The Moving Starts to Happen

A is walking around with a spring in her step. She keeps hugging me and saying “We’re moving to Utah!” I keep smiling and saying she’ll be singing another tune once we get there, because after all she’s 14 and it’s change. She’s just so happy to be going back to the States. I always ask her if she’ll miss her friends and she says yes but she doesn’t feel like she knows them well enough to be that upset about it. Is this a cultural thing or just an A thing? She says that while she has a big group of friends here, none of them are her best friends. Being in a big group seems to mean that you tell one friend something and it’s like telling the group which makes people more guarded. I was talking to a friend here about it and she said when she was growing up “the group” was the most important thing, forget about having one close friend. I see it in their interaction, it’s kinda cool and polite. I wonder if being at an all girl’s school has anything to do with this.


She’s been compiling a list of things she’s looking forward to and the funny thing is that two things high on her list are Tuna Helper and SpongeBob Squarepants Macaroni and Cheese. Forget that she’s been eating better the past year than many people eat their whole lives!

H is wrapping up his last week of work so he can focus on the logistics of the move. We’ve put together a list of things to sell and I think about having to buy a new life again when we go back to the States. If we would have seen into the crystal ball and known we wouldn’t be here for at least five years we would have put some things in storage, but in a way, it’s nice to not be saddled that way. Financially not the best thing we’ve done but it’s just stuff right? I was telling one of my colleagues here that I think about the future sometimes when A meets the boy she wants to marry (although she swears that will never happen) and we get invited to the soon to be in-law’s house and they have beautiful furniture, china and a fancy dining room table. Then they come to our house and we’re still living like college students because we’ve moved around so much. What will they think of us? She just laughed that I would be concerned about that. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking of that because in the end I guess the lesson we can teach her is that possessions don’t really matter. Get some life experiences instead.

Me, I feel like I’m having a mini mid-life crisis. With this big move, work not letting up a single moment, and a milestone birthday around the corner that I am trying desperately to ignore, it’s a little stressful right now. The day my mother died, we were leaving the cemetery after the service and while her death in many ways had been a long time coming, I still felt like I’d been sucker punched. As we walked to our cars, my best friend put her arm in mine and said to me, “Just promise me you won’t do something stupid with your hair”. Fast forward to London a few weeks ago and me admiring a woman with bleached platinum blonde hair. The train journey home I was thinking to myself, yeah that would be cool! The next morning when I verbalized this to one of my co-workers and saw the reaction it evoked, I realized how well my friend knew me. The moment of insanity passed. I will be heading back to the U.S., brunette as usual.