Forward and back

Birthdays are for marking time, for remembering and celebrating the year gone by (even if the celebration is mostly just that it’s over) and for looking forward. This will be a surreal birthday on both counts. Last year, P was over from Australia to write with me in DC, and we had dinner with P, and M and his wife, and my mother. After the dinner dishes were cleared and the guests cleared too, P and Michael and I removed everything from the kitchen cabinets in preparation for the kitchen demolition that would allegedly begin the next day and be finished in six weeks (it began the next week and was nearly finished in 16 weeks). At that point, we had no idea that we would be moving to NZ, that we would be selling that house with the new kitchen, that we would be celebrating my next birthday in a kitchen on the other side of the world. This year has been a good one for showing how even when all the changes that come are changes you’ve chosen, you still don’t necessarily get a lot of foresight.

And the funny thing was that then I believed I had the foresight. I believed that we’d go to NZ for a couple of months this year as I took my study leave, and we’d come home to find our beautiful new kitchen waiting for us. I believed that the NZ trip would be a step out of the ordinary, that it would help me in my tenure bid, that it would be a thing I’d never forget, that would be with me long into the future—a US-based future, with the kids at Oyster and us at our jobs and everything coasting along as it has been. And that was less than a year ago that I believed that.

In that year, we made the decision to move, we finished the kitchen, got the visas and the jobs, sold the house, bought a new house over the internet, packed everything we owned onto a container ship, and brought our bleary-eyed children on a journey to our new home across the world. And here they’ve started a new school, we’ve started new jobs, we’ve found new closeness in new friendships and new distances in old ones. And now we’ve bought another house and will engage in a new home renovation project as we try to figure out what to do with ourselves as we live in this house by the sea. All in all, it’s been a rather full year.

For the coming year, I lack foresight. I have a big curtain of fog spread up over August, even, as we try to figure out what on earth I do next once my GMU salary runs out. And the fog gets thicker as time goes into the future. I have written about the indefinite nature of my life in this blog lots of times; the birthday just underlines it. Guesses for the next year from any of you in the ether?

Things I’m pretty sure about: Aidan will turn 6 at a summer birthday party in the US, and odds are he’ll begin losing teeth. Naomi will turn 10 one month later in the dead of winter on the other side of the world, and she’ll become even more adolescent than she is already. We’ll run into major snags and frustrations in the renovation project, which will take longer than we anticipate and cost more. I’ll alternate between delight at the shape of my world and raw panic about what comes next.

It’s a pensive trip home tonight on the train, into black clouds that may portend rain. Michael is out of town (again) and Rob is out late tonight, so it’ll be me and the children on a dark early-winter night. We’ll light the fire, read books, bicker with each other, snuggle up together. It will be a night for living in the present, for paying close attention to what is here now. Some people practice that kind of “presence” because it’s good for them. I practice it because with a tangled last year and a mysterious future, there’s nothing to rest my mind upon but today. And, in a firelit cottage by the sea, today isn’t such a bad thing to rest upon after all.