What I want to write about

This is what I want to do here: write about moving and what it was like to settle into each and every place. Write about what you say to people that tell you to put down roots or that you really aren't settled into a place until you have lived there for a year or five years or ten years. Write about how the grass isn't greener anywhere and it's gorgeously greener there too, in moments. Write about how freeing it is to look entirely foreign so people hopefully don't expect you to abide by the unwritten rules of society, within reason. Write about how it feels to step outside your gate those first few weeks, how it feels like you're totally naked, until you get so used to it that you have to remember that you are different and not transparent to everyone after all.

Write about moving as a teenager, as a single person in her twenties, as a girlfriend, a partner and finally a wife, as a new mother, mother of two and then three children.  Write about hiring staff and letting them go, about learning how to make friends and how to readjust my expectations in a hurry.  Write about trying to find peace with living in a country where my lifestyle as an expat contrasts starkly with the poverty right down the street, even if we moved there to work with a humanitarian agency.

Write about moving to Taiwan, France, Italy, Belfast, Kosovo, Eritrea, Guinea, Decatur, San Francisco, Putney, Brattleboro, Dhaka, Cameroon, Hanoi, and Burlington. Write about leaving, about the honeymoon period and when, exactly, the realization hits that you could leave and not be too broken by the leaving. Write the magic and the heartbreak.