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.
If it’s the rainy season here, is it spring or fall in
Vermont? 
Has all this moving around ruined me for being wholly in one place? I’m not sure I even want to be anyway. I think about
many of my various homes in the course of any day, kind of like living in
multiple worlds all at once. The Internet
and Facebook make this even easier- I have regular updates from my friends
around the world, I can check on weather and news from everywhere I’ve ever
lived or might be moving to in the future. Mostly it is a good thing, I think, but at
times I find myself disoriented, forgetting which season it is or what part of
the school year we’re in. Conversations with
settled friends about long-term plans can be awkward. I’m never entirely sure where we’ll be this
time next year but I still need to go through the motions of making arrangements as if I will be. 
Am I more prepared to cope with unexpected drastic change than so-called
“settled” people? Even the most settled-seeming lifestyle can be rocked to the
core by unforeseen events and I have had some rigorous exercise in living with
uncertainty and readjusting to new circumstances. 
Am I losing my perspective, living in the United States for nearly 4 years in a row now? Sometimes I feel like life is too easy for us here- the phone almost always works, as does the electricity, the heat. There's usually a hospital nearby, within an hour drive, no flight to another country is usually necessary to find a specialist. We bathe in water clean enough to drink. The roads on which we drive are smooth and straight. Sure, there are pot-holes but nothing big enough to swallow a vehicle or make a 10-mile trip be exhausting from being thrown all over the car. We have to work hard to find things to complain about but we still manage to do a lot of it, to find discomfort everywhere. I try to remember that we have it easy, not to layer on the guilt, but to try to appreciate what we have.
