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.

there was the time...

i feel like i binge blog. right now, i have a lot to write about, but am having trouble putting it down on paper. or on the computer screen, i guess.

but the main thing tonight is i miss palestine. more specifically, i miss our friends. i miss the community we had there. it really was something else.

sure, there were the times when there were parties on our patio till 3 a.m. the summer after hiba was born and all i wanted to do was sleep instead of listen to people laughing and talking right outside my window. and there were the times when everyone would come over till the wee hours of the morning and make my kitchen dirty and leave their dishes for me to wash and then never take them back to their own house. or the times when andrew would steal my coffee mugs.

but there were also the times when we would play catan for hours on end. or the times we would watch movies with funny subtitles and bad quality. or the times when we'd have sushi parties or saleem would make hotwings. and the times when we would bbq on the deck and sit around and eat and drink for hours, talking about everything and nothing.

there was the time when rachel dropped everything she was doing to distract me from the fact that my husband was detained by the israeli army. she made some phone calls with me and then came over to my house and we taught hiba how to clap.

there was the christmas when we were all so homesick that we had a million different parties and dinners and breakfasts and gift exchanges and acted as fill-in families for each other.

there was hiba's first birthday party, which was filled with some of her best friends in the world - all people who were at least twenty years older than her, but loved her like family.

there was the time when hiba was born and munther snuck food into the hospital for me, tons of people brought us dinner and showered us with gifts.

there was the time when matthias was born and rachel and audra took care of hiba, and again friends brought us food and helped us out.

tonight, jason had to take matthias to the hospital. turns out he has croup. he's fine now - that's not the point of this post. the point is that it was 11 at night and i didn't know who to call. we do have friends here that i would call and take hiba to if i really needed to. but we don't have the sense of community that we had in palestine, where if i called one of our friends, they would drop what they were doing and come to our house, no matter what time. and we all lived so close that it would be a matter of minutes.

i know we have good friends here and i know that friendships take time. i'm thankful for the friends we have.

but tonight, i miss palestine. i miss the culture of closeness that was forced on us, that we had to adapt to, that we were made to live with whether we liked it or not. and by the end, i liked it. and i miss it.

on miscommunications

i have a friend who recently said she likes to start blog posts about single subjects with "on xyz". i like it too. it makes me feel sophisticated and like i'm writing something deep and important.

so anyway, i think that in general jason and i have pretty good communication skills. we tend to be good listeners and are able to communicate our points to each other. but every once in a while, there's a little glitch.

like sunday, for example. we are in the middle of potty training hiba. on sunday, she wanted to wear underwear to church instead of her pull-up. so, we let her. jason was working in the nursery anyway, so we figured it'd be a good outing for her to be out of her pull-up. she did great - even used the bathroom there once, which is a huge deal because she's usually scared of public bathrooms - but at the end, right before we were about to leave, she peed in her pants. so, jason went to change her. i hadn't packed any extra underwear, because i figured that if she had an accident at church, she should just wear a pull-up for the rest of the time. jason thought that might be confusing for her. he told me this. i didn't really think much of his comment.

so fast forward to nap time. jason was going to put hiba down for a nap and asked me if she was all ready, if she had a pull-up on. i said, yeah, she's ready. go ahead and put her down. so he did.

a few minutes later, we heard hiba calling. we ignored her. then she said "i got poopoo on my bed". bleh. so jason got up to go change her, thinking he would find a little poop on her sheets.

instead, he found hiba standing in her bed with a pile of poop next to her, which had fallen out of her shorts. because in fact, she did not have a pull-up on.

apparently, when jason told me that it would be confusing for her to wear underwear sometimes and a pull-up sometimes, he meant he didn't put a pull-up on her. and when he asked if she was ready for her nap, he meant did i put a pull-up on her since we've been home. he figured that was obvious because if he was asking, it meant she hadn't had a pull-up on earlier. i totally missed all of that.

so we had a good laugh, cleaned hiba up, changed the sheets and put her back to bed. it's good to be reminded that we can't read each other's minds, even when we have the best of intentions.

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.

happy birthday, zuus!

one year ago today started out like any other day. i walked hiba to day care, picked sara up to show her around bethlehem, went to a staff meeting, did a little work, went back home, made sure there were freezer meals ready - you know, every day stuff.

then i went to my dr.'s appointment, where he checked out matthias, who was looking good. plenty big, great heart beat, some small contractions here or there. so i told him i wanted to go ahead and have them break my water to put me into labor. he tried to talk me in to coming back the next morning, since it was already like 5 p.m. but i was pretty set on not being pregnant any more and hiba was at rachel's for the night, so he did not change my mind. plus, the paida carnival was like five days away and since i was the volunteer coordinator for it, the sooner i had the baby, the better.

so, i checked into the hospital, ate dinner, and headed up to the labor and delivery room. i got all settled in, they broke my water and said they'd come

back and check my progress in two hours to see if i needed any drugs or anything. that was at 6:30 p.m.

8 p.m. on the dot, matthias edward pollack made his way into the world. one and half hours of the worst pain of my entire life (admitedly, i haven't had a very painful life or anything, but GEEZ it was intense...), our little boy joined us.

now he's one. he's walking, starting to talk, laughing, joking, blowing kisses, throwing fits. how time flies. happy birthday, zuzu!