Letting Go

When Alex went to college, I was prepared to miss him. I was so prepared, so determined not to cry when we left him, that I didn’t cry at all, apart from tearing up a little once in the van twenty miles away.

I was fine when Vicky moved to St. Louis to go to school. I had my writing and my volunteer work at the church. She came home two or three times a month for real food and laundry facilities. While I enjoyed getting caught up on her life and taking care of her for a few hours, it was a relief when she piled her laundry baskets in her car and waved good-bye. The house was quiet again.

Then Eric got laid off. We were enormously relieved when he was offered his current job. I threw myself into sorting and packing. It was a stressful three months. I knew it would be a relief to finally get everything moved so I could settle into the new normal.

It wasn’t a relief. Everything in my life except the cats and Eric was unfamiliar–the neighborhood, the incessant noise from the road next to our apartment, the snow–dear Lord, how could I ever have been happy to see it snow? Why was I excited about the lake effect again?*

One day, I was unpacking a box and ran across a passport. I opened it to see whose it was, and Alex’s 13-year-old face looked back at me. I lost it. Full-on, instant ugly crying. It wasn’t just that I was in a new place. I was there without my kids.

I’m not writing this for sympathy. I’m getting help and working through the grief. That’s what it is, too. I’ve touched on this before–I was grieving my old life before our final move.

I’m writing this for my friends who have kids in or going to college. Don’t think you get over it and move on. There may come a time when something changes so much or so fast that you realize your old life is really over. You invest all those years nurturing your babies–the sleepless nights, the fights and broken hearts and tears, and then they’re off on their own adventures and you’re left wondering how it happened so quickly.

Whether you were a working mom or a stay-at-homeschooler, you’re going to have regrets. You’re going to miss the pudgy toddler. It’s okay. You don’t let go overnight. I’m not sure you ever completely let go at all.

 

*Almost without exception, when people find out I moved here in January, they apologize for the weather and promise me this is the worst winter they’ve ever seen here. The city can be scary, but the people have been really nice.

The Process

I’ve kind of taken the long way around in this writer gig. Welcome to pretty much my whole life.

When I started out, I figured you write a story, send it out in the mail, and it gets rejected. You send it out again and eventually it gets published. I’m not alone in that; most new writers think that, and most of us figure out pretty quickly that it’s not that easy. There’s the whole problem of writing the story.

It’s taken me seven books and more than a decade to figure out what I think is the process. I’m still testing the hypothesis.

Part of the trouble is I want to be a plotter so bad I can taste it, but that’s not how it works for me. I can figure out the beginning and end, and some of the big parts in between, but I have to dig in and actually write the draft to find the whole story. That makes for a big mess to clean up, and I haven’t figured out how to deal with the mess. That’s why I have four drafts, representing, oh, about five years of work, on my hard drive to rewrite.

I’m going to try something new. Now that I have a fresh draft to work with, I’m going to write the long synopsis. Hopefully, that will give me the map to the manuscript. Stay tuned. It could get ugly!

New Gig

I got an e-mail from a friend a week or so ago. My bard mentor, who performs at the Scottish festivals in Missouri, can’t make it to the first one this year, and she asked if I would fill in for him. Of course, I accepted immediately. It is a paid gig after all.

It took a whole two minutes for panic to set in. I really haven’t been barding that long, about 2 1/2 years. That’s not a lot of time to build up performing chops. My mentor sent me a bunch of new stories, though, and helped me work out sets for the kids’ storytelling sessions I’m scheduled to do. Now it’s a matter of prep work. I have a small repertoire already, and I’m going to add another half-dozen stories so I’m not telling the same ones at every set. There will be some overlap, but the stories he sent are ones he hasn’t told in a long time, so it will be new for the regulars who come to the festival every year. Maybe it will make a up a little for his absence. Not that it will be easy to learn six new stories in a matter of a few weeks. It’s rather like cramming for an exam I’m going to have to take over and over and over!

Here are the particulars, just in case you happen to be in the area:

Missouri Tartan Day

Frontier Park, St. Charles, MO

April 4-6

Have a look at the schedule to find out when you can come hear a story set. Hope to see you there!

The Country Mouse

Among Aesop’s Fables is a little story about a country mouse who is visited by his cousin, the city mouse. The city mouse is dismayed by how little his country cousin has and invites him to his home in the city, where they can live together in abundance. The two mice go to the city, and the country mouse is astounded at the bounty, but they only just start their feast when a cat crashes the party. The two mice scurry off to safety, and eventually, the cat leaves. They come out and begin their feast again when another visitor (unnamed by Aesop) shows up and the cousins have to run for cover again. The country mouse decides he’d rather have a little in peace than abundance in danger.

I think there must be other stories based on this fable that expand on the adventures of the country mouse. Probably my grandmother read them to me when I was a child, and some of the details stuck with me. Whether those stories exist anywhere outside my imagination is a bit of research for another day. The point is, I’ve identified closely with the country mouse for the last several months.

Moving is hard. It doesn’t matter if you’re moving across the street or around the world. It’s a dirty, sweaty job, even if you’re not the one doing all the heavy lifting. I have quite a bit of experience with moves, having done it five times in the last seven years of Eric’s military career. Our move to Chicago has been unlike any other move we’ve had. Not only was it the first one in twenty years that we’ve done entirely on our own, it’s the first one we’ve made without kids since before we became parents. While not having to factor the kids in made some decisions a little easier, there were times I really wished the kids were around to lug stuff up and down stairs!

Since I know we’re not the only ones to come here chasing a job, I’ve decided to journal some of our experiences here. My hope is that somewhere, there are country mice who have to move to the city, and they’ll find my blog. It will likely be a combination of what I wish I’d known before we moved, and experiences we never thought we’d have. Some of the posts will be in my regular Monday spot, but I may slip in a few extras here and there, so if you haven’t already subscribed to my blog, you might want to consider it. You never know what you’ll find here!

Harder Than It Had To Be

The battery in my van died last week. I was getting ready to go to a yoga class and it wouldn’t start. Of course it was parked in the front spot in the garage, so even jumping the battery was bound to be a challenge.

Saturday, while we were running errands, we bought a new battery  and went home to install it. Unfortunately, the battery sits under a bar and the fuse box, and our socket set is downstate.

Plan B: We pushed the van out of the garage, intending to push it with Eric’s car the half block to the mechanic’s shop. Easy peasy, or it would have been if it hadn’t been for the ice and snow in the alley we back onto. We got the van stuck on an ice bump and couldn’t get it back over. The ice cut the traction, so Eric couldn’t even move it with his car. Where the heck is the football team from the high school up the road when you need them?

Plan C: Eric drove around to jump it. Too bad the battery was so dead the starter wouldn’t even click.

Plan D: We called a tow truck, and were told it would be an hour and change before they arrived. It came sooner than expected, and he had a fancy pants battery jumper. Of course, it started right up. *Insert unkind name here* At that point, I came upstairs to get lunch and let Eric deal with getting the battery changed.

There are up-sides. It didn’t die in a rest area, in the snow, somewhere on I-55 when I was driving back and forth moving stuff. It also didn’t wait for Eric to go out of town. Timing-wise, it was pretty perfect, even if it did mean sitting outside in the cold to wait for the tow truck.