Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Starting Over

We're headed to Montana in about two weeks. I don't know where we'll end up in the long run, but I'm almost positive it won't be California.

I have such terribly conflicting emotions about all this. Obviously, I'm excited. I love western Montana and I'm grateful that we'll be able to be close to all of my family, at least for a time. I'll get to let my kid regularly go wild outside, and we'll go sledding and cut our own Christmas tree and have Sunday dinners with the family. Hopefully this summer we'll go hiking and go to powwow and Good Ol' Days. I am bursting with excitement over that.

And I'm tremendously sad. The other night, just after we put the kids to bed, we heard a strange noise, so Doug walked into their room and asked Keilana what it was. She got very quiet and was sort of turned away from him, so he said, "Keilana, I'm talking to you, so talk to me. What was that?" She turned to face him and said, in a sad, shaky little voice, "I'm excited to go to Montana and see Yaya and my cousins, I'm just going to miss my friends." Doug assured it that it was OK to be sad, because we were really going to miss our friends, too. On Sunday, I kept thinking there must be some way to take our ward with us. The kids are all having a bit of a hard time, as the house gets emptier and moving day gets closer. Their whole lives are about to change completely.

So are mine and Doug's. I'll have to figure out how to fit our family into the already established routines and relationships of the extended family. It will probably affect the dynamics of my kids' relationships with each other, as they are so used to spending so much time with just each other, just the three of them. We have to develop whole new routines and habits. We'll be so very, very far away from Mimi and Papa. We'll probably miss them most of all. The four of us have grown quite close over the course of the last five years, and even with all the wonderful family we'll have up in Montana, it will certainly feel like there's a hole in our hearts at having them so far away. I wish that our families lived a little closer so that my kids (and I) could spend a lot of time with both sets of grandparents.

If I think about it too long, I just get sick. So instead, I'm trying to focus on all the work I have to get done (anyone who wants to help is more than welcome to come pack and paint), and on all the good stuff: best friends who are cousins, a white Christmas, that whole hazy line between backyard and wilderness thing, spending a lot of time with my mom, soaking up time with my grandma.

In the mean time, I'm trying not to think too much about how much I'll miss the Meiks, Ashcrafts, Hunters and Cregors, or how much we'll miss our family here, or about not being able to take a weekend trip to Monterey or Disneyland or Sacramento. Having a lot of people in your life to love is wonderful, but it also makes some decisions a lot harder,

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