Prickly Burden

Written around August 8th

(me and crew at age 23 in Portland)

It’s been 3 months almost to the date since we found our L.A. house and I wrote my birthday journal entry.

I think it’s interesting that I am so not a morning person, but that’s when I write these. Fighting my way through insomnia, in the raw, exhausted moments and the clear morning quiet my most jagged feelings about my life situation come fighting their way to the surface in extreme clarity. The sun is coming up over Casco bay out the front window of my friend’s east end apartment. My first apartment in Portland, a tiny crooked little 3rd floor place with a view of the water and a rotting back porch that I loved, was just 3 houses down from here. I have seen the water from here in all it’s seasons, ice floes, fog, and glorious sunny mornings for the sailboats and tankers and tugboats and ferries like this one today.

It is exactly 1 week from the day we leave, and I am falling apart.

No move is easy and I have rarely been part of one that has involved so many life changing events at once. My husband is completely rearranging his professional and our financial lives in hope of being more able to pursue his dreams of writing and filmmaking. My step-daughter is leaving home for the first time and going to college. My oldest step=son is about to be able to really pursue his dream of acting in film in the competitive L.A. market. My youngest step-son is about to have his life changed completely by living with us half of the time during the school year, which he has never done before. And this is the end of an era of my life. And a big one. My twenties are over and I largely spent them here. I went from just out of college into my first real satisfying realm in the professional world here. I owned my first home here and went through a divorce here. I fell in love and got married again and became a fulltime step-parent here. I have watched my friends get married and have babies. My last childless friend here informed me yesterday that she is having a baby! This is a very old, very close, very good friend. The news is so bittersweet in that I am so happy for her, but so sad that I will miss it. I will be doubly losing her to a new life.

My heart doesn’t want to leave. My heart wants to stay here with my apple trees and watch my garden finish for the season. My heart wants to be able to drive to my parent’s house in VT. My heart wants to stay here and have a baby and raise him or her with my friends. Isn’t that what most women want at this point in our lives? It’s a longstanding biological and social tradition. I long for a home, a community, and a family in it. I long for the security of trusted friends and family. It’s time for me to settle down. My husband would remind me that I have that here. We aren’t selling our house. We will come back. But……we are leaving for 10 months of the year. We will cease to be a part of our friends lives in the way that we are now, and we will need to find new lives in L.A. to fill out the other 10 months of the year. We are embarking on a totally unsettling new adventure. Next week we will begin driving through the belly and the bowels of America on our way to our new westward home, visiting family, friends and old ghosts. It will be the first time that I have made the trip in almost 10 years. Pretty fitting I guess.

Today in my heart I wish it weren’t so. I wish that I was pregnant too and that I lived here and didn’t have to leave.


But I’m not, and I do.

This move has been coming for me like the tide. My love for my husband and his children has pulled me into it. I have to go. They need to go for so many reasons, and I need to be with them. And it also answers some wanderlusting some unsettled, seeking part of myself. I long to settle, I long to have a baby of my own, I long to sink my teeth into that slice of life. But…..the truth is that I have no baby, and at 32 I am finished with one career path and uncertain of the next, and the truth is that I am not settled, inner our out. Except in my love for my family, and that makes the purity of this decision trustworthy to me. I am going out there with my love for them, and a prayer. There has got to be some greater reason for this for me. What am I going to find? Faith is such a prickly thing to hold.