other people’s lives

Aw, Katie. I’m sorry your friend is moving. I know you guys are close. I’m sorry, too, that you don’t feel settled. Feeling settled seems like the apex of grown-up-hood to me. I feel like an adult, sure. I have these kids, see, and this minivan, and even a 401k, whatever that is, but I don’t feel like a grown-up because I don’t feel settled, either.

I don’t know if it was your last post that did it, or just a rough patch I’m struggling through, mood-wise, but I’ve been missing our old town in Kansas very much lately. Like, it’s sort of painful in my chest when I think about the good stuff we drove away from. I mean, we literally drove away, waving goodbye to our neighbors and crying, everyone in the minivan except the baby. And it sounds ridiculous to anyone, probably, that I’m sitting in the land of opportunity with the most perfect weather, missing a state that just got hit by a major snowstorm and a with a governor as reprehensible as Sam Brownback.

Go West, young man.

I’ve been thinking about how, as social creatures with so much cognitive ability, we relentlessly compare ourselves to others, against false interpretations and impossible standards. I think about it all the time, really, which is why I blog and write and read non-fiction. To set things straight, at least on my end.

Take, for example, the trip we just got back from just a few days ago. We went to Kauai, the island in Hawaii I’ve been wanted to visit for years. Living in California makes it easy to score cheap plane tickets to Hawaii. I was so excited about going that I ran through a quick blog post in my head about how to travel with kids and on a budget. I dubbed it, “traveling with kids on a budget”.

From the outside, it sounds like stuff to envy: we had the time, and were able to afford, to take our family of five to Hawaii on a bit of a whim. It was the trip of a lifetime to my younger self, a child who grew up hovering around poverty, an adolescent who had never traveled been beyond Arkansas.

Our children are great on planes. We know how to pack light. We stop at roadside stands to taste new fruit like rambutan and we’ll lay our heads to sleep wherever we’re told. We are adventurous. We snorkel. We are fortunate souls. I bet others looked on admirably.

But, still.

I’m ashamed to say it was difficult or that I didn’t have the Greatest Time Ever. But, Katie, it was difficult and I didn’t have the greatest time ever. It turns out that I’m no expert at traveling with kids, on a budget.

What does this have to do with your friend moving? I don’t really know, exactly. I guess what I’m trying to say is that everyone struggles. EV. RY. ONE. Even the ones who look like they’re having a fantastic new adventure.

(Well, maybe some people don’t struggle? But I don’t know anyone like that because I would dismiss them rather quickly.)

What I’m not sure about is that we have an inherent need for stability. Most of my friends seem to think we do. One friend in particular, the neighbor I moved away from, loves trees. Says we need to establish roots.

But another good friend told me, when I was debating our move: “Ships are safest in the harbor. But that’s not what they’re made for.”

I don’t know if we’re trees or ships, but my experience growing up was of moving to a new town at least every two years. This is what I know. It wasn’t until I graduated college that I lived in the same town for more than a couple years. You told me it was hard to make good friends as an adult, when you move somewhere new.  I wasn’t sure; I’d had practice as a child. How hard could it be? But the house Chris and I lived in with our children in Kansas, for five years, was the longest I’d lived anywhere. I took the friendships and family nearby for granted, despite my best efforts not to.

What matters most? Setting out for new horizons as a tight family on its own, to struggle and grow together? Or growing deeply-rooted traditions and relationships that wash up and down in your psyche, like the tide? Who can keep track of the years that go by?

Will I never feel settled because I never learned to in my formative years? Do I not feel settled because I haven’t found “the place,” like someone who’s fallen in love?  Am I actually settled wherever I am, as long as I have my husband and children near me?

I don’t know. At least not yet.

But you were right about the many complaints you voiced when I announced our move to California:

1. Costco is always crowded.
2. Traffic is always bad.
3. The palm trees aren’t native.
4. There are too many mountain ranges to bother remembering names.
5. It’s hard to find new friends.

And, Katie, it’s even harder to be away from old ones.

when good friends move

via anotherporch.blogspot.com

Probably our worst fight—maybe, really, our only fight?—happened just before you moved to California. You told me that I was the only one of your friends who wasn’t being supportive about the move. Man, that pissed me off.

But you were probably right. You were right. I wasn’t the least bit supportive. In the weeks leading up to your Bon Voyage, I brought up all the things about California that suck—you know, in an off-hand, jokey sort of a way. As if the crowded Costcos would convince you to stay in Kansas forever.

My motive was simple: your moving would not be cool for me. You would get to go off to a new land and a new house and a new adventure, back to the beaches and palm trees and In-N-Out Burgers that I was still missing in Kansas. And I would still be here, except it would be a little bit worse because I would have no one to try and convince me to smoke hookah with her. And even though you should have felt the teensiest bit flattered that I like you so much, I know that I was being really selfish. And I was wrong, even though I was right about the Costcos.

Not yet two years later, I find myself in a similar position. One of my closest friends, Megan, just got a job in Indianapolis, and I feel like the selfish girl who can’t see past her own issues to be happy for this exciting new stage of life that awaits my friend and her family. This one hits particularly hard, as Megan used to live right down the street from me. She stayed home with her kids, who are close in age to my kids, and we’d have play dates or go to the grocery store together or take walks. Before that, she was there when both of my children were born. And before that, she and her husband and me and my husband would get together every week to eat dinner and watch LOST.  Now, I know you’re not a big TV watcher, but people who ARE know that people who share LOST with you are special people indeed.

We had this easy sort of rhythm going where we could walk into each other’s houses without knocking. We never needed a big event to get together, or even a “company-worthy” meal. We knew where things like the extra toilet paper were kept. We preferred if you didn’t call and instead just stopped by.

Probably most of my anxiety about your move, and about Megan’s move, comes from my own feeling that I’m not quite settled yet. We moved to Kansas for Scott to go to school. We thought he’d finish school and then we’d be back in California, where both of us had grown up. That didn’t happen. I went to graduate school. Scott got a job. We got pregnant.

Our situation is not abnormal. The average number of times a person changes jobs now is up to twelve or thirteen times in a lifetime. Our culture is a mobile one; we are all on the go—sometimes out of desire, sometimes out of necessity. We are people who change locations, jobs, dentists, pediatricians, churches, yoga classes, favorite coffee shops. (For some reason, we tend not to change hair stylists. At least I don’t. Not unless I have to. Please don’t make me.)

I’ve been reading a book called The Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture. The author, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, has this to say on the subject:

Staying, we all know, is not the norm in our mobile culture. A great deal of money is spent each day to create desires in each of us that can never be fulfilled. I suspect that much of our restlessness is a return on this investment. Mobility has a large marketing budget […] But I am convinced that we lose something essential to our existence as creatures if we do not recognize our fundamental need for stability. Trees can be transplanted, often with magnificent results. But their default is to stay.

I don’t blame you or Megan for moving any more than I blame Scott and me for the decision to move away from our own family and friends six years ago. Of course not.  Moves like these are part of our lives—sometimes magnificently so. But I do long for stability and for a place, probably because I know how valuable it is to have it—even for a little while.

But maybe that’s a benefit to our mobile culture? A silver lining? The ability to see and appreciate good friends who never have to knock. The stability that we do have, even amid all the movement.

what it’s like

moving forward. looking back.

The other morning, Chris and I were sitting at the table, having a bit of coffee together before the kids woke up. I was fine. Fresh. Ready to start the day. And then Chris said, “Oh, yeah. You need to listen to this.”

He handed me his phone, on which there was a message from my mom. (My mom calls Chris’s phone to get ahold of us because he does things like answers his phone and checks his messages.)

“Hi, Maria and Chris. I ran into so-and-so downtown and he said to tell you they miss you. And I took a walk past your old house: the willow tree has gotten so big! And here is what the weather is like today.”

It wasn’t an unusual message.  We get them on a semi-regular basis. Sweet, nostalgic, yet upbeat. But, for some reason, it totally threw me off my game. I couldn’t look at my husband and went to sit on my cushion and started to cry.

We’ve been in California for over a year now. I like it here. I don’t think we’ll move back to Kansas, or anywhere else, in the near future. But I still miss Kansas. More specifically, Lawrence. More specifically, our home and friends and family there. And even more specifically, the reason for the tears the other morning, I miss the me that I used to be before we moved even though I like the me now even better. My mind doesn’t do well with holding simultaneous, seemingly contradictory thoughts. It doesn’t do well with ambiguity.

I don’t regret moving. I appreciate the ways it’s helped me develop: emotionally, psychologically, intellectually. I wouldn’t go back. But, I also grieve what I gave up to move. I miss the me that didn’t know the things I know now from this move, things that have changed who I am on a deep, fundamental level.

You know what it’s like? It’s like becoming a parent. My guess is non-parents are sick of parents going on about what a big deal it is to have kids, especially because we often talk about how important and great it is, yet we look so tired, pinched up, and angry all the time. A few years ago, I had a friend who was thinking about not having a kids ask me to describe what’s so great about it. I hemmed and hawed for a while and finally said I couldn’t really explain it. (She pointed out that, since this is what I write about, I should try a little harder.)

It’s just one of those things, right? One of those life-things that doesn’t make sense. One of those cultural things we’re not really supposed to talk about. Like, that, maybe if we knew then what we know now, we wouldn’t travel that road, except that’s really impossible because, once we’ve traveled it, we know there are deeps truths we didn’t know about before and we couldn’t, wouldn’t ever go back to the way things were. It happens in all kinds of circumstances: falling in love, moving away from home, becoming a parent.

The closest I ever got to saying these things out loud was with another friend who said that, before she had kids, her own mother reminded her that she didn’t have to become a mother. That there may be some advantages for her life not to. My friend said that she was hurt by this, to hear it from her own mom, specifically. Because of the implications, you know?

It was only after becoming a mother herself, understanding what the experience means by living it, did she know what her mother had meant. Her voice through this conversation, like mine, sounded a little sad, and then we stopped talking about it because one of our children ran up and interrupted: they needed us.

the #2 stressor

This is going to be the most difficult post to write so far: more difficult, even, than getting that damn first one out of the way. (Of course, we’re less than four months in, so there will be more difficult times. I promise.)

As you know, we’ve moved again. For the second time in less than a year.  This one is very different from the last. The last one was across the country. This one is across Middlefield Rd. The last one had all of our belongings (some broken) arriving in a huge truck and unloaded into our house in less than three hours. This one took place over the course of a week, with Chris and I making no less than 8 trips a day in our mini-van. We had nine months to prepare for the last move, (The pregnancy metaphors abound with that one: I’ll post about it some time.) We had about three weeks to prepare for this one.

About the time I was at my most-stressed with our last move—we had been in California for just a few weeks—I read the status update of a friend of mine who has moved with her husband and three young children (the oldest is eight) AT LEAST six times since having her first child. (These weren’t “small moves,” either. I lost track of all of them, but it goes something like this: Colorado-Kansas-Colorado-Washington-Colorado-Colorado.) Anyway, she wrote, “No matter how many times you’ve done it, no move is easy.”

Indulging my own self-pity, I sort of blew off the comment. She was referring to her Colorado-Colorado move and I thought, at least she’s staying in the same state and I bet they’re moving this time because they’ve found a better house. (Heaven forbid, in the age of facebook, that I actually contact her myself to find out; instead I read her status updates, like all 432 of her closest friends, and feel like I’m all caught up.)

Well, here I am, freshly moved in the same area of the same town in the same state, to a better house, and I want to say: IT IS NOT EASY!!! It seems like we all know the statistics about life’s most stressful events: after the death of a loved one, moving is the #2 stressor, right? (If I had more time, I would look up verification and link to it here, but you will have to google it yourself this time and let me know if I’m wrong in the comments.)

The fastest way for me to explain the stress is to show you a picture of my “closet”:

My closet, my mind.

Each morning, I wake up and look for a pair of clean undies (that are MINE) in this pile, sometimes finding some, sometimes going without, and I consider wearing something other than the same pair of work pants and baseball shirt that I’ve been wearing every day for the past two weeks, but decide a uniform is best in stressful times, and then go on to look for my toothbrush, I think of how this mess is the perfect representation of my mind.

I wore this pretty much every day for two weeks when we moved across the country. And I am going to wear it every day for two weeks now.

Even in the best of times, I am not the most mentally organized person. (Right now my friend Rachel is reading this and thinking, That’s the understatement of the year.) So I try very hard to have an organized space around me. I use hooks and dividers and files and baskets. I identify clutter on a daily basis and put it in a box near the door that I take took Goodwill regularly. (One time I had to go back and reclaim a puzzle that Luke saw in the box, though, so I now I don’t take the kids on this errand.) And I am Very Slow To Unpack. This must drive Chris nuts: he wants to take a box and put it on a shelf and be done with it. But I insist I know what is inside every container, can assess whether we really need it, and then think carefully about the most efficient spot it can go. I don’t like things hidden in storage. To me this means we don’t really need them in the first place. (Except for our Christmas stockings. Those are in a box labeled “Christmas Stockings” in the “seasonal” section of the garage.)

So, my closet will get where it needs to be in time. The kitchen is done. That matters most when you have three children. And, since it’s in the kitchen, the junk drawer is done, too:

Hope for my mind?

But here is the difficult part. The stress of this environment is messing with me. I feel good at doing two things right now: making up excuses to go to Ikea and giving my therapist job-security.

Here is a comprehensive list of the things I DON’T feel good at:

(um…I just published this post on accident. I’m writing the list in a new post now. Stay tuned for, like, 20 minutes.)

*update! it’s published!*