This has been the most agonizingly slow move of my life. I resigned my job months ago (stage one), moved out of my house (stage two), sorted and purged my already sorted and purged belongings and sent the remaining 'keep' stuff off with two of my kids (stage three), then flew to one side of the country to visit said kids (stage four) and am now at stage five - visiting the other kid on the other side of the country and watching stage six (getting on the plane for England) approach like a tsunami - apparently slowly but with monumental and inexorable force.
This kid lives in a little flat (her first real grown-up flat) and has kindly given over the living room sofa to me for the duration. She's at work at the moment and I'm sitting here remembering how noisy it is to live in a flat with other families living their lives through all these adjoining walls and floors and ceilings. I lived in a lot of flats when I was first pretending to be a grown up ages and ages ago, but the noise wasn't part of my memories of that time although it must have been there and I find myself trying to look at those memories with a more realistic eye, one that includes the bang of doors in the stairwell and the sound of someone apparently trying to chip the lino off the upstairs kitchen floor one square inch at a time.
Sitting here brings back the feeling that I've had recur all this past week. I've been trying and trying to figure out why this move, this change is so overwhelming. It's not the academics. I'm excited for that stuff, confident (at the moment) and happy. It's not the uneasiness of being a 'mature student' which will definitely make me a minority and an odd one (or hopefully two or three) out in the program, although that does give me the occasional twinge. It's not even the logistics - the little ones of wrangling my too-heavy and too-awkward luggage through airports and in and out of trains and cabs and into the B&B; the big ones of finding a flat, setting up a bank account, maneuvering through unknown systems and protocols just to get my life shaken down into a new normal - although that is where my brain is choosing to settle and express its panic.
No, I think it's that for the past eight years I've been doing so little that is new, so little that breaks the known. When Kirk went missing, the kids and I went back to my home city because my parents were there. It wasn't the first time; we scurried back there years and years ago when Kirk finally managed to get free of the army and we desperately needed their generous help as we both went back to college. Familiar; not necessarily desirable (outside of that wonderful, loving family), but familiar. The job I just resigned was at my old university - the same shabby adobe buildings, the same patterns of speech in the [slightly older] humanities faculty, the same [terribly younger] students. As the kids got older and we all worked towards the inevitable goal of them being grown and on their own, I hardly moved out of what had happened before and I don't know whether that was fear of change at a time when all the change had been catastrophic and horrific, or a desire to hold on to Kirk through the means of the familiar even when the familiar wasn't something I liked or wanted. There was mud at the bottom of my rut but it was mud I knew perhaps?
But those damn ruts. They just keep getting deeper, and more ingrained in your internal landscape until it seems like the rut is the only possible way to move even if you know better, and the effort to get out of it is so enormous that it seems impossible. And how on earth do you know what to do and where to go without that stupid, confining, uncomfortable rut to guide you? I think my rut got so deep I could barely see out of it.
So this long, drawn out move was maybe a really poor idea, or maybe a superb one. I did need to see my kids all settled and happy and living their [independent {!!}] lives before I left. And maybe I needed to strip away the sides of that rut a little bit at a time. Maybe baby steps were all I could take. Maybe just leaping from one to the other in one massive move would have been too overwhelming. I don't know. But the rut is well and truly gone now and I'm here a week away from the tsunami and I can see it coming fast now. But know what?
I think I'm going to ride the hell out of it, and after that... anything.