My Candle Gots Two Ends, And Both of 'Em's Burnt (Or: Lament of the Working Mother [Or: Oh Baby, I'm So Tired])

Now don't get me wrong: I am very glad that I continue to have an association with a company that, in return for my daily services Monday through Friday, puts a little something in my bank account every couple of weeks.

I am pleased as punch to be a mom, particularly to such usually-awesome-sometimes-less-so kids. I'm pumped to have the opportunity to clean a house when millions would give anything for the safety and security and richness of one small room in it. I lurve that it has a kitchen in which I can play Swedish Chef and borky-borky my way through recipes of my choosing.

I'm thrilled that my passions met the world's needs in the form of my weekly ESL class and I'm joyful to have found a church that provides community once and often twice each week.

And, despite the economic chaos and political trainwrecks, this country ain't half bad.

Nevertheless.

(Perhaps you see where this is going.)

Some days, it kind of feels like it's all a bit much. Actually, every day feels like it's a bit much, just some days bring more energy to tackle that muchness. And lately that energy has been just the slightest bit hard to come by.

The culprit is actually a recently-added innocuous 15 minutes/1 mile. This time/space change that resulted from our move altered the rhythm of the universe oh-so-slightly so that I now have to leave the house 15 minutes earlier in order to get to work on time.

15 minutes isn't all that long if you're talking about an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants or a coffee break or simmering a sauce. But it's the equivalent of 100 years of sleep deprivation when it comes first thing in an already-early morning. Mondays and Tuesdays are okay, Wednesdays are tough, and by the time Friday comes around, I'm wishing that pajamas counted as business casual.

Of course, there's no way I'll borrow from Peter to pay Paul and go to bed 15 minutes earlier. No, if anything, I tend to go to bed 15 minutes later because my tiredness and inefficiency during my pre-supper free time result in no reading time for PM until well into the PM. And so I groan as I set the alarm and think, only six hours until this sucker goes off, and vow to do better the next night.

So while I'm not complaining per se, I am pouting just a wee little bit. Hopefully y'all will be a bit understanding as I work out the kinks in the new schedule and either a) blog less or b) blog the same but with more crotchety.

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Bad Blogger!

Ack, it's been a bit tumbleweed-going-by around here lately! Sorry about that. Hey, if McCain can suspend his campaign due to the economic crisis, surely I can suspend a bit o' blogging.

Busy, busy these days, but mostly run of the mill stuff. We're still doing some beginning of school activities with Curriculum Nights and New Family Nights. I had ESL class this week, and on Thursday The Girl and I went to see Little House on the Prairie: The Musical.

It was actually pretty good. In a bit of stunt casting of their own, the producers cast Melissa Gilbert (Laura in the television series) as Ma. Significant misrepresentation of the Laura character, tremendous liberties with the storyline, a tad too much singing, but overall I liked it. The Girl sat rapt with attention for most of it and managed to stay awake all the way until the end, so two thumbs up from her.

Then yesterday my parents arrived for a weekend visit. So nice having them here (and not only because they hang out with the kids and indulge them in all the dollhouse-playing/craft-making/video-gaming that I really dislike).

And that's about it - pretty boring really. Of course, I'm trying to pretend that this country isn't seriously considering a $700 billion reward for fiscal mismanagement or a vice-presidential candidate who tells Katie Couric "I'll get back to you" when asked for specific examples of her running mate's past reforms. I'm also trying not to be peeved that I'm not eligible to vote in Canada because apparently I need to have a date of intended return in order to register. And as a result, I'm trying not to think about the repercussions of the fact that I don't have a date of intended return.

So, no blogging as a result of denial, I guess, not because there's nothing to blog about. But don't worry - the vice-presidential debates are next week. Lots of fuel for the fire there. If, that is, I can manage to watch them - so far I'm able to watch only the smallest snippets of Palin and then only through cracks between the fingers of one hand covering my eyes with a finger of my other hand hovering over the mute button.

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Waste Management

So Thursday is grocery shopping night around these parts, and The Girl and I spent yesterday evening loading up on supplies.

Have I mentioned that I have to send each child a snack from home for the "Health Break" at school each day? Have I also mentioned that said snack can consist of anything from a long list of fruits and vegetables? Oh, and cheese and yogurt. No nuts (yay for one less communal eating experience about which to worry), no bread products, nothing processed. Just fruits and vegetables and cheese and yogurt.

It isn't as easy as it sounds, as my kids aren't huge fans of getting their 5-10 a day. In the interest of expanding our possibilities, we checked out the dried fruit section yesterday, and the following offering gave me pause:

Single serving prunes.

Now tell me, what exactly is the target market for these? Old ladies who like to keep a little something in their purse for regularity but who get tired of the prunes in the baggie clumping together? Healthful and hygenic cubicle dwellers who want to offer something better for their co-workers' bodies than candy but who dread the thought of someone thrusting a dirty, germy hand into a communal bowl of M&M's**?

Beyond the mental incongruity of someone handing one of these to a child who thinks he's getting a LifeSaver, I must register my disapproval of putting Nature's candy into a wrapper like this. The level of excess packaging in this product rivals those fruits in 7-11 subjected to the cello-wrap-styrofoam-treatment - Hello?! An apple already has a wrapper. It's called a peel.

So these get a big thumbs-down from me for many reasons. I'd better not see you reaching into your purses and crinkling one of these bad boys open in church on Sunday....


**Someone very close to me (who shall remain nameless, to protect his innocence) keeps on his desk a bowlful of candies with a little tongs to prevent exactly this type of bacterial perfect storm. Personally, I just keep individually-wrapped Jolly Ranchers. Somehow it's different when it's prunes.

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Mother, May I?

The English as a Second Language class I teach was moved from Monday to Wednesday this term.

I'm fairly grumpy about it, because Wednesday has traditionally been my crash night - the night I plan an easy, one-pot supper because I know I'll be pretty tired from three full days at work but not close enough to the Friday's-coming boost to have gotten my second wind, and I'll barely have enough energy to clean up a few dishes and herd the kids into bed. I often yawn my way through our nightly Little House on the Prairie chapter, only to snuggle with The Girl and close my eyes for just a minute, until I come back to half-consciousness at midnight and stumble over to my own bed.

That said, as much as I grumble getting into the car to head over to class, I'm always energized by the time I'm done. My students are so eager, so respectful, so gracious. They've checked their egos at the door and laugh as they stumble their way through broken sentences. They're often scholars or recently-arrived professionals, and I'm usually in awe at the collective intelligence in the room. Yet they never murmur dissent as I lead them through yet another inane exercise about predicting who will win the game show on the dated VHS tape we haul out each week.

It also helps that they tell me frequently that I'm so very, very beautiful. Now, given that most of them have spent less than a month in America and that the average age of all the other ESL teachers is closer to 50, their sample size of white women is likely not large or representative. Still, it makes me feel all syrupy inside.

They're also astonished to discover that I am a mother (hee - someone told me I am "what is known as a hot mother" yesterday), and of school-age children no less. The invariable reaction is "but you are too young!"

(To which I usually think, now that's the pot calling the kettle black, as every Chinese woman I've ever met [and Japanese, too, for that matter - hi Shimizu!] is aging so gracefully that the most established matriarch usually appears to be fresh out of grad school.)

Yesterday, after I assured them that yes, I was indeed a mother of a 7-year-old daughter and a 5-year-old son, one of my new students burst out proudly that she also has a 7-year-old daughter. She went on to explain, "I have only one child, because of China's one child policy."

Then, with naked longing in her voice, she said quietly, "I would like to have another."

Now I have many friends who have said the same words, or have said with even more longing, "I would like to have even one." Too, too many of them have heard "you cannot" - whether they hear it from the soul-sucking infertility demons or from the will-defeating and bank-account-breaking adoption process. Or worse.

But I do not know anyone who has been told "you may not."

What is that like? To bring your baby into the world with a final, exultant push and realize that you will never carry life inside you again, because you have reached your quota. To celebrate your baby's each new stage even as you mourn the one that's passing, because you know you will not be allowed the opportunity to experience it again. To grieve once a month as your body reminds you of who might have been, and will not be, because you do not have permission.

Certainly I can agree with efforts to slow our ever-increasing burdening of the world. Certainly (in theory, anyway), population control makes sense.

Nevertheless, my heart broke a little bit last night for this mother, and the one beside her who nodded that yes, she too, had only one child and longs for another. And it made me hug The Boy a little more fiercely when I came home, knowing that by some great stroke of undeserved luck, I was allowed to have him.

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Overheard at the Local Bookstore Today

"Mommy, is Barack Obama a Christian?"

"He says he is, but he's not. He went to a Muslim school."

"Mommy, what's a Muslim?"

"..... Come over here and check out these books."


And here I thought party membership of the heavenly sort was decided solely by God. Silly me; apparently sneak peeks into the Book of Life are granted to suburban soccer moms.

It boggles the mind, really.

(Sorry for all the politicking lately. This election's got me a tad testy.)

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Vice Presidential Candidates - They're Just Like Us!

I've been writing this post for several days now (so it's not all that timely), trying to make it not about Sarah Palin. I tried to make it about both of the current elections in North America. I tried to make it about democracy in general. I had Old Testament allusions. I even brought in Winston Churchill.

But I can't force it where it won't go. It's about Sarah Palin, and no attempt to broaden it changes the fact that I've alternated between laughter (with an edge of hysteria), nausea, and stone-faced stares at the circus on my television for the past two weeks.

(That this isn't even my election doesn't reduce my anxiety. It actually makes it worse, knowing that I am profoundly impacted by her presence on the ticket, and knowing that I am powerless to do anything about it.)

To be clear, my all-around astonishment/disgust/head-shaking at her nomination is not (entirely) a result of her being Republican. I'd like to think I'd be similarly upset by a like bit of stunt casting by the Democrats.

Because that's exactly what this is - stunt casting. And worse than her nomination itself is the fact that it's working.

To recap: a person who has been mayor of a town smaller than Steinbach and has been governor of a state with more caribou than people for less than two years is being presented as someone who should be elected to the second-highest position in the land. Someone who, as first-runner-up, will take over if Miss America for some reason cannot fulfill the duties of her crown.

A person who has fewer stamps in her passport than I do, yet would be that oft-cited heartbeat away from the launch button of a nuclear arsenal. Someone whose foreign policy experience is limited to being able to see Russia yet who makes off-the-cuff remarks on national television about the possibility of war with that country.

Yet she has tremendous support. Her nomination has rejuvenated the GOP, and swing voters by the thousands are declaring that they will mark an X beside her name in November.

From whence comes this insanity, you ask? It's captured by a viewer's comment The Husband read after Palin's pre-written-teleprompter-delivered-heavily-edited speech at the Republican convention:

"I just love Sarah Palin and I'm totally going to vote for her. She's just like me. I don't have a sister, but if I had a sister, I'd want her to be just like Sarah Palin."

In fact, this entire "vote for the hockey mom" campaign is directed toward people like this, people who focus more on her experiences as a mother, her "down-to-earth" way of speaking, and her declaration that she's going to "shake things up in Washington" because it reminds them of themselves. People who look in the mirror and like what they see, and extend that approval towards the candidate that most closely resembles the person in the mirror, not the person who makes the best case in the "why I should be vice-president" debate.

(The danger with voting for the person in the mirror is that most of the American public - and, I would argue, Sarah Palin - would fail spectacularly if handed the reins of power to the highest position in the land. We - and I include myself in this - lack the insight and the broad perspective required to make decisions that affect not only 300 million Americans but, in fact, the entire world.)

Now, lots of people would argue with my recap above and say that having past experience is no indicator of future success (funnily enough, a lot of the same people who said that it was when it came to Obama). If that's the case, then all the voter has to go on is not the way the candidate answers "what did you do," but simply what they say when asked, "what would you do?"

Yet Sarah Palin has provided almost no answers to the WWSPD question since her nomination. Until a few days ago, the only interview she had given since being catapaulted to national attention was, quite tellingly, to People magazine. Her speech at the convention was the parroting of the party line written by others, and even her recent ABC interview sounded like a rehashing of the answers she has been fed by her coaches ever since the media was told that she was not going to give any interviews until she was comfortable, but that she was ready to answer any of their questions (um...).

Despite knowing nothing more about this candidate than what the media has been able to dig up about her beauty-queen-Troopergate-pregnant-daughter-special-needs-son past and the few soundbites she herself has given when allowed in front of the microphone, people are declaring in droves that she deserves their vote and that she will bring change to the country.

And it is this that makes my stomach churn: that so many would base their decision on whether they like her. Because she seems like a nice person. Because she's pretty. Because she's a woman. Because she's got problems just like regular folks. Because she's got a son in Iraq.

I don't want this to be some sort of ad hominem attack; these things are all true. But they are not stand-ins for actual knowledge about her, knowledge which is scanty at best and, in my opinion, quite damning at its worst.

And in that sense, this does become a post about the entire democratic process. Americans and Canadians are all neck-deep in politicians these days, each clamouring to be heard. As voters, we are called on to make judgments about the candidates and the parties and to decide which we think will steer our respective countries in the best direction.

As voters, we owe it to ourselves, to our countries, and to every person worldwide affected by our choice of leader to do our research. Is it difficult to sift through all of the messages? Is it a monumental task to check out party platforms, to compare policies, and to predict who will be revealed to have been lying the least?

Does it take a lot of effort to look past the pretty faces, the smear campaigns, and the carefully-staged photo ops? Does it take even more effort to be open-minded when it comes to all the candidates, and refuse to vote for someone simply because you voted that way in the past or because they're just like you?

Yes.

But to slack off is to risk doing what so many are doing when it comes to Sarah Palin - replacing actual knowledge with media-driven conjecture and allowing a not-so-carefully-constructed-but-oh-so-shiny facade to dazzle them and make them blind to the need to ask some very serious questions.

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This New House

So we were chatting at the supper table today about school and cafeteria lunches and the presence of peanut butter at the Peanut Allergy Table. And then we moved on to other important subjects, like our new-found multiplicy of television channels, "discovered" only in that we actually hooked up the cable to the television at our new place (despite the fact that we always were paying for the cable at the other house).

Which led to the exclamation of "I love the new house" from The Girl. We asked her why:

The Girl's Top Ten Reasons to Love the New House

10. Carpet in the basement (apparently hardwoods aren't the requisite softness for playing).

9. The new TV channels.

8. Mom and Dad's bedroom is right next to The Girl's and The Boy's (previously she was all alone on the main floor while the rest of us retired upstairs).

7. We have new neighbours - one playmate on each side (plus bonus trampoline!).

6. There's a new park just down the street.

5. We have a "free" play structure in our backyard.

4. There's lots of room inside to play.

3. It allows us to go to the new school (which got a thumbs up today).

2. The garage is attached (no more walking in the rain/snow).

And the number one reason The Girl loves the new house...

1. The laundry chute.

(Doesn't get better than throwing things down a laundry chute, true enough.)

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The "C" Word

(No, not that one - this is a family blog. It does get a bit political below - consider yourself warned.)

To once again raise an angry hand against that expired equine, I dislike Change. By now, the myriad reasons as to why this is the case are well-documented, so I'll simply reiterate that I like my life the way I like my Chipotle vegetarian bowl - predictably the same each time I order it.

Yet, despite my attempts to keep Change at bay, it nevertheless continues to assault me at all turns.

The Change to the new school is going as we expected (hmm - predictable Change - an oxymoron?). The Boy shrugs off the newness and plays with someone new each day. We've already had a bus behavior lesson (again, as expected), but he seems to be slipping fairly effortlessly into the new routine.

The Girl has shed some tears - it is a big school and there are lots of well-established relationships. She feels very much like an outsider still. But I remind her (and myself - the ol' Mommy Heart takes a beating at such times) that her previous two Septembers have involved similar tears, and each time the situation has become friend-filled quite quickly. Still, a few prayers for some friends - particularly a lunch-eating companion - would be welcome.

"Change" seems to be the mot du jour in the media, around the water-cooler, and in the general conversation here, too. As you may have heard, your neighbours to the South are replacing their *ahem* "leader" in the next while.

(A disclaimer: I have strong leanings towards the political left and have long considered myself a Democrat-who-cannot-vote. I gravitate towards the "liberal" media and am drawn even more towards Mr. Obama. Consider my bias made known.)

And although I might reject Change on the level of my personal life, I embrace the need for Change for this nation. This is a tired, weary, bewildered nation desperately in need of a new direction inspired by new policies and, ultimately, new perspectives and new voices.

Which is why I cannot understand how McCain can lay claim to being an agent of that change. Having successfully silenced his predecessor this past week, he attempted to distance himself equally from the "business as usual" old guard with Washington in a stranglehold. Yet exactly how does one become a maverick overnight from within (and as both a product and perpetuator of) the same system he suddenly criticizes?

Palin certainly represents Change, but not, I fear, as anything more than for its own sake. I cannot predict how she would react if suddenly handed the reins of power - a not impossible situation, given the proximity of McCain to his final shuffle off this mortal coil - in what is arguably the most important position (or at least figurehead) in the world.

I do know that if your resume is short enough that you still need to include "PTA President" to round it out, you're probably not ready to lead the free world. I also know that if you are going to whore out your smiling, shiny family to the media as an attempt to demonstrate your readiness to lead a country because you managed to juggle full-time mommying with full-time work (um, welcome to my world?), then you cannot shriek "invasion of privacy" when that same media uncovers less savoury aspects beneath that veneer of perfection.

Whether Biden would do better is also uncertain, of course, but I don't know enough about him to be able to comment. I do know that he needs to stop using the word "literally" in his speeches.

And finally, Obama. Untried? Yes. A voice of experience? No. But a voice ringing true? Definitely. A voice ringing with promise? Absolutely.

Promise this country so desperately needs - war-weary, down-trodden, and ripped apart by the disunity that is the natural result of its Wild-West-World-Police-Every-Man-for-Himself-Exalt-the-Almighty-God-of-Competition-and-Materialism philosphy of late as it is?

Yes.

In other, more personally-impacting news (but another Change I am equally powerless to prevent), CBC Radio Two has betrayed me yet again by falling for the ol "Fresh + Modern = Lowest Common Denominator" formula. The programming is in shambles (yet, mysteriously, Tonic continues to make the cut), and Music and Company has been replaced by something resembling CHSM Saturday afternoons. I heart Tom Allen, but the music set on his morning show had me quietly wiping tears of bereavement at my desk on Tuesday. I cannot, simply cannot, listen to Holly Cole's cover of I Can See Clearly Now at 8:57 in the morning (perfectly suited for 8:57 PM as the song is), and the transition from that to Aaron Copeland's Fanfare for the Common Man was as jarring as when CKB tried to learn how to drive standard on country roads in The-then-16-years-old-Husband's Honda Prelude.

They say that the more things change, the more things stay the same. They might, but all this craziness makes me feel Arnold-ish:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

(From On Dover Beach, Matthew Arnold, 1867)

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You Must Be 42 Inches Tall to Ride

Annnnnd the roller coaster took another unexpected sharp turn yesterday.

(And you all thought that things were settled - ha!)

Not two hours after putting The Girl on the bus yesterday, I got a phone call from the school. Another family wanted to switch from full-day kindergarten to half-day and the school wondered if we wanted to switch The Boy.

Would we?!

If you haven't been keeping up with us thus far (and really, you haven't had a fighting chance at our rate of change), we went from both-kids-enrolled-in-School-A to one-kid-each-in-Schools-A-and-B to two-kids-in-School-B-plus-one-of-those-kids-in-half-time-off-site daycare. Clear as mud?

What this now means is that both kids are at the same location all day. Even better, The Husband can stick around at home until the school bus picks them both up at the bus stop down the street, and I leave work early enough to race home and meet them both at the same bus stop down the street.

Both kids, same time, same place. No before-school or after-school care. Transportation to and from school direct from our doorstep. Confirmed enrollment for as long as we choose to maintain it in one of the top schools in the state. A school that automatically feeds into the only middle school and high school with French Immersion options in the cities.

Folks, this means the approaching of nirvana, Shangri-La, and Valhalla all at once here.

We're talkin' 'bout getting off the roller coaster and sinking gratefully into those boats at Tinkertown that go placidly round and round at approximately 0.25 miles per hour and all you have to do is ring that little bell.

Stability. The same school two Septembers in a row. Saying "nice to see you again!" instead of "nice to meet you."

Thank you Jesus. Yeah, we worked pretty hard to get to this point, and jumped through seemingly endless numbers of hoops, but ultimately, against all odds, spaces just happened to open up right before school started and credit must be given where it is due.

Speaking of right before school started, the last minute shift to all-day kindergarten meant that not only did The Boy not have to begin learning one routine only to abandon it for another when a spot opened up mid-year, but it also meant that he started school a day earlier than planned. And so, today's first day of school picture:

My favourite part is his "bus necklace." The sweet babies all get little cards that display their names and their bus numbers (and announce in bright pink to all nearby adults that this is A Child Who Needs Help).

Both kids had a really good day. The Boy has made a friend (another little girl, of course - he loves the ladies) and The Girl seems to have made some relational overtures. The Girl had the opportunity to demonstrate her technological skills by showing the teacher how to make a YouTube video full-screen. (I'm not sure whether to be proud or embarrassed that she knows how to do that, or whether I should ask myself, "why exactly are they watching YouTube videos on the second day of second grade?")

And I, knowing that things look like they might be calming down, also had a good day.

Although, who knows - given our track record, this is simply the point between go-rounds where the roller coaster operator yells, "WHO WANTS TO GO AGAIN?!" and everyone around us has yelled "MEEEEE!!!" and up we go again.

Legs and arms inside the car, ladies and gentlemen.

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Seedlings Turn Overnight To Sunflow'rs...

Sniffity-sniff-sniff:

First off, it doesn't get much cuter than a little girl with half-emerged front teeth, remnants of summer's bruises and scrapes all over her legs, wearing hard-won Hannah Montana shoes on the First Day of School.

(The shoes are "hard-won" in that she only received begrudging permission after much pleading because they don't actually say Hannah Montana on them and because they were the only shoes in her size left at Target yesterday - yes, we are awesome parents who are totally on the ball when it comes to getting ready for school.)

She was nervous, but definitely excited this morning. It helps so much that one of our neighbours goes to the same school and rides the same bus - the two of them were giddily running around while we waited for the bus and their mothers snapped pictures of them. I'm told the bus driver is super nice; this helps to quell some of my maternal fears.

I'm less worried than last year, as she's linguistically caught up to her peers, and I know she'll actually be on time. I'm a bit concerned that she'll find her way around, but I'm sure all of the teachers will be looking for wide-eyed, frightened-looking little ones. My worst fears are that I've missed one of the dozens of forms somewhere and she's gone off to school totally unprepared in some way - that she'll find out to her extreme embarrassment that she doesn't have the right supplies or that her lunch isn't right or that her "nutrition break" (heaven forbid we call it "snack") doesn't meet the exacting dietetic standards.

My heart stopped when the neighbour girl came out wearing a uniform. I thought - did I miss a memo?! I immediately began making plans to head out to St. Paul where I know of a uniform store, and panicked that The Girl would be the only kid in school not wearing one and was enraged that the secretary didn't tell us about it. Of course, I could have just asked the girl's mom - which I finally did - to find out that they don't have uniforms but her daughter just likes the look of them.

(It's pretty clear I'm more nervous than The Girl is. I had the triple-whammy-school-butterflies dream last night: I was two weeks away from a Canadian politics exam and hadn't attended one class yet, I was working for my tuition at Smitty's where an errant decimal place was charging customers for $8,000 breakfasts, and I had been conscripted into Ed's ensemble choir because they needed altos to bring along on their trip to Europe. Seriously - I was very glad when the alarm went off this morning.)

And so the year begins. I'm excited about the return to routine and am anticipating even more a year full of friends and knowledge and enrichment for my kids. The Boy goes on Thursday for the first time, so watch this space for part 2 of this story!

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One Year Ago Today...

...three-quarters of the Peitricia Mae family touched down in the Twin Cities and joined The Husband, who had preceded us by a week.

We had somehow managed to pull together an international household move in about three weeks, with a French Immersion school discovered at the eleventh hour, a house found in a one-day trip less than a week before we left, passports secured on the fly, and packers/movers/car-shippers all lined up with only days' notice.

Since that day, things haven't always been smooth, but I would be a little Nellie Oleson if I complained ungratefully. The fact is, everything has worked out, even if differently than we planned.

I've been saying for the last year that I wouldn't pose the question "was moving here worth it?" to myself for at least a year. It's taken about that long to even determine what the criteria used to define "worth it" are.

Initially, I would have said that "worth it" meant that we built a life for ourselves that was the same or better in all respects in comparison to our former life in the 'Peg. But that would have been a tall - and impossible - order. A life we took years to build? A life filled with friends and family who have been alongside us both through our descents into the darkness and our triumphs?

So I modified the definition to one of net balance or gain, meaning that undoubtedly some aspects of life here would not measure up, but that some of the gains of the move would either balance out or tip the scales in favour of the transplantation.

There have certainly been gains. Minneapolis is a really lovely city. We're ten minutes away from two in-city lakes and the amenities are great (Target, anyone?). The Husband likes his job. I found a job in fairly short order and, while I miss my former coworkers and have yet to form similar relationships, the new job is both challenging and rewarding.

There have been net balances. Our first concern has always been the kids - this nomadic lifestyle is hard enough for adults, never mind little ones who crave routine and depend upon a stable foundation from which to explore the world and form their emerging selves. They have had - but have also overcome - many challenges this year. I continue to marvel at their ease in making new friends, but remind myself of the unseen cost of that apparent facility. I burst with pride when I consider their academic accomplishments, but vow that they will not move schools again.

There have been losses. We have yet to find meaningful friendships, a loss which is tempered somewhat by frequent trips "home," but one that will need to be remedied if remaining here is to be a valid option. Our church here, though warm and welcoming and through no fault of the members, simply cannot compete with our home church. It is wearying to be a Canadian living in America.

I suspect that little of this would surprise someone who has also moved far from home. The things over which we have the most control - visas, jobs, schools, lifestyle - have all worked out quite well, in part due to providential provisions and in part due to our own hard work. The things over which we have less control - relationships - are also the ones that take time and cannot be forced (as much as we might like to do so).

Was moving here worth it? No. Yes. Depends on the day.

It seems that I will need to table the question for yet another year. And perhaps I'll have to do the same next Labour Day. Perhaps that isn't a question that can be answered. Perhaps the grass will always be greener on the other side. Perhaps it will always be thus:


TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

(Robert Frost - 1920)

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