There and here

   
Last Friday was a big day. It started out at my parents' house in Wisconsin, moved on to the airport and a flight to New York, jumped next to a few hours at our empty Brooklyn apartment, then ended with another trip to the airport and another flight - this one to Frankfurt. The whole day I kept thinking "this is big, isn't it," but I couldn't put it all together. I saw nothing but fragments. I'm on a plane right now. I'm in a cab right now. I'm saying goodbye to some people right now, and in a few minutes I won't be saying goodbye to them anymore.

This whole move has been like that. I was out with a friend one night - my very last night in New York - and I told her that I felt like Mr. Burns in an early episode of The Simpsons. Mr. Burn's doctor took a handful of rubber toy "germs" and tried to stuff them through a little model doorway. You have every disease imaginable, was the message. They are all trying to get through the door, and they are blocking each other. For weeks I waited for the panic to come and the real tears to flow, but the germs were all blocking each other. I carried on.

And now we're here. Frankfurt. We have a temporary place in a crummy-ish neighborhood, and a lease on a for-real place that starts April 1st. We're living out of suitcases, washing the same 4 plates over and over again, and looking forward to the day we again have conveniences like a hair drier, pens, a coffee maker, and a place to call our own. All in good time. 3 weeks time, that is.

The little ones are handling this so much better that I thought they would. We are all sorts of out of sorts, but dangitall if we aren't doing okay.

These first days in a new place are so raw. Experiencing them reminds me of my other big moves and how I woke up bawling in the middle of the night, night after night in Beijing. I cried myself to sleep my first night in New York. Nighttime is a beast, am I right? Your guard is down and everything comes at you like a hammer. I spent a full 30 minutes last night - say from 2:00 to 2:30 - mildly panicked that I had never made one last trip to Coney Island. And to be honest, I still feel a little terrible about that. Oh, New York! Maybe I'll be able to write about it sometime, how much I loved it and why it was okay to leave. How amazing it was to be a young mother there - how the friends I had more than made up for the challenges New York throws at families.

For now though, I'll just think about Nils and I as our flight took off from JFK. I wanted to distract him, and we ended up with a pad and pen in our hands. I started writing letters, and it quickly turned into Nils wanting me to write the names of all his friends. I did that for him, big block letters. JOEY. ELIZA. JACK. WOLFGANG. It was an 8 o'clock flight and the lights of the nighttime city were in full force out our window. I looked out at them occasionally with tears in my eyes. MATEO. MADELINE. The lights gave way to the darkness of the ocean. Was that Coney Island beneath us? AVI. JACKSON.

And we were gone.