Leaving Home: Part 2 #atlasgirl blog tour post

This post is part of the Atlas Girl Blog Tour which I am delighted to be a part of along with hundreds of inspiring bloggers. To learn more and join us, CLICK HERE!   This is the second part of my post about leaving, and ultimately finding, home. 

What image comes into your mind when you hear the word "wanderlust"?  Do you see a woman on a mountaintop, arms outstretched, wind whipping her hair?  Or maybe exotic locations, waterfalls and ancient temples, a road less traveled?  When I was 21, hopping all over North America as a flight attendant, I would belt out the lyrics to Sara Evans "Born to Fly".  I had the Wanderlust, and I was not alone.  Most of my co-workers lived as nomads.  We had our base city, bare apartments shared with several other people called "crash pads", friends and family that we visited on our days off, but nowhere we called home.  Ever since my family had left Texas, home hadn't been the place where I lived.  So I was searching for it in every city I visited.  In August 2003, I lost a friend.  A roommate.  A fellow flight attendant.  It rocked my world.  I wasn't sure what I believed or who I was, but as I emerged from the haze of grief, I realized that the rest of my life could be a few more weeks or 75 more years.  What was I waiting for?  Finally, I planned a trip that was sure to cure my wanderlust:  I was heading to Paris.  I pictured myself at the Eiffel Tower, eating crepes and wearing fabulous jeans and finally pulling off red lipstick, visiting art museums and in general being the best version of myself.

Somehow in the months to come, my European adventure included my mother.  For me, it was the realization of an adolescent dream, a first step to the life I was meant to live.  I don't know what it was for her. (A week before we left, she asked, with a crinkle in her nose, "Now what is there to do in Paris?"  I gave her an exasperated look and began, "Well the Louvre for one..." and she interrupted, "OOO, yes!  Can we go for a gondola ride on the Louvre?"  I couldn't even begin to explain everything that was wrong with that sentence.)  We flew in to Spain, took another short flight to Frankfurt, where we stayed with friends (Germany in a nutshell:  terrified by the Autobahn, entranced by the medieval castles, loved the cake in the Black Forest, sampled blood sausage).  And then....we boarded a train for Paris.

I felt euphoric as we hurtled toward the City of Lights, my nose pressed against the glass.  We found a cute little hotel run by a married couple (who made cafe au lait and baguettes for breakfast), ate some dinner at a nearby restaurant, only had 3 fights between the train station and our shared bed, and I fell asleep to the noises of the city.  In the morning, I was ready for Paris to sweep me off my feet.  My mom and I walked all day.  We saw a brasserie, a bucherie, a pharmacie.  The Arc de Triomphe.  The Louvre.  The Champs Elysee.  We bought chic clothes.  At twilight on my mother's 45th birthday, we dined at the foot of the Eiffel Tower.  And I fell asleep disappointed.  Because there was also the endless claxoning of emergency vehicles.  The overwhelming smell of Armpit on the Underground.  The aggressive Asian tourists.  And my mom was the only familiar sight.

When people asked, "How was Paris?", their eyes alight, waiting breathlessly for some tale of adventure, all I could say was, "It wasn't what I thought it'd be."  In all my planning, I'd forgotten a very powerful force.  Like Lord Voldemort, I had underestimated LOVE.  Going to Paris was the most important thing to me....even more important than the ring I was wearing on my left hand.  You see, all through school and flying, I'd also been falling in love.  I kept returning to Ohio for him, once a week, every other week (3 weeks apart only twice, and how those weeks dragged).  A month before my trip, he'd placed the ring on my finger and asked for my hand, but he hadn't factored into my plans.  Each day I had struggled with European pay phones and walked away frustrated, unable to connect across the time zones.  I just wanted to hear his voice.  And, while it didn't have the outcome I thought it would, my journey across the ocean did help me realize where my home was.  It was in his arms.

I started to resent Ohio a little less as we settled there, not far from the place where I'd felt like a Texas girl in an Ohio world.  In 2007, I gave birth to my beautiful baby James and we bought a house with a big yard and rooms for the other children I suddenly wanted.  And it's through the eyes of my boys that I see and appreciate what makes Ohio our home.  Jumping into a pile of multi-hued leaves.  The many, many uses for snow (snowballs, snowmen, snow cream).  The excitement when football seasons starts, though I'll never forsake my Dallas Cowboys.  And the church downtown that welcomes us, loves us, teaches me the truest meaning of family.

Chris asked me recently if I still wanted to move away, and I was finally able to answer NO.  My need to feel significant isn't defined by a place, it's filled in the arms of the people I love.  It doesn't matter where we lay our heads, as long as we lay together.

Emily T. Wierenga, award-winning journalist and author of 4 books, has released her first memoir, Atlas Girl: Finding Home in the Last Place I Thought to Look. They say the book is like “Girl Meets God” meets “Wild” meets “Eat, Pray, Love.” I say the book is inspiring. You can grab a copy here.

Leaving Home: Part 1, a #atlasgirl blog tour post

This post is part of the Atlas Girl Blog Tour which I am delighted to be a part of along with hundreds of inspiring bloggers. To learn more and join us, CLICK HERE! 

Have you seen these ads on Facebook that try to get you to buy custom t-shirts?  Ones that say "I crochet so I don't strangle people" or "I'm a programmer; trust me", because some sort of computer algorithm (look at me, using words I don't fully understand) has taken your personal information in order to sell you something.  One that pops up on my feed frequently says "I'm a Texas girl living in an Ohio world", and every time I see it I think about when I used to be someone who would have bought that shirt and worn it as often as sweat and body odor would allow.  I remember being a scrawny tomboy who loved the Dallas Cowboys and pecan pie, who helped her mother make tortillas in a special pan and wore the burns like a badge of honor.  I remember ducking into a large sewer drain with my sister to get out of a sudden hail storm, riding bikes for hours, neighbors named Bubba and Nacho and Fay.  And I remember the mutiny that rose up in me when my mother announced that we were moving, that she missed her family and we were going home.  Except that Texas was my home, and Rocky and Cathy and Jayne and Freddie were my family and I had finally reached the age where I had real friends that would call on the phone, even though it bored me to talk about clothes for more than a minute

But I really couldn't do anything to stop the move, other than watch the boxes pile up in my room and glare at my mother whenever she talked about how great our lives would be in the North.  This is how little my opinion factored in:  the day that was chosen to pack up our house and leave was my last day of fifth grade.  The day when teachers threw out the lesson plans and brought in sno-cone machines, when recess lasted for hours instead of 30 minutes, when children were emboldened to tell each other their true feelings.  I was sitting beside my mother, the Dallas skyline whizzing past us as we headed to Oklahoma, then Missouri.  And I still remember the conversation that we had that morning, the promise I made to make new friends in our new home, to get along.  My sister apparently made no such concession, because she kept the clock in her room on Central time for more than a year after we settled in the Ohio suburbs (and I wish for the life of me that I knew what happened to finally make her change it, but I'm drawing a blank).  I kept my promise that summer, as we walked our new town to get our bearings, since there were sidewalks everywhere and quiet streets  and everything fit in six square miles.  And I kept my promise as I walked to school each morning, after my dad had left for work and my mother took my sister to the middle school on her way to the hospital.  I listened to the kids around me talking, and I felt like an anthropologist studying an aboriginal tribe.  They used different words, like clique for the way people clumped together at recess and queer (which I thought meant when a boy liked another boy) for when something was strange.  And when I finally did speak, they asked me why I didn't have an accent, and I just shrugged, because the accent I heard most in Texas was the lilting way Hispanic women spoke, and the "Texas" accent heard on tv was more common further south.  But I couldn't keep my promise at our new church, when my parents brought me to the Wednesday night program, when I was expected to walk down the hallway by myself to a room full of people I didn't know, never mind that they were my own age.  That was when I cried and begged them not to leave me, but they did anyway, so that I had to walk down the hallway into a room full of strangers with a splotchy face and red eyes. (This is one of those moments I think about now, and I still don't know if they did the right thing.  Do you push your shy, awkward baby out of the nest or let her stay home with her nose in a book?)   Then one day, on my walk to school, I saw something I'd never seen before.  It was like little ice on each blade of grass.  Later, I learned it is called "frost".  When I got to school, I asked if it had snowed, and I got funny looks. (Much like labor pains, once you've experienced snow, you don't mistake a tiny pattern of cold for the real thing again.)  Actually, I seemed to get funny looks most of the times I spoke.  The boys called me by my last name and the girls had apparently decided who their friends were in kindergarten, and I bounced around trying to find my place.  A year is a long time to go without a friend.  But suddenly sixth grade was ending and I had found Melissa.  Of course, I didn't know then what she would mean to me over the years; pretty much all I knew was the distance from Texas to Ohio, and that people stopped saying Coke and started saying Pop somewhere in between.

That was the turning point for me, finding one person who liked me just the way I was.  The next year, I joined the school band and made more friends.  I had a boyfriend or two, which was more a cause for anxiety than excitement.  I found an identity I could live with, at least for a few years.  I was the nerdy girl who got good grades and used her quick sarcasm to make her friends laugh.  "My So-Called Life" aired for a year, and I watched each episode, entranced by Claire Danes and her struggle to be a good daughter, a fun friend, a desirable girlfriend.  Like many adolescents, I struggled to have control.  It seemed that everything that went wrong could be solved by a change of location.  The kids at my school are snobs.  The winters are too cold.  The budding trees make me sick every spring.  My 18th birthday stood out like a bright yellow Finish line.  Once I got there, everything would be different.  When the college brochures started arriving in the mail my junior year, I tossed every one that was located in Ohio.  I perused the ones from Wisconsin and New York, but they went in the trash once I found out how snowy their winters were.  What remained were schools in Florida, Washington DC, Virginia, Arizona, Georgia, and of course, my beloved Texas.  I had the grades and test scores to go where I wanted, and that was anywhere but here.  But I didn't have the money to pay for any of them.  I still remember the desperation as my senior year drew to a close, trying to come up with a plan, some kind of loan that would get me out of Ohio and on to the life I was supposed to be living.  Finally, in June, after graduation, I admitted defeat and took the short trip up the highway to Kent with my dad, filled out an application and took a tour and went home with an acceptance letter.  It was affordable and offered the degree I wanted, but it was not the grand experience I thought college would be.  So I graduated early and took a job as a flight attendant.  I stepped off the plane in a new city every day, and I invited the world to audition for me.  DANCE.  SING.  Give me a reason to never leave.  I explored New York City and Kalamazoo, Michigan.  I strolled through Jacksonville, Florida and Greensburg, South Carolina.  I ate barbecue in Charleston and lobster in Maine.  I flew to California and Canada and Cincinnati.  And I felt like Goldilocks, because none of them felt quite right.

There was one trip I was saving, a destination I had very high expectations for, the one I was certain would fit like no other city on earth....

I'll be posting the conclusion of my journey on Saturday.  In the meantime, purchase Emily T. Wierenga's new book, Atlas Girl: Finding Home in the Last Place I Thought to Look on amazon NOW!!  ALL proceeds from Atlas Girl will go towards Emily’s non-profit, The Lulu Tree. The Lulu Tree (www.thelulutree.com) is dedicated to preventing tomorrow’s orphans by equipping today’s mothers. It is a grassroots organization bringing healing and hope to women and children in the slums of Uganda through the arts, community, and the gospel.

Even When Your Heart is Breaking...

Tonight, I'm nursing a broken heart.  It's happened before, of course, when the boy that I liked didn't feel the same way, when the person I loved, a fixture in my life, passed on.  I felt that shattering inside, cried those nonstop tears, wondered how I would ever get through it.  But this is a brand new heartbreak, because today the social worker called.  Instead of vague ideas and hypotheticals, she called to give me a date.  Two weeks.  In two weeks, our little girl will be moving back home with her family.  All I could say was, "Oh," as the lump formed in my throat.  Because we knew this was coming.  We had been told this was the plan.  This is what we signed up for.  And yes, I can think of a hundred different reasons why this is going to be good for everyone, how this is the best plan given the messed up nature of the world we live in, where parents aren't always the best people to raise their children, where a flawed but well-meaning foster care system is necessary.  I won't have to worry about that hair anymore.  She won't talk back to me when I speak.  Our next holiday celebration isn't going to be hijacked by her behavior.  She won't be able to teach my sons anymore bad habits, and maybe the ones they've learned over the past eight months will die out over time.  She'll be with the people who look like her.  She'll be able to see her mom more.  She'll be someone else's responsibility, which would mean I can finally relax.

But every time I think of it, the actual date, packing up the dolls and hair products and clothes and shoes that have drifted to every corner of our house, I just keep crying those non stop heartbreak tears.  Because we are her family, and I am her mother except in the one way that matters to a judge.  After living with us for eight months, she has become my daughter, and I love her.  I just hung our new family photo yesterday, the one with Chris and I surrounded by daffodils, with four kids spread across our laps, 3 blonde boys and one brown girl.  That is my family, but in two weeks, it won't be.  Instead of listing all the ways she bugs me, I keep thinking how much I'll miss her.  I'll miss seeing her grow up.  I'll miss all the development that will happen after this point, won't see the final result of all that we've poured into her.  I won't know for sure that she is safe, that she is being fed, read to, hugged, given appropriate boundaries.  Maybe her (other) family will still call and invite us to see her, but it's not guaranteed. 

We knew this was going to happen, theoretically when we signed up to be foster parents, and practically, when her social worker told us she would be moved sometime this summer.  And I've said myself that I just can't see us adopting her, signing up for another 15 years of being exclusively responsible for her, making her a permanent member of our family.  Right now, I wish I could be more calculating, more rational about all of this.  I wish....I don't know.  That I wasn't human?  That the very act of caring for someone day in and day out didn't forge a deep and lasting connection between two people?  That I could just smile and wave and tell her goodbye and never think of her again?  I honestly kept thinking that when it was time for her to go, we would just go back to our regular lives.  But now I see the flaw in that thinking, because there is no going back, there is no life previously in progress that has just been waiting, static.  We are all different than we were 8 months ago, both because the boys are young and that is just the nature of early childhood, but also because this girl came into our house and she infiltrated every one of  us.  How are my boys going to react to losing the person they have started calling their sister?  Part of me thinks there will be some relief, a welcome quiet in the mornings and in the car and all day long,  Probably they will notice and appreciate that there is one less person to share with, one less person to occupy their mother's time and her lap.  But at the same time, I think they'll miss playing with her.  I think they'll miss her nonstop energy, her whole-hearted joining in of whatever game they devised.  We've laid the groundwork to answer their questions, of course.  They know she has another mommy, another home.  We've said she's just here for a while, but they will never have to go.  I've whispered that this is their forever home and I am their forever mommy in the quiet minutes before they fall asleep.

I keep thinking back to a conversation that Chris and I had at Friendly's (because, of course it was at Friendly's, where every pivotal moment in our relationship has happened, every deep conversation, every big decision) a few years ago.  Michael was just a baby, only a few months old and just coming out of the infant drug addiction that brought him to our family.  His social worker had informed us that she was contacting family members, looking for a kinship placement for him.  We sat across from each other, the little guy fast asleep next to me, and Chris said, "I think we should have another baby."  I shook my head.  No.  I didn't want to be pregnant again.  I was no longer interested in growing our family biologically.  And besides, I knew the real reason he wanted me to get pregnant was to salve his heart as he faced the loss of Michael.  He wanted to make a baby that they wouldn't be able to take from us, because there would be no conflicting loyalties, no one standing before the king and asking to cut him in half.  Another baby would be all ours.  But that wasn't the solution to losing Michael, and I told him that.  Chris was disappointed, but he knew I was right.  I wish I could summon that calm person right now.  Because I just keep thinking about how nice it would be to get pregnant, to have a new child to look forward to while I am losing this one that I love.  It won't happen, because we took that option off the table about a year ago.  There are always more foster kids though.  More babies and toddlers and preschoolers who need a home, a safe adult to look out for them.  As much as I want to call Children's Services and ask them to send me another, I know that I need a break, at least for a few months.  I need to let myself grieve.  I need to feel what I'm feeling, because there is no "fix" for this.

Time heals all wounds.  Right?  So if I can just give it time, maybe I can stop crying.  If I just think about all that she has learned and experienced while in our care, maybe I can tell myself that we did what we could, what she needed, and release her.  Maybe if I can quiet this internal storm, I can hear the voice that reminds me that He loves all His children, that she will always be in His care, that His love is big enough and deep enough and transforming enough that we'll all be able to get through this.  And I need to remember the look on her face, the huge smile that broke out when I finally dried my eyes long enough to tell her that she was going to see her grandma, that she gets to have a sleepover this weekend.  She knows who her family is, every last one of us, and she belongs with them as much as she belongs here.