Comings and goings

Around me as I write this, Ed prepares to leave again for another interview. The comings and goings of this process feel like a maelstrom, not in their simple departures and days away and returns, but in the implication that these are the first steps of the next great upheaval. This knowledge makes the process harder to bear for both of us and we are both wound up tight tight tight and trying not to inflict that upon the other.

Once I believed myself semi-nomadic. I didn't like travelling as much as I liked living places and I thought in that I was well suited to diplomatic spousehood. As I age, I find myself slowing down and the longing to be where I will always be is very strong. I want to know where I will be and then be there.

In these wild days of email and fast travel, we are all nomads. So many of us live far far far from the bones of our ancestors and places do not exert the same power over us. We are scattered and before us lie the almost infinite choices of where to go and what to be. Sometimes, like now, it feels too much. I don't want all that choice. I want to have to be somewhere. I want to be tied there.

And even as I write that I shake my head because part of the great struggle of motherhood for me has been the ties that bind. But maybe in this conflict is the point. Parenthood does tie you and perhaps it does more than tie you to your children. Perhaps it ties you to your community, your town, your house. You weave yourself tighter into the web of community just as having children weaves you tighter into the web of life.

NaNoWriMo thought for the day: When I am writing every day, I feel connected to the whole ribbon of my life. Suddenly, moving or changing or growing old no longer feel frightening. I can look up and see the whole road before me, mapped by my writing along it. No matter where the road curves or twists, that I am writing it down means that there is thread unbroken between my now and my then. It is a kind of rock when the world feels shaky.