The Emergency Contact

Love, in this house, is not subtle.

It’s the last packet of crisps handed over without flinching. It’s pausing your stim to listen to a story that doesn’t interest you at all. It’s someone silently finding the runaway socks and putting them back in the washing basket that sat unfolded, again, without saying a word.

Love here looks like LED strip lights in four rooms, toast cut in squares not triangles, and ten second clips of the same cartoon on repeat morning till night. It sounds like, “We’ve got this,” said on the third meltdown of the day while stepping over a trail of rice cakes and grief.

It’s loud. It’s lumpy. It’s held together by leftovers and blind faith and the mutual understanding that no one is ever, ever, allowed to ask a question mid-stim.

And somehow, in the middle of all this - between school buses, support plans, sleepless nights and the occasional emergency load of laundry after an incident involving pudding… I fell in love.

And not the Netflix kind. Not the dramatic reveal or the tidy arc or the “he kissed me and the world made sense” kind.

This one made no sense at all.

I loved being alone. It was quiet. Predictable. I didn’t have to explain myself to the walls. They just let me be.

But then Alex showed up, and the house didn’t feel like mine anymore, it felt like ours. And that didn’t scare me. Not the way I thought it would.

He didn’t get everything right. He once used my good scissors for opening packaging and I briefly questioned everything I knew about him. He put the cheese on his toast before the beans, which, if you ask me, is criminal.

He made a noise that startled my youngest and she responded by throwing Dorito’s directly at his chest. But he never flinched. He just wiped off the dust and said, “Well, that’s new.”

He didn’t just see me. He noticed me.

The way I speak in half-sentences. The way I touch my neck when I’m spiralling. The way I hold my breath when the phone rings.

And he didn’t say I was too much. He said, “That’s a lot. Let’s carry it together.”

We still have chaos. Oh, we have so much chaos.

The other day, the youngest picked a bar of chocolate from a stranger’s trolley in Aldi. The eldest told her teacher she didn’t come to school for friends, just the iPads. I burned dinner because I got distracted by a TikTok of someone folding towels correctly. And Alex just looked around the mess and said, “This feels like home.”

It’s not perfect. It’s not even close.

But it’s real.

It’s a family made from mismatched pieces that shouldn’t work together but do. Like a collage where all the glue sticks dried up but the tape held. Just barely.

I still need space. I still crave silence. I still fantasise about checking into a hotel and doing nothing but sleeping for 36 hours and peeing alone without someone narrating it from outside the door.

But now, when the house is quiet and everyone’s finally in bed and I sit on the sofa with the lights low and toast crumbs on my leggings, I look over and see him there.

He’s usually asleep. One sock on, one sock off. Hair a mess. Head tilted like a cartoon dad who got conked with a frying pan.

And I think, I chose this.

And somehow, he chose me.

Which is wild, honestly. Because some days I barely choose myself.

But here we are.

Tiny, imperfect, miraculous.

This house, this life, these loud little people who call me mum and make me laugh while I’m crying and teach me every day what unconditional love really looks like.

It’s hard. And it’s heavy.

But for the first time in my life, it’s also enough.

Thanks for reading.

If you saw yourself anywhere in these pages, in the chaos, the quiet victories, the meltdowns, the moments held together by toast crusts and sheer defiance, then hey… maybe we’re all doing better than we think.

I used to write down my own number twice on every form.

Now? I’ve got a second emergency contact.

And he actually shows up.