8 months in

It's been just about 8 months since we moved and it's hard to say whether it feels like it's been a long time or a short time.  We're established enough that we see our neighbors around town and we say hello (in Dutch).  We have a good idea of how most things about daily life work here and where to find what we need, or who to ask if we don't.  Yet, I still look out the window at the now familiar street we've chosen to live on and it feels novel.  It still feels a little surreal, like it's a dream come true but I had written off that dream and left behind so long ago that even the dream itself is unfamiliar. 

I don't think about Tacoma often.  When I do, I'm no longer flooded with anxiety and discomfort.  I miss our house and our yard and our cat, and then I also really don't.  I miss some people and my spirit becomes full of love for them, and then I let it go.  I never hesitate to send them a message when I'm thinking of them, though.  I learned long ago that I'm rather bad at staying in touch, but doing so was so important that I dropped all reservations about just reaching out whenever the thought struck.  Our beloved friends who visited a month ago brought us our Tacoma posters and I finally put them up last week.  Somehow, they feel out of place.  Like my love for that place and who I was while existing there is part of a past that I'm ready to move beyond.  Like these artifacts of our former home and our former life don't belong here.  Yet I can't for the life of me understand what else I'm supposed to put on the walls.  I don't have any relevant interior design plans or improvement projects for this house because it's still so new and I have no idea how long we'll be living here.  One day, we expect to grow out of this 1044 sq ft space full of 4 humans, 2 dogs, and a business.  But who knows when that will be.  

This is one of the huge emotions that I'm still working through - the idea that my future isn't tied to a specific place and a specific existence, day in and day out, like it used to be in my mind.  That our "forever home" in Tacoma maybe wasn't actually our forever home and that such a thing doesn't need to exist so long as we have each other.  I'll be riding my bike in a new place and imagine myself there, let my emotions and my intuition settle into the ideas and the possibility of something I can't foresee.  It's so liberating.

Anyway... I think we've done really well with staggering our transitions just enough that nothing has felt overwhelming and everyone has had time to adjust bit by bit.  We have two last major transitions to work though and that's all that we can see in our immediate future.  Next week, I start my new job.  I'd had one short-term contracted position prior, but this one should be my professional trajectory for several years at least.  My anxiety can't seem to understand that it's not the end of the world as I know it to begin this new job because it thinks that full-time work is all that there is.  I'll only be working 24 hours a week with flexibility to increase as I choose, but I'm not sure when or if I will choose to work beyond those 3 days.  It genuinely feels like a full-time position would actually be the end of the world right now, even to the logical side of my brain.  This is just one of the many lifestyle changes that I'm elated about but need to get used to.

The next major transition is the kids starting a new school.  Since February, Miles had been in a Dutch language immersion class with other new arrivals.  This program was supposed to be a full-year for him, but February is an awkward time to move to a new classroom with new peers, especially if we hoped for him to eventually end up at a school closer to home.  His teacher believed that his rate of learning and his grasp for the language after just 5 months was sufficient to move him to a fully Dutch classroom early, and he wanted to give that a try.  David, on the other hand, was too young for the language immersion program anyway and dove head-first into a fully Dutch classroom in January.  She quickly made friends (all of whom happen to be Polish) and I think she's learning more of the language than she's choosing to speak so far - every once in a while, she'll just declare a perfectly formed past-tense sentence in Dutch with irregular verb conjugations and everything.  We're all learning and doing our best to speak Dutch all the time at home and I'm so proud of these kids for giving it their all.  It's hard to know if the friends they made at their first school will remain in their lives or if they'll even remember these first few months in The Netherlands.  I'm very excited about their new school, on its own merits and also as the last major transition before we can all breathe deep in the stability of our daily lives.

I think that's it for me at this juncture.  I hope to interview the kids this weekend once they've had a little bit to relax after a full week of camp where they're not only super active, but speaking Dutch all day as well.  Have I mentioned how proud I am of them?