it's Official...

....we're moving. Mister got a job offer from Big Company out of state. We are going for it. It is going to be a huge change. But, as time has gone on (and the possibility of this company offering him a job became more and more real, aaand we got nearer and nearer to the end of his severance pay) I have started to warm up to the idea of a fresh start. Yes, it will present a whole new set of issues that I will have to contend with: Where to put Handsome Man in preschool in the fall, and who/how/where to talk to about his IEP. Who will work with it? Will they have room for him if a program even exists? Also, a new community, where I know absolutely NO ONE, and at nearly 40 years old, with two young children, I have to go about the seemingly impossible task of making new friends. Which sounds positively exhausting. I can't imagine how I could ever do better than the friends I have surrounded myself with here--and it took a while after we moved here to find and foster these friendships. I am spooked about navigating my way through a whole new city, in a new state...even though I've traveled a bit, I've never officially called anywhere but Northern California my home. Now we are moving to a city that I have never been to....(even though everybody and their kid brother has been there at some point in their lives for a bachelor/bachelorette party, quickie wedding, convention, vacation, or just for the Elvis impersonators...{can you guess where I'm talking about? No. I've never been.}) And then there's the whole business about going back into business. I was looking forward to getting back to work within the next year or so, and also starting a new business partnership. Now what? Start over? In a market I'm totally unfamiliar with, where I have ZERO contacts? Oy. That also sounds positively exhausting and impossible.

But then there's the flip side.

There is something so appealing right now about hitting the RESTART button on our lives. The past many years have been one struggle after another, the biggest and most debilitating and crushing of which has been infertility. It has colored every aspect of my life for so long. Mel at Stirrup Queens has talked about Location Casualties; the places you can't bear to revisit because they hold some horrible memory for you. My world here is full of them. So many places that I must drive by or even visit on a semi regular basis due to my work or just because they are so many and so near: There's the hotel we stayed at the weekend after we learned our first pregnancy was not viable. It was a vain attempt to 'get away' and forget and an excuse not to answer our phones for just a few more days, not to have to answer the horrible question. There's the restaurant we ate in that weekend, where I ordered wine, feeling strangely guilty even though I knew it didn't make a difference to the dead embryo inside me. There's the locations where I attended friends' baby showers, or heard pregnancy announcements and nearly cried my guts out in one bathroom or another, and on and on...And there are many more places that are mixed for me now on the other side of our journey: The hospital where I had my d&c but also the same hospital where I delivered Grace. But, either way, I am surrounded by this gauzy film that sort of covers the lens of my mind's viewfinder. Every where I look, old sadness, new joy, but melded together into one large opaque shroud over everything. How will it be, I wonder, now that things are different, now that I am no longer mired in my Great Sadness, to be somewhere new, somewhere totally devoid of memory and meaning? No reminders of old longings, losses or heartache. Even our house, which I will be sad to leave behind, as it was the home that welcomed both of our beloved children, is also the home where I sat for hours, incapable of moving, during the most suffocating moments in our struggle. How many hours did I spend completely stuck to this couch, drowning in inertia. How many times did I sleep (or not sleep) on this couch when I couldn't stop crying in the middle of the night and didn't want to disturb Mister? I think before we leave I will drag this couch into the front yard and light it on fire! I will dance around it and proclaim: You no longer have a hold on me! I am free! I have ripped through the dark veil of sadness and I will start over!

Can you start over at almost 40?

No one I meet from now on in our new town will have any idea of what came before, what sadnesses I endured or how broken I once was, how fragile our marriage became. Maybe that is good, maybe just what we need. I/we can be whoever we want... I think. Maybe we can forget too.

Who will I be now? Who can I be now...? Is there a more confident, happier, sassier, funnier, kinder, more energetic version of me, waiting out there in the desert?