mind games: anticipation

We live in San Francisco.  We love our neighborhood, inside of a national park, with trails, beaches, and historic sites.  The kids run free with their friends, playing baseball and kickball and street hockey and building rope swings and forts in the woods.  I don’t think I’ve seen a toy gun since we left Georgia.  For the first time we live in a vacation destination: we have seen friends from around the world- some as planned reunions, a few last-minute, and one completely coincidental, on a street-corner in Haight-Ashbury.

Ten months in, I’ve passed through the honeymoon phase, when I loved it fiercely, as if someone was trying to take it away from me, and the hating phase, in which I was constantly fed up with the traffic and most people and vigorously fought anyone’s suggestion that it might be time to put down some roots. Now I’m just living here, pretty comfortable but still learning my way around the parts of the city I don’t go to regularly.

Unfortunately, the hating period also coincided with the part where we realized that our finances in this very expensive city are very shaky, and my husband started looking for jobs that might support us all better. I have been looking too, but being a trailing spouse and mom and moving every 1-3 years doesn’t do wonders for a resume.  (More on that in a future post)

I’m trying not to think too much about the long term and the big picture, in favor of focusing on kids and home and sanity, but it keeps sneaking up on me.  I have to keep in mind our house in GA and when we should start trying to sell it.  I have to start touring public middle schools with my son so we can decide which ones we want to bid on for next year.  And now the organizations to which my husband has applied have started calling back.

Anticipation of a new home is a delicious feeling- finding it on a map, reading about it online, pestering friends who may have been there before.  Most of the cities I’ve moved to are places about which someone always says, “hmmm, I’m sure you’ll make the best of it…” or “you are so brave for going there,” but that doesn’t ever discourage me, I love that imagination phase of moving. It’s seductive, a chance to let go of the things about my current life that are getting me down and dream about how I will remake my self at this next, better, destination. 

The problem is not that my daydreams bear no relation to how my life will actually play out in my new home, it’s how it leads me to forsake my old home too quickly.  It’s hardest to stay in the present when my husband has applications out to multiple jobs in countries around the world.  I start thinking about moving to Uganda, Fiji, Geneva, and forget completely about why I might want to be grounded where I live for as long as possible.  It’s very hard to love my current home while preparing to move somewhere else, when I’m unlikely ever to return except for brief visits. 

In an effort to slow my disenchantment, I avoid looking at a map of the region until after the first interview.  I try not to look at online information on the expat scene or international schools until the organization makes an offer.  My husband and I have a deal that each of us has veto power.  We discuss potential jobs and countries together, and either of us can be the one who says “no” or, after we’ve gotten there, “it’s time to leave.”

Up until now, one or both of us have been ready to leave a place when it’s been time to move on.  This time neither of us is so sure we are ready to go, but the applications are going out anyway- experience has taught us to start this process up to a year before we think it might be necessary to find a new job. We hadn't expected replies so quickly.

I’d thought that we’d gotten in the habit of moving but this extended stint in the US has been disorienting.  As an expat abroad, I’m part of a community of transients.  People who have been in a city for five years are marveled at and all the

social networking is accelerated when your whole relationship may only last a few months or years, depending on how long you overlap with your new friends.  It was a shock to return to the US and try to adjust to the slow pace of making friends American-style.  After three years in Georgia I was still a newcomer- after three years in Hanoi or Dhaka I would have been an old hand, with most of my early friends already off in new countries. 

So far, we’re not going anywhere and our daily routines distract us just enough from the possibility that this time next year we might be settling into a new home on the other side of the world.  The atlases are hidden away, I’ve started a garden and am ignoring as long as I can the temptation to daydream about faraway destinations.