two years

last year, i was pretty much a wreck. i functioned and i like to think that i fooled a lot of people into thinking that i was doing great with this whole life transition thing. but the truth is, i was not. between november 5 and november 17, all of my thoughts were consumed by what we were doing a year ago that day. i would spend hours every day looking at pictures from our time in palestine, facebook stalking our old friends, not talking to people about all this, and just being really sad. looking back at my blog, you can see that i was really obsessed with the whole "moving on" theme from matthias' birthday through the end of the year.

and i think it was good for me. not the whole bottling-it-up-and-not-talking-about-it or facebook-picture-stalking things, but it's good to process, good to mourn, and good to move on. i definitely could have found more healthy ways to mourn, but it was important for me to process everything that had happened a year before.

yesterday was november 17. the day we left palestine. and i didn't even realize that until in the evening when someone asked me how long we had been back in the US. i had quite a full day - we had a big thanksgiving dinner for teen mops, so i was busy decorating, cooking, making sure all the details were taken care of. i had to take matthias to the doctor in the morning to make sure he doesn't have asthma (he doesn't). i spent the evening at teen mops, hanging out with teen moms and my other mentor friends, making sure everyone got enough food and had a great time.

thoughts of sadness, thoughts of missing palestine, thoughts of wishing for our old life - these thoughts didn't consume me. when i realized that it was november 17, i had a twinge of sadness, a moment of thinking back. but that's all it was. thinking back. which i think is appropriate. we've been here two years. and i finally really feel like we are here. or at least i am.

it's taken me a long time to get here. almost two years, in fact. and it feels good. it feels good that i can look back over by past blog posts and not burst into tears, but really be happy remembering our time in palestine. it feels good to have friends that we can have over, have playdates with, have birthday parties with - friends that i actually really like instead of thinking of how i miss our old friend. it feels good to have a church that jason and i are both excited about instead of thinking about how great our "not-church" group was in palestine. it feels good to be involved in groups that we love, both the work and the people involved, instead of thinking of how awesome paidia was.

so all this to say, i still do miss palestine. i will always miss it. i will always be sad that we had to leave in the way we did, that we had to leave our great friends, that we had to leave the place both our kids were born, that we had to leave the work we were doing. but i also am finally able to say that i am here. and i like being here. and thoughts of being there don't ruin my ability to be here. which i think is pretty good for me. 

reverb '10

so i have been wanting to write about things besides my crazy transition to the US and my kids. but it seems like i only think of other topics when i'm away from the computer and then by the time i sit down to write, the topics are gone because my kids ate my brain cells during pregnancy. so, today i signed up for reverb '10, which is a project of reflection over the last year. there is a prompt each day which will give me something to write about and to look back over the last year. so here goes...

one word. encapsulate the year 2010 in one word.

transition.

this has been a year of transitions. physical transitions, emotional transitions, mental transitions. we started the year staying with jason's mom for a few weeks. that transitioned into staying with her for a few months. that transitioned into moving into our own house, one that we own and will live in permanently, something we've never had before.

i started the year with very few friends, in a new place, probably on the brink of a mental breakdown, emotionally exhausted all the time. that transitioned into finding a mops group, meeting other moms, joining a bible study, looking for a church. that transitioned into new friendships, emotional stability, settling down here.

i started the year not wanting to be a stay-at-home mom. i wanted to be more important and do something with measurable results that other people could see. that transitioned into the realization that i can't afford to work part-time in this country, which transitioned into the realization that i would be staying at home full time. this transitioned into filling my days with so many outings, groups, and activities so i wouldn't be bored, which transitioned into me finding my niche, realizing that God has called me to do this right now and accepting that, which transitioned into some great opportunities to volunteer while i stay at home.

now, imagine it's one year from today, what would you like the word to be that captures 2011 for you?

settling.

i feel like i spent this year transitioning (well, maybe because i did) and avoiding settling here. i spent the first nine months or so making plans for our next phase in life and denying the fact that we're here to stay, at least for now. i want this next year to be a year of planting roots, deepening friendships, settling down, and enjoying stability instead of wishing i was doing something else. we are here. we will be here for a while. so i want to settle her as long as i'm here.

and then we realized...

it was a cold night. one of the coldest so far that year. and of course, our heaters didn't work. the landlord promised he would fix them soon. i said we should call up saleem asap to see if we could borrow the propane heater that he had since he never used it, it was actually ours at one point, and the landlord never fixed anything nearly as quickly as he said he would. but instead, i settled for my fuzzy blanket that jason had gotten me for christmas our year at the house of hope. he knew how much i loved fuzzy blankets, and since he got me one it meant i didn't have to somehow have all of my fuzzy blankets shipped over from the US - which was what my plan was.

so anyway, it was cold. i snuggled up in my brown fuzzy blanket on our uncomfortable couch, probably watching some re-run of boston legal, listening to hiba not sleep in her room and praying that matthias would actually stay asleep in his. it started like most other november nights that we'd had in palestine.

i don't remember who brought it up, but somehow jason and i got to talking about our rejection letter. the one from the ominous, all-powerful committee at the ministry of interior that kindly informed us that our request for visas was denied and we had two weeks to leave. by now we were down to 11 days. our plan was to ignore it. we had tickets bought for the end of december, weren't planning on coming back anytime soon, so who cares what the committee said. we'd stay. they might fine us, they might black-list us, but whatever. who cares, right?

but then we started talking. and thinking. and realizing. we realized that our plan was kinda dumb. jason is more qualified to work in palestine than anywhere else in the world. our lives, our kids lives, some of our best friends were formed there. and five years (our potential black-list time) is a long time. heck, three years is a long time. that's how long we'd been there. we realized that putting ourselves in the position of not being able to return was not really an option.

so we started to talk. and pray. and think. and pray some more. and in a couple hours our normal november night had been turned upside down. we were leaving in 11 days. we had plane tickets to change, baby furniture to sell, clothes to pack, books to ship, a car to sell (or push off a cliff....). but most of all, we had a life to wrap-up, a chapter to close. and we had 11 days.

but on the good side, we could tell our landlord he didn't have to fix our heaters and soon i'd be back to all the fuzzy blankets i could ever want. a lot sooner that i wanted.

Restless Life Syndrome

when i think of me and jason, i think of him as being the spontaneous, adventurous, always-wanting-to-do-something-new half of us. and i am the routine lover, let's-settle-down-and-live-the-american-dream half of us. but lately, i feel as though we've flipped.

we have to own our house for three years or pay the government back $8000. when we bought the house, i was planning on selling it on march 5, 2013 and moving on to the next part of our life. i pictured this being somewhere cool and exciting, maybe back in the middle east, maybe in central or south america, or maybe in some cool city in the US. we would get jobs (or at least one of us would) doing some sort of good work for some awesome-sounding organization and our lives would be cool again. i assumed that this is what jason was planning on too.

but a while ago, he told me he doesn't really want to move in three years. he actually likes little rock, and while he doesn't necessarily want to live here for the rest of our lives, he could live here for quite a while.

so that makes me the restless one. i realized this a few days ago and have been embracing it full on. my new plan is to live in this house for three years to the day and then either rent it out or sell. we will then embark on a year-long journey around the world, visiting friends that we know to see what they are doing. we'll couch-surf and bum rides off of people, live on as little as possible. during that year, we'll find something awesome to do, probably having to do with community development type stuff in a developing country, get a job and do that for a few years. when we get bored or our contract is up, then we'll do the round-the-world thing again. sounds fun, huh? oh, and this is with our kids, who will be 5 and 3 1/2 at the start of all of this.

i realize that this is not a very realistic plan. it's just not very responsible. and while i don't think that everything we do in life has to be responsible, i think that some sort of responsibility comes with being parents and at some point you have to grow up and settle down. to some extent. (see how restless i am? i can't even say that i think i need to settle down without some sort of qualification tacked on the end...)

so why do i have restless life syndrome? i think it has to do with a fear of settling down and becoming connected with the community in which i live. when i finally gave into that in palestine, we had to leave. it took me two years to admit that we actually lived there and were there indefinitely. so by the time i really started investing in relationships, our house, our community we were only there long enough for me to finally enjoy it, finally have some really great friends, finally have it feel like home before we had to leave. and i don't really want to go through that again.

i'm starting to make some good friends - friends that i can have real conversations with about real life. we have found a church that we are excited about and want to get involved in. our house isn't completely decorated, but i've put enough work into it that i don't gag every time i walk in the door. we're making friends with our neighbors and getting involved in different organizations. but i still have this fear of putting any more effort into these things. because the reality is, jason and i have no clue what we want to be when we grow up. and we have no clue when we will grow up. so any day now, we could decide to go a different direction, move somewhere else, start a new adventure. or we could decide to stay here, invest in this community, make it our home. and since i don't know, it's hard to "be here". i mean, it takes a lot of effort to make friends, to develop a community around you, to make you live your home. and frankly, i don't want to put all that much energy into it if we're gonna just pack up and leave.

so it's easier to just plan on leaving than to not know. if we plan on leaving, than we can have fun while we're here, have some cook-outs and game nights, enjoy the time that we're here, but not really invest anything. that way it's easy to leave. it's fun to leave and exciting. but if we don't know, if we don't have our crazy plan ahead of us, then we have to live here, in the moment, making the best of what we have and really investing time and energy into making it our home. we have to make real friends and invest in people's lives and let them into ours. and all of that is wonderful, but it comes with the risk of being swept away again, being hurt, having to start over with so many memories of how great that last place was.

but here we are. i mean, we bought a house after all, so we're here for awhile at least. i'm learning to make the most of it. i'm learning that it really is better to be here and to have it be hard later than to just drift through on my own. but i'm still dreaming of what our next adventure might be.

The Beginning of the End

matthias's birthday marks for me the beginning of the end of our time in palestine. we didn't really know it at the time, but his birth definitely was the beginning of two months of craziness. this is what happened between his birthday and november 16:

-matthias was born. spent two nights in the hospital and then went home. we had a wonderful friend who came for like two weeks to help out with hiba. she ended up cleaning our house, doing dishes and laundry. it was great, especially since i didn't realize how much i needed that rest.

-paidia's annual carnival. three nights. i was the volunteer coordinator and the carnival was run by volunteers. organizing, transporting, helping 30+ international and local volunteers each night. oh yeah, and matthias was less than a week old.

-plans were made and preparations were made to build the high ropes course. this means jason was working quite a bit. in addition to matthias being a few weeks old, hiba was around too. i'm so thankful for her daycare and the ladies there and so glad she liked it.

-ben, the ropes course guy, came to help build it. he stayed with us for a week and a half. matthias was a few weeks old at this point.

-my mom came to visit. yay! it was wonderful.

-ben left, jason continued to work on the leadership center and ropes course.

-we had a visa appointment. they sent our applications to "the committee". we were pretty much convinced we would get the visas and if we didn't, we'd stay anyway. this was the end of october. they said they'd let us know within two weeks.

-november 2 - got a call from the wonderful ministry of the interior. our applications were back and we could come get the results. they couldn't tell us over the phone. i already had plans all day, so i thought i'd just go the next day since we were gonna stay either way.

-november 3 - we got the news that our visas were denied and we had until november 16 to leave. sure runied that day. we were still planning on staying.

-november 5 - we decided to leave. it was probably the hardest decision of our life. also, since we waited a few days to decide, it meant we had 11 days to pack up, sell stuff, change plane tickets, figure out what we were doing when we got back to the US....all that fun stuff. oh yeah, matthias is just over a month old.

the next 11 days were crazy. looking back, they were actually pretty fun. we both worked a lot, jason with paidia and me with getting ready to go. we hung out with friends every night till the wee hours of the morning. we played tons of games of catan with rachel, saleem, and munther. we had bbqs with anyone who wanted to come over. i had my last friday lunch with the girls. jason played his last day of friday basketball. we had three going away parties (we're pretty awesome like that). we really savored every moment that we had.

but, because it was so crazy, i didn't really have time to process what was going on. or energy to, for that matter. there were so many big things that happened in the next two months that it's easy to think back and know exactly what i was doing each day a year ago. so this year, it's nice to be in a place to look back and remember, to process leaving, to grieve what i lost, to see what i gained, and love what we did.

i think it will be a long two months. maybe harder than last year. because this time around i know the end. ignorance is bliss. and those two months were crazy bliss. i know i probably look back through rose-colored glasses - i mean, it was crazy. and we were all tired and worn out. it was hard and by the end, i was glad to be done. but it was exciting stuff that we were doing. we were around wonderful people that we loved and who loved us. and those last 11 days sure were fun. it wasn't perfect and i sure wouldn't want to actually do it over again. but for now, i'll savor the memories as i think back to the beginning of the end.

i think we might be weird...

so i've been thinking about our move to the US for a while now (since we were planning on coming in december) and i've come to the conclusion that we might be weird when we move back. we'll do things like use cloth diapers, have a garden to grow our own vegetables, compost, conserve water, hang our clothes out to dry instead of using a dryer. these are things that i used to make fun of my mom for - and now it'll be me. we do all of those things here and it seems so normal. well, we don't have a garden but that's because fresh fruits and veggies are right up the street. and all this stuff that we do is more out of necessity or to save money, but now it seem weird to me to dry clothes in the dryer if you can hang them up instead or to use disposable diapers when the cloth ones are clean. it seems wasteful to throw away paper and banana peels instead of putting them in the compost bucket or to take a really long, hot shower (even though i loooove doing that and probably still will). so we'll probably keep doing these things, even when we don't have to. and now i'll be weird like my mom was. maybe i can pass it on to hiba.