all the signs he had failed to read, my partner was forced to confess that we are both inept adults and walked off with a citation that may or may not be followed up with a heavy fine. This was three months ago. So far, we’re in the clear.
As we drove off into South Australia through that unloving portal of welcome, I chose to convert my feelings of grump and injustice into a sense of truly arriving somewhere new. It was the first major contraction in the birth of a new life, and it was the beginning of a long labour, we would find out.
South Australia is its own special place. It’s the driest state in Australia, and its capital, Adelaide, is often referred to as “a big country town.” It’s very arid, very quiet, and very different in a lot of endearing ways. First off, it’s got a 30 minute time difference. When it’s the top of the hour in most places on the globe, it’s 30 minutes past in Adelaide. India, Iran, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, and Newfoundland in Canada all have this half hour offset, as well. It’s an indicator of the off-beat rhythm here. It’s the promise that things will be different. At least, that’s how I choose to see it. My husband, still doing time conversions to Sydney working hours, probably sees it a bit differently.
Soon after checking into our AirB&B in Port Willunga, about 40 minutes south of Adelaide, the arrivals came rolling in like the pounding waves of a merciless sea. The birthing contractions were hard. School tours, uniform shopping, skateparks, lunchboxes, job applications and interviews, police checks and online CPDs, car registrations, scrubs and training schedules, basketball games, circus school, playdates, school camps, doctors, tele-health naturopaths, a mountain of supplements to stomach, a new van, dental checks, school excursion forms, homework, school apps, screentime, bedtime, dinnertime, and sleepovers. The whole damn treadmill seemed to build itself before our eyes, enveloping us in the spirit-dismissing crush of modern life under the guise of first-world normalcy. Hard labour. And I cried out many times with the smarting of defeat.
Our family re-joined the rat-race in fits and spasms, and there were no concessions made for where we had been, what we were up against, or who we were trying to become. We didn’t stand a chance. As tired and symptomatic as we were, and as desperate as I was to get us into a stable rhythm, I relinquished any hope of creating an innovative life and simply accepted, with polite thankfulness, the life that presented itself before us. It is lovely. It is blessed. But it’s too fast, too demanding, and has too little room for novelty or breath. Life in paradise, I suppose. Kids fed. Roof sturdy. Money steady. Time for wine and walks among the trees. How can I expect more when so many in the world have so little? It’s easy to live in gratitude, and I do. But something about this whole modern family arrangement just doesn’t sit right with my soul. It didn’t feel right on the road either, though. So, there you go. Must be me.
We have started to get the boys the help they need. This arrival has been key. With an Integrative GP in Brisbane and a naturopath group in Melbourne, we have found our tele-health team to address the PANS/PANDAS conditions the boys have been battling for months. We have not arrived at a state of wellness yet. Some days I have hope and see progress. Other days I just have fear of an expensive and heart-breaking life of volatility. “It’s a journey,” they tell me. Yeah. Right. One of those journeys you want to abandon. The kind you didn’t book. The kind you’d jump off… even if it were a moving train… if you could. But, jumping ship, jumping train, parachuting off the burning plane, those options are not in the drop-down menu of parenthood. There aren’t actually many options in the drop-down menu. Just effort. Just onward. Just love. Love. Love. Love. Even when you feel like you might be out. Love.
We are getting closer to wellness though. We are no longer completely at sea. The boys are more stable. The light that was once lost is back on some days, the smiles as bright as the sun. But the dark circles are still there, the odd expressions, the tendency towards aggression and rage. The “flares” of illness still rise in fury with no warning. We are not in the clear as of yet, but we have information, we have professionals with experience and a plan, and we have promising movements towards baseline. We will stay the course till we arrive fully back to the wellness we once knew, the wellness we never fully appreciated. Blast it!
Our actual physical home is coming into focus too. On the 9th of this month, a home will be ours upon closing. It’s smaller than our last place, and the garden is a blank palate. The house is new, mould free, and has a view of the sea on a clear day if you really want to peek through the trees. In a market of cut-throat over-bidding, we were very pleased to snag our little home in a beautiful tree-filled neighbourhood, walking distance from a historic downtown. The boys will go to school minutes away, sports teams are forming, bike routes will soon be made, and weekend creek jogs will make many happy mornings. I am looking forward to our world shrinking down to the size of an Aussie village. No more travel. No more packing. No more change. We might even burn the backpacks and cackle as we dance around the flames. This Gap Year is done. Home is near. It’s a good way to start the new year.
There is still one arrival I am seeking, though. Perhaps I’ve been seeking this all along. While everything is pretty well settled for the family, I am still, somehow, unrooted. My vocation is not yet near any sense of home. I am not supposed to be a nurse or a first aid trainer, not a world-school mum nor a travel blogger. I’ve got somewhere to be, and it is beckoning. It’s cop-knocking at my door, actually. There is some other arrival out there waiting to be found. Something calls. I suppose that’s what “a calling” does.
I try to feel grateful for the summons… even though it feels more like harassment, a dogged undermining of this new reality we have worked very hard to construct. Somehow I know I am not supposed to be logging hours and funnelling funds into a mortgage and a refrigerator filled with food. There is something more, and the calling, the destabilising directive, is tireless. It’s some immortal pulse of a subpoena that will not let me rest into a simple life. Like no other time in my life, I feel like there is something I need to do. But I’ll be damned if I know what it is. When I try to answer the call, to pick up the cosmic receiver, it is me who seems to hear a busy signal. Again and again, there seems to be no voice on the line. No guidance. No direction. Just the dat-dat-dat-dat of nothingness.
I admit I feel an affection for this calling, this persistent pestering from within. Without it, I fear I would be susceptible to a loneliness, an existential void, like a what’s-the-point shadow would spread over this blessed life. I wouldn’t want that. So, while I do feel a bit troubled by these daily inklings and waves of empty aches, this tugging between my chest and my gut gives me hope. A hope for something greater ahead. Aside from parenting three spirited boys, aside from keeping the bills ticking over, aside from all the home-keeping and the modern life management, there is, I am certain… something else. I feel it every day. That’s good, right?
If I’m honest, I feel a bit sad about the Gap Year now. Sad that this potent chapter is over. Sad it was such a struggle with the boys so unwell. Sad that so many of the lessons were painful. Sad that we aren’t who I thought we might be. Sad that it’s all sealed off and receding. Sad that I didn’t find what I was looking for. Sad for the hopes and visions that did not fruit. Sad that we are back on the treadmill, almost no better off than before. I’m sure this sorrow will evolve into new shades of perspective over time. It’s probably not surprising to feel a bit down at this point. Emerging from a gap such as this is bound to leave the mind feeling murky. I think we must have a few more arrivals waiting ‘round the bend. We’re bound to.
For the record, I don’t know if we ever saw anything “for the first time.” But the key to this little riddle lies in the first and sometimes omitted line of the TS Elliot quote: “We shall not cease from exploration.” Baked into these words is the notion that one might not even know they are seeing a place “for the first time” because our exploration irrevocably evolves our vision. There is no rewind on our becoming. As humans, we do not consciously remember the teetering faith of our first steps. Most of us have no memory. From a tiny age, we are single-mindedly pulled forward by our desire to explore. We are blind to our own advancement. We are bewitched by our own spell of the possible ahead. The alluring future unfolding at our feet is all we ever need see.
We can never go back to our former selves, really. We cannot unsee or unknow or unfeel. The butterfly never returns to the cocoon, nor the bird to the eggshell, nor the sprout to the seed. We cast off the casings of our former selves and tread on them mindlessly as we take our next steps of becoming, as we prepare for our next flight and flowering. We cannot go back. It is not allowed. We have overwritten who we were by who we have become. And we shall not cease to do so. Not till the end of our days.
The family who left home last January is gone, long gone on the breeze of passing Time. Who we are now is still becoming. And our exploring is ever erasing our former selves. This is what TS Elliot meant. We shall not cease in our exploring because we do not cease in our becoming. I cannot see how I once saw. I no longer have the eyes. I can’t even see who I used to be. And, actually, it’s quite tricky to even see who I am. Yet, there is no doubt that progress of the human spirit has taken place. Perhaps, one day, I’ll have enough perspective to see all of this more clearly. But that day is not today. And no day soon. I may be bent and withered by the time I can see, or maybe the final curtain will fall before that day ever comes to pass. Who knows. Larger movements are at work. I’ll just trust their supervision.
So now, the final scroll of a Gap Year is all that’s left to be shared. Thanks, once again, for your interest in our family and for donating your precious time to spectate on our antics. Your presence has been felt.
That’s a wrap. Gap Year done. May 2026 be rooted and calm.
Mapping the Gap 
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