I'm bachelorette-ing it tonight in Logan. It is pouring rain. Again. Sitting here in the wee hours, in my empty, yet-to-be-rented house and wishing that my king size bed was still down the hall waiting for me. There are a lot of things that I am wishing were still in Logan tonight. Like our lives.
I watched a show on TV last night about the tsunami in Indonesia, five years ago. I almost can't stand that it has been five years. It doesn't seem like five minutes ago that I was standing in my kitchen in the middle of Christmas leftovers, watching the news, not really believing the destruction I was seeing, and trying to picture 200,000 people dead. So on this show, they interviewed a couple whose five year old daughter died in the tsunami. The mom said that when she got the news that her daughter was dead, that it was like one of her lives had ended, and another life had begun, and no matter how much you wanted to, there was no way to go back to the old life. Then she broke down crying.
No way would I ever compare anything in my life to the grief of that mother, but her words stuck with me, because I realized that what we have all been feeling around here is loss. Moving is loss. It doesn't matter if the move was for good reasons or bad, you still lose something in the process. And you have to be sad for a while about what you left behind. And I knew all of this before we moved, and tried to prepare for it, but there really isn't any way to get ready to lose something, because you don't really miss it until it is gone.
I keep telling the kids that things will be okay one day, and I know they will. But I want them to be okay TODAY. I want to wake up in the morning and have our new lives all in order, and our old lives all tucked nicely away and put in perspective somewhere in the back of our brains. Or I want to wake up and have our old lives back the way they were. But none of us is really wanting to go through the adjustment phase, of meeting new neighbors, making new friends, starting new schools, and establishing new routines. It was fun at first, but now it just seems like work. The fun part of "new" has lost it's appeal, and we are down to the work part, and it pretty much just bites. Especially for the kids, who miss their old friends and are feeling like they don't really want new friends, because they have perfectly good friends at their real home. And especially for me (tiny violins come in here please,) because I have a perfectly good job up here, and I don't really feel like looking for a new job, even though the commute is putting a huge strain on our time and gas budget.
I'm not sure what the point of all this whining is, except that it felt good to put a name on the kind of pointless, aimless, sort of depressing emotional fog that seems to come and go around our house. To realize we are probably normal. And to put it in perspective with what others have lost. Sometimes I forget I'm not the only one in the world with problems.
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