Marcum musings on life as an expat: May 2017

We've been in our new home a little more than a month. It's beginning to feel like ours - with our personalities shining through décor, photos, furniture arrangement and laughter. We've hosted our first small gathering. The garage is now where we park cars, not a place we store boxes. The last vestige of 'cardboard chic' décor has been relegated to one room in the basement that we'll sort through leisurely over the coming weeks. The guest room has a bed - only a bed, but a bed nonetheless and all exterior doors may only be accessed by keys we've personally distributed. Normal is revealing itself in stages - first, we found a school prep rhythm, we're playing with who will drive whom where and when and who will walk and on what days. We've got our first doctor's appointment and one of the kids has accepted their first birthday party invitation. We're getting there.

Normal is a funny word though. Actually, I looked up the definition because life seems to paint 'normal' as a completely fluid concept in our world most days. Here's what the Google coughed up:

adjective
1. conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expected.
"it's quite normal for puppies to bolt their food"

2. technical
(of a line, ray, or other linear feature) intersecting a given line or surface at right angles.

noun
1. the usual, average, or typical state or condition.
"her temperature was above normal"

2. technical
a line at right angles to a given line or surface.

From the get-go, I tend to think life embraces the right angle definition far better than the 'usual or typical' definition - as in life often feels like it jolts in a totally new direction, without warning, so as to prevent us from establishing a normal or usual state/condition. That said, establishing 'normal' as a typical state is one of my goals and it seems to be a goal I'm always striving toward without fully meeting. I'm OK with that because I am easily bored, but I must confess this quest for 'normal' is sometimes overwhelming and exhausting.

There are things I sorely miss about the 'normal' we'd established in Vancouver:
1 - school hours from 9AM - 3PM daily for both children
2 - afternoons on the playground for kids to play and me to catch up with my friends
3 - regular lunches and coffees with my bestie where we solved the problems of the world and laughed a whole lot
4 - running into neighbours in the lobby of our building or on the elevator
5 - walking everywhere
6 - being able to clean our apartment from top to bottom in less than 3 hours
7 - the scenery & lack of humidity
8 - the diversity of the West End and hearing all sorts of different languages

There are things I deeply love about the 'normal' we're discovering here in Georgia:
1 - having time one on one with my 12 year old in the mornings so we can talk and really know one another and having one on one time with my 9 year old in the afternoons for the same reasons
2 - walking to school with Henry on occasion
3 - being closer to family from whom we've been so separated these past 4 years
4 - the fact that we can spread out (our apartment in Vancouver could have fit inside the floor that houses the kids' bedrooms and bathrooms)
5 - having a yard and living on a cul-de-sac in a neighbourhood where our children enjoy playing with other kids almost every single day
6 - serendipitous moments that have affirmed we've landed in the right place at the right time
7 - having an ice maker and garburator (aka garbage disposal) - total first world indulgences that are decadent to have in our reality

Here we are - smack dab in the middle of one of those angular shifts in life and we're managing - dancing between joys and grief, longing for what the past held and anticipating what the future holds, clinging to who we know we are at our core and letting go of pieces that no longer fit. This thing called life is a constant ebb and flow and I'm grateful for how the experiences of our family have shaped us individually and collectively. My hope is that our normal will never be stagnant, that we'll always be in some small phase of redefinition so that we continue to grow into who we're meant to be. Here's to stretching, here's to those who've helped us get to this place, here's to those we sorely miss and those we've yet to meet. Thank you for being part of our journey.