After 20 years, I finally added solar panels to the roof of my house in October last year.

Just before that, I used the pandemic lockdown to spend a lot of time finally turning that old bathtub, pre-dating my now-adult children, into a fabulous garden pond. I bought a series of Gedde compost bins and established a system for cleaning under the chook’s night perch and mixing in pond weed and extras from the now-revamped vege garden to get a really nice regular composting system going.

I was harvesting my own food and enjoying the colours and textures and freshness.

I’d bought and assembled a special reading bench, and added a waterproof cushion, so I could sit in the sun in front of the vege garden and watch the parrots on the sunflowers.

In November last year, I was flung into quite a different trajectory. One where my chooks, and their tiny house with ingeniously accessible egg-collecting, would no longer be part of my life. One that was exactly the right path for me, although it was not what I had ever planned.

If you have a kid with any kind of difference, you have probably been given the “Welcome to Holland” essay, attributed to Emily Perl Kingsley.

It is not one-size fits all. I share some of the reservations that Kirsten Groseclose mentions when she suggests that sometimes this Haiku from Mizuta Masahide seems more appropriate, especially when you are coping with marriage breakdown or trying to find support, or even work out what to do, when you have a violent child who you love with all your life and are also scared of being hurt by.

My barn having burned down, I can see the moon.

Expectations and plans go sideways all the time. I loved my garden that I had finally transformed after 20 years of looking out the lounge window and planning to. A 20 year plan finally realised.

I am also pretty happy with my new garden, which is a series of containers I will be able to take with me elsewhere as things settle. A totally unexpected and adaptive arrangement. One that is only blossoming so well because of the skills I learned with things planned and unplanned in the last 25 or so years.

The first container is peppermint, common mint, perpetual spinach, broccoli and marigold.

The second container is broccoli, pak choi, five types of lettuce and perpetual spinach.