finding my way home: geography

have you ever set foot in a place for the first time, fully taken in the scene with all your senses, and known without a doubt that you're home?

i have.  several times, actually.  it's a sort-of serial homing issue for me.

growing up, i never strayed too far from the place where i was born. . . literally.  from my pre-school, my elementary school, my middle school, my high school, my college, and even my law school, i could easily drive to the hospital where i was born, within half an hour or so.

of course, there were things i loved about this place, but then, there were also those things i hated.  people i loved where all around, but then again, so were people that i didn't love so much.  it was this mix of good and bad that settled into a feeling of ordinary deadness.

by the time i started my own family, claustrophobia had come on full force, and it was only a few years into my daughter's life before i started feeling like this place i knew so well just wasn't the home i wanted.  so, with our families grabbing at our ankles, my husband, daughter and i managed to get free, and off we went to start a new life 3,000 miles away, in eugene, oregon.

the feeling of freedom after arriving in eugene was unparalleled.  finally, i could define myself without a peanut gallery of voices that really knew me better than i knew myself.  i could decide what to do with my work life, my daughter, or my day without a sea of opinions to sort through.  i could look to the future as a big and beautifully blank canvas, rather than a list of obligations and expectations that i needed to coordinate so that everyone would be satisfied.

at first, it was a total vacation from reality.  we hardly worked, and every weekend was yet another exploration of some fantastically beautiful place we'd never been before.  as we hit the eight month mark, the reality of needing to end the steady outflow from our bank account and increase the inflow with some steady jobs began sinking in.  with that dose of reality, our new home felt less homey, and within four months or so, we road tripped our way across four states and landed in our next home sweet home - santa fe, new mexico.

and sweet it was.  we were welcomed into our new abode by a glorious southwest sunset, and the house we'd arranged to rent just weeks before turned out to be absolutely breath taking.  within weeks of landing, we had our daughter in the loveliest little school, had met a slew of like-minded friends, and our newly planted life was already beginning to feel like it had some roots.

and on things went for a few months . . . until even with the jobs we'd found, the money really started to dwindle.  so much so that i had to swallow my pride, and swallow hard.  there seemed no choice but to ask those parents whose hearts i broke if just maybe they could help us stay afloat.  and they did, and we got serious about figuring out how to stabilize in our new and beautiful home.

fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, about a year into our stint in santa fe, a perfectly matched job opportunity for me arose in a nearby town.  fortunately because it was a job teaching law that i really wanted to do, and with summers off but pay that would still turn around our financial situation.  unfortunately because the nearby town actually wasn't that nearby.  albuquerque was over an hour away.

after trying to figure out a way to keep this great home and take the dream job, it seemed clear that wasn't going to work out so well.  the flow of life was pretty clear that it was time to go, yet again.  having become somewhat obedient to these waves of movement that rarely explained themselves, again, we moved. 

the job did provide the stability we needed - steady income, steady routine, steady residency in one town . . . well, not really one town.  we still managed to switch our zip code and town at a rate of about once a year, but all of our addresses clustered around the job which kept life steadier than it had been for a few years.

but even with all this growing stability, albuquerque wasn't the home that we chose with wide eyed excitement.  albuquerque was actually the town we drove through with our noses turned up when we first blew into new mexico. 

i had learned to admire how beautiful the sandias were all lit up at sunset, and i'd found my favorite restaurants and bookstores.  my mental roadmap of albuquerque was set, and it gave me that nice feeling of comfort in always knowing where i was and how to get where i wanted to go.  maybe, through the back door, we did in fact stumble upon a new home.

after being faced with the statistic that our ten year old had lived in ten houses in her short little life, my husband and i did have to admit, we were so sick of moving.  the renting game which was so freeing, uncommitted, and wonderful (especially during the housing market crash), had become a frustrating lot of ups and downs.  maybe it was time to settle down, and maybe home didn't need to give us that warm and fuzzy feeling of the towns we hand picked.  maybe home was actually closer than we thought.

to be continued. . .

finding my way home: marriage

one of the ways that my husband and i knew we were right for each other was because we both had this itch for something more.  we could talk for hours about our fantasies: living in hawaii, buying a beautiful plot of land, growing our own food, building our own house. . . the dream went on and on and on.

and both of us loved it.  we loved the dreaming, and we loved that we could so harmoniously paint this beautiful picture of exactly what we wanted, together.  there were no fights about whether or not to include this or that.  just blissful agreement.

but unfortunately this state of bliss didn't last long.  in our first years of marriage there was a time when our prospects didn't look so good.  newly wed and newly strapped with a baby, we fell into the pictures of what a family looked like from all around us.  he started a business, i got a good stable job, we put the kid in daycare, we bought a house, and we waited for that sense of the great american dream to settle in.

but, it didn't.

instead, it all felt terribly wrong.  he became increasingly frustrated with how long it took for a new business to actually start making some money.  i hated my good job, yet felt chained to it and had no interest in any other possibilities.  and our daughter, let's just say daycare wasn't at all where she wanted to be. 

everyone else had made it look so easy.  no one else seemed to be jumping out of their skin.  but, as much as we used all those appearances to persuade ourselves that life was really grand and wonderful, we just couldn't be convinced.

and so, something of a mid-life crises showed up there at the end of our twenties.  well, more likely it was me that had the crisis and some spilled on to him, but either way, there is no denying crisis was in the house.

during that period of time, i questioned everything.  i questioned whether i loved him, whether i wanted to be married, whether i'd just rather be with someone else.  i questioned motherhood, whether i even had it in me to be a good mother, whether it might be easier to be a mother only part-time.  i opened that dark closet of skeletons.  i'll just be straight; i jumped in the damn closet.

and luckily, before i made a choice that wouldn't be so easy to turn back from, i slowed down.  in the pause, all those dreams that my husband and i had hatched, way back when our relationship was new and our love was the most real thing in the world, those dreams started tapping me on the shoulder.  at first in whispers, and then, as i got further and further away from the pull of the closet, the whispers got louder, until it was absolutely undeniable.  the time to go for it was now.

fortunately, he too was hearing the call, and so we dusted our bruised and battered relationship off, got our gorgeous little daughter packed up, and hit the road, full of hope that in a new place we could make those dreams happen.

and things did truly shift.  it was one of the greatest blessings of my life to restart life in new places, again and again, with my little family of three.  as we moved from house to house, and town to town together, we got to know each other in ways that i don't think many people ever get to know others.  in each new place, we always had our best friends, and those best friends were us, by necessity but i like to think also by choice.  as our time together as a little unit flourished, our appreciation of that time together became the nucleus around which everything else gravitated.

and those beautiful dreams and fantasies that started us out were memorialized in each home by a collection of collages that encapsulated the spirit of what we most wanted.  even our daughter was in on it all - the family farm dream.  even though our lives looked nothing like the dream, we each had the dream painted on the inside.  it was a sort-of secret club we had going, a secret dream that kept us moving.

but then, a great job for me slowed us down.  financial security caused us to stop the moving, and for the first time since our crisis, we remained in one place for five years.  there were times that i seriously felt a little like a drug addict tied down to a bed without getting a fix.  the moving, seeking, dreaming, reaching had become an almost addictive impulse for us, and when life stopped we weren't quite sure what to do.

the stress of an intense job started bringing in my control issues full force, the ones that had haunted our marriage from the beginning.  the lack of distraction from constantly moving backdrops brought in my husband's depression, in all the ways that had made me so confused about whether he was the guy for me back before we started moving.

we needed to get moving on these dreams asap, or everything was going to start falling apart.  we revised the collages and rooted the dreams in the current biome where we lived. and we started looking for property, opening up to see how it could all unfold moving from right where we were.

we went out with realtors in a few different places, nearby and some far, but after each day out, we'd come back scratching our heads.  we knew that where we looked wasn't it, but there was absolutely no indication at all whatsoever about what was it.

after getting slapped in the face a few times, i just felt ready to surrender.  that surrender brought me to some of the greatest contentment that i think i ever experienced to that point.  life just seemed perfect as it was.  i felt ready to pack up the collages and put away the dreams.  i was madly in love with my family, content with my job, and really comfortable with my surroundings.  i was already living a dream.

until, i found out that my husband wasn't living in the dream with me.  since i spared the details of my own little crisis, suffice to say that the end of our seeking was that stationary sort-of environment that brought on my husband's questioning crisis.  he started to feel restless, and in that restlessness, he started to feel confused about what it was that really held us all together.  he jumped into his own closet of skeletons, and to me, it was quite an abrupt awakening.

so, after all i'd put him through in those early years of our marriage, i had the patience and understanding to wade through the muck with him for a bit.  it hurt to realize that maybe the dream that i was living in wasn't the same as what he wanted, to realize that maybe he didn't feel the way i did about our lives. 

and that summer, our marriage died.  it was one of the most painful experiences of my life to feel so content and at peace in my family, and then to realize that my husband was in such a different place.  deceived, betrayed, unappreciated. . . the depth of difficult feelings is hard for me to express.  my memories of that summer are a blur of tears, aloneness, and surrender.

in the surrender, there was no more hiding from all the problems in our relationship.  so many of the patterns came to a head, and we honestly started to consider that maybe we just couldn't be happy together, not without some big fantasy driving us one way or another. 

at times, i thought two strikes was going to be it for us.

but, as it turned out, after this winter of our relationship, there was a spring.  when asking all the most difficult questions, we ended up in the realization that we wanted to be together, and we wanted this more than either one of us wanted to be right.  we truly wanted to be good to each other.

this moved into a rebirth of our relationship, a chance to reevaluate and restart.  the trauma of the summer had taken us deep into all our discontentments, and with all we had seen, there was a surprising turn that came into our sense of the future.

to be continued. . .

finding my way home: motherhood

when my daughter was born, some portal opened inside me.  as i held this perfect and beautiful little woman-to-be, i felt such a deep commitment to her.  during those first moments holding her in my arms, it was like i made a little pact.

i silently promised to do my best, my very best to teach her what this woman thing was all about.  i wanted her to have the benefit of all those lessons i had learned, i wanted her life to be easier, her confusion to be smaller, her happiness to be bigger.  i wanted her to have a guide.

when she was still in my belly, i could feel her femininity blossoming.  although i kept it a secret, i knew she was a girl; i knew it all along.  images of a woman dancing kept gliding through my mind, and even more, i felt this aura of soft womanly light surrounding me.  maybe all pregnant woman get that little glow, but i definitely felt that mine had a pink tinge to it.

when she was still an infant, i found a blank journal that said "i hope you dance" on the front.  i bought the journal, and since that time, every six months to a year i pull out the journal and write a little passage to my woman in the making.  my plan is to save the journal and give it to her during her own time of transition.

the reason all this guidance probably means so much to me is because of how messily i slopped my way from little girl to adolescent.  it wasn't that my mother and the other women around weren't there for me, but just that they didn't have a clue how to lead a young girl through the dense jungle of puberty.  none of them had a leader, none of them had fared much better on their own treks; how were they to know what i needed?

but i suppose after spending years of my adult life unraveling yucky patterns and processing poor choices from my own unguided youth, i just couldn't bear the thought that my own little girl would have it just the same.  sure, she'd make mistakes.  sure, life would be hard sometimes.  but wasn't there something i could do to make it easier?

and, that was the question that filled my early years of motherhood.  that was the question that overwhelmed me with shame when i saw the ugly patterns of wanting validation from men surface when she was just a baby.  that was the question that told me i needed to figure out two things for myself: how to be the mother i really wanted to be, and even more, how to be the woman i really wanted to be.

i tried to find all that within myself in the community where i grew up, but it was just too easy to fall back into unconscious patterns, to act out what i had seen elsewhere, to act either from resistance or attraction to what was happening around me.  i just couldn't chart a new course being surrounded by the things that had built my old course.

and this deep feeling that i needed to do it differently was a large part of the fuel behind the desire to move cross country.

i hit a major turning point in eugene, oregon.  two special kindergarten teachers at the eugene waldorf school, ms. bonnie and ms. lourdes, were some of the first guides to me in how to parent from a different place.  i remember sitting at the kid-sized table in their lovely classroom crying because i didn't know how to console my daughter during violent spells of crying in her sleep.  i was overwhelmed with guilt that it was all my fault.

that guilt had strong roots in the fact that having her in daycare was one of the most traumatic experiences of my life.  i only dropped her off there once, and i stood by the door listening to her cry for a good twenty minutes before i could leave.  then, i only was at work for an hour or so before i just had to take a sick day, run back to the daycare, and take her home. 

from then on, my husband and i made do with an 'i never take her to daycare' arrangement, and then, my husband and i stopped by a bookstore one afternoon, and the cashier recognized us.  she told us how she used to work at that daycare, and that she quit because of how her supervisors would never let her pick up our daughter.  her co-workers told her that my daughter needed to cry it out, and even after hours and hours of non-stop crying, they wouldn't let her go and give some love to our little baby girl.

ouch.

so, getting back to that little kindergarten table in eugene, oregon, you can now hopefully see why i thought maybe these night terror crying spells that we couldn't wake her up from somehow had to do with our awful parenting choices.  and as i went through all this with these kindergarten teachers, i felt no judgment coming from them.  they clearly hadn't made the same choices for their own children and were not advocates of such choices, but they just held this loving space of compassion for both me and for my daughter. 

their whole way of being was this immense lesson to me.  they didn't try to solve and conquer; they just listened and offered their loving insights with an open hand. . .and within a couple weeks the crying spells were gone for good. 

from there, mentors in my new journey of both motherhood and womanhood came from everywhere.  all sorts of women seemed to model little tidbits of the path i was seeking, and before long i didn't even need the mentors.  a process began to unfold inside me, a process of intuiting my way into the mother i most truly wanted to be.  and i've got to say, it has been amazing path - one that could fill many more pages on its own.

but, all this leads into the present, and how that time of transition for my daughter is finally coming to pass.  after getting a permission slip from her school last spring asking if she could attend the girls only video presentation at school, i was cued that the time to get serious about this transition stuff had come.

i jumped on amazon and started ordering books: first, some of my judy blume favorites for her, and then, some books to help me get a sense of how i could possibly guide her through this stuff.  one book in particular grabbed me: becoming peers by deanna l'am.

i happily floated through the pages after it arrived, absorbing the ideas and formulating my own, until i got to her discussion of the "coming of age year."  in this chapter, the author talks about identifying a year for your girl to work with different women in her life.  she suggests gathering a group of women that love your transitioning girl, and asking them each to choose a task or project to do with your daughter during that year, creating a sort-of net of wisdom to hold her as she moves through the confusion and questions of puberty.

i loved the idea . . . but felt this pit in my stomach as i saw how logistically impossible it would be.  i lived so far from my friends, from my own mother, from my relatives.  there was no one in my current town that really felt close enough for me to ask them to mentor my daughter's coming of age year.

as the weeks passed and a really difficult time arose in my own life, i felt more and more of that pain of not having a community of women around me.

part of why i'd left my hometown was to discover a different way of being a woman, and now, all these years later, the whole plan seemed to be turning back on itself.  now, i felt this great need for all those women that i left behind.  they weren't just like me, but now i could see how their different perspectives and even their different values were their wisdom.  those different ways were the great jewels they could not only offer me, but they were those things that i most wanted them to offer to my daughter.


and within some months, these feelings about geography, marriage, and motherhood all converged, and the answer to all the questions about "finding my way home" started coming clear. 

the path that we've been on is a circle.  little by little, the plans started to evolve, and it seems that in the spring, we'll be moving back to where we started: the eastcoast.  we'll have family and friends around, a house of our own, and a new adventure to watch unfold.

although it turns out that our search for a home out in the world was in vain, it's turned out to be quite a fortuitous wave of ignorance.  by blindly looking around every corner for this perfect home to appear, we started to break down and realize there never would be a place with all pluses and no minuses. 

finding a home for us was about releasing all the resistance to seeing the great blessings of what was right in front of us from the beginning.