Twenty Years

Moving our family of five to a different state has made me sentimental. Realizing I've been out of high school for twenty years has made me reflective. And these have converged into all kinds of thoughts rolling around.These are some of them.


Twenty years since high school. After twenty years, delicate lines have snuck up at the corners of my eyes, reminding me that this face is not exactly the same one I wore then. The scale reminds me that this is not the same body I fumbled through high school in. There are three little boys who follow me around asking for food and snuggles who remind me I am a (mostly) responsible adult who doesn’t get to make decisions based solely on my plans and desires. I have a husband who makes me realize that all my teen worries about being lonely or missing love were completely unfounded. The minivan sitting out front makes my teenage self groan in angsty protest and demand to know where the powder blue Nissan Pulsar went (God, I loved that car. T-tops!). There are a surprising number of things telling me that I am not the same girl I was in high school.


But then I dug out my yearbooks. I remember being apprehensive in high school but pretty comfortable socially. I had fun friends and only the requisite amount of high school drama. I remember riding around on Saturday nights in a friend’s little Civic blasting Nine Inch Nails, belting out “I wanna vacuum like an animal" (that still cracks me up). I went to coffee shops with friends (although I hadn’t developed a taste for actual coffee yet) where we sat around for hours talking and laughing. There were bonfires at the beach, unspoken/unrequited crushes, notes passed in class, and a blissful ignorance of what grown-up life was all about. And those yearbooks reminded me that I was also wonderfully goofy, getting up on stage for the school Lip Sync (more than once!), Talent Show (although I still wish I could take that one back), a play, even a musical! What was I thinking, exposing myself to an audience like that? How did I start on that side of the daring/anxiety equation and end up on the other?


Recently, Dave hung out with some college buddies when one of The Guys was in town. When I asked him how everyone was, he said, “We’re all exactly the same, just a little more serious.”

I thought that was perfect.

I am still that slightly apprehensive, sometimes unexpectedly bold girl, just a little more serious. I can still be goofy, even if I sometimes need reminders from my kids or a little wine. I still have the best of friends (some are even from high school) and there are days when I'm not quite sure of my place in the world. So, in spite of the mirror, scale, kids, or responsibilities I’ve collected over the years, I’m not all that different now. And all of this is why I’m looking forward to the reunion. (I know, it’s weird. But my girlfriend Deborah has a t-shirt slogan and everything. There’s no going back now.) A bunch of us can get together and momentarily put aside our grown-up burdens and remember our slightly awkward teenage selves and the silly way we were. And then we can be a little awkward and silly all over again.

Violence

I debated addressing this at all here. But because I'm recording this journey in part for my kids, I thought this was too important to gloss over or pretend it doesn't exist. So this is a letter of sorts to them.

To my boys in ten, twenty, thirty years, I achingly hope that you don't live with the routine gun violence we do in 2016. Three words that should never be in a sentence together: routine, gun, violence. I'm writing this on the heels of a shooting in Dallas, Texas, targeting police officers, which is only the most recent of many shootings involving workplaces, nightclubs, public spaces, and even schools. And my heart hurts for the victims and police, their families, people of every color who are underrepresented and disenfranchised, our country, and a very tiny part of me even aches for the shooters in these atrocities who are blinded by hate, mental illness, evil, mob mentality, whatever it is that drives them. There's a sense of uncertainty in our country right now and a pervasive, vague, underlying distrust of people on the other side of the aisle (democrats/republicans, pro-gun/anti-gun, black/white, native/immigrant, the list of divisive options is endless).

In the midst of moving, I simply cannot devote much mental space or energy to dwelling on the violence and pain. Packing boxes, planning the drive, registering the three of you for school, setting up utilities, daydreaming about the new house, all of these are welcome, trivial distractions from the much bigger national picture. There's a little escape for me in wondering if the beautiful home in the small town we're moving to will somehow be safer than San Diego. This is completely irrational, of course (we are generally safer than any other time in history, and we live in a remarkably safe place right now), but it's a fantasy that lets me believe I can keep you safe.

Here's hoping that we've come to some national agreement on guns and ways to combat violence that require compromise from all sides but don't vilify entire groups of people. And if, God forbid, we haven't, I hope you guys can be part of the solution.

Hello from the middle of the night

A dear friend asked me to blog about our move to Oregon and I have relented. Because it's 3:30 in the morning with less than a week until the moving van pulls out of town. And what better time to start a slightly creative endeavor to preserve family memories and entertain loved ones than the middle of the night when I can't sleep?

At the moment, I'm wrapped in a quilt I made (very modern, not your grandma's quilt, for anyone wondering), sitting in the middle of our roughly 440 sq ft downstairs surrounded by moving boxes (packed, not empty) and sandy floors (residue from soaking up as much California beach time as we can). Dave is hopefully asleep in a hotel room halfway across the country on a work trip trying to keep sharks alive (that's not a cute metaphor; he really is). My youngest two boys are sleeping on the floor of their bedroom in sleeping bags because we Craigslisted their bunks right out from under them (the beds may not have survived the move and we made $100 on them from the price we paid six years ago; we're buying them new ones when we move, promise). And my oldest is in my bed because he informed me at bedtime that he could tell he would have a nightmare (though he couldn't confirm what it would be about), and how could I turn him down in the face of our impending move and Daddy's travel?

But now, as is often the case, I need to cut my writing short because the son with premonitions of nightmares just came downstairs to see what I was doing because he saw the light on and realized I was gone. I promised him I'd be up in five minutes and those minutes have multiplied. Maybe in our new (larger) house in Oregon I'll be able to sneak away to a distant corner of the house and write in the middle of the night without interruption. Or maybe I could find a cave. I think a cave would be better.