Sunday, July 22, 2012

And Here We Find Ourselves

We are crazy.  At least, that's what I've told myself every day for the last five months.  We are crazy.  That's because five months ago my husband Kurt and I decided to leave our American lives in New England and move with our two year old toddler to Africa.  It was insane.  We had a house.  And a baby.  And a job close enough to walk to.  And a mall 0.7 miles away. To most Americans it was the perfect set up.

And all we wanted to do was move. 

The simple explanation is not simple at all. Even as I'm sitting here trying to place words to rationalize, I have little to say.  The explanation is hard, but it has everything to do with where we've come from and who we are.

I grew up in a small town in eastern Iowa. Minus some limited travel within the US and one strange afternoon in Tiajuana, Mexico, my itch to see the world had hardly been answered during childhood.  Though we had no extended family and few friends nearby, my family lived in the same house my whole life. Kurt, though as sheltered, experienced the opposite. From the ages of 0-18 his family had moved eight times--all inside of (or within minutes of) the state of Iowa.  When we met each other at the University of Iowa, Kurt's one goal was to settle down and stay put somewhere. Somewhere. Anywhere. Please.  My goal was to get out of Iowa. To somewhere. Anywhere. Please.

When we started dating, I was in the process of packing up my life for the Peace Corps.  A last minute phone call to my recruiter to explain that I could not leave my newly discovered soulmate did not go well.  She told me that if I made decisions based on boys, I would find myself going nowhere.  And I did. 

Soulmate Kurt and I got married at 21/22 years old, got jobs, and bought a 3 bedroom home in town.  We watched for the next two years while friends around us did the same...starting families, spending weekends at Walmart, filling empty houses with meaningful artifacts from exciting places like Target and Bed, Bath, and Beyond.  When it occurred to me that I could be living the exact same life forty years later, a piece of me died.  We quickly realized that just because we'd married young did not mean we were ready to settle down in other ways.  We weren't judging others for their decisions, but we recognized we needed something different. We needed adventure.  We needed to grow. We needed to get out.

Fast forward eight years of adventure later...  After coming to our realization, we sold our house, gave away a household of possessions except for what we could fit in our car, lived in a summer camp in Pennsylvania, and arrived in New York City homeless and without jobs. In a blink we were calling Manhattan home, wearing black and using crazy words like, "schlep" and "bialy" while we ate macaroons from the corner bodega. We moved to the Bronx for five years and reinvented ourselves and our careers while we met every kind of person on Earth.  When we found ourselves pregnant and suddenly both laid off in careers experiencing major hiring freezes, we moved our newborn to the arctic tundra of Connecticut for the only job we could find, eventually buying a foreclosed home with no pipes, electricity, or remote sense of sanity. Loved every minute of it.

Eight years of transition later we cannot imagine ever having stayed where we started. We’ve had so much fun in the learning, we are now feeling the pull once again to leave a state we did not choose, and a home that we could stay in forever, but don’t fully belong to.  It's time to learn some more, to take leaps beyond our comfort zone once more.

And so here we find ourselves.  Scraping our lives clean once again, ready for our next adventure with little more than ourselves, what would fit in a storage container, and an energetic toddler named Jonas.