Suffice it to say that this past year has had its challenges. After a tumultuous first couple of months after the move, we fell into new routines and began to take hold of our new normal. Oh there were days when I was cursing my husband’s name, but increasingly days when I felt like we were making it work. The kids were thriving in school, we saw my stepson frequently, and my husband came home every two to three weekends, usually for three days at a time. We Skyped, my husband emailed pictures of superheroes, cartoon characters and animals to my kids’ delight, and we talked every evening like clockwork. My daughter sailed through the school admissions process despite my scrambling (and occasional fumbling) to keep up most of the applications, essays, obligations, appointments and interviews on my own, and we thankfully had a happy ending there.
But we wouldn’t be settled for long. The other thing that happened over the course of the year, was that my husband accepted a summer job in – as if my life hadn’t taken enough turns – Sydney! And no I’m not talking about Sydney, Florida, the Sydney. When I would tell people the news, inevitably their eyes would grow wide and they would exclaim, “Wow, what an adventure!” I would nod along, but it was only a couple of months after we moved when the news came, and inside I was still reeling. Ordinarily I too would have thought, Wow what an adventure!, but my brain was saying, Wow what a lot of work getting everyone ready by myself and being by myself over there with two young kids knowing no one and I have not even settled into all the change that just happened!
My housekeeper Nalini told me, “You know you never find out how strong a person you are until things like this come up in your life. It’s good for you.” But my perspective is, I was good without knowing, perfectly content! Did not need to know that information. I guess there is that rare person who would choose to jump off a bridge, but the rest of us just rise to it and deal with the crap life throws at us. This much I already know. So I would rather not have the crap!
I realize how lame this sounds. Oh boo hoo hoo, you have to spend the summer in Sydney, Australia, poor you! But it was the state of mind I was in at the time. As life calmed down for me, my enthusiasm for a summer down under did begin to build. Especially given all the many accounts that Sydney was beautiful, highly livable, and that the people were great and super friendly. But I was right about one thing, it was a crap load of work getting us all ready. My husband was to head down within a week after his school got out mid-May, and I was to join him with our two kids when their school ended three weeks later, so preparations were largely on my own. As lift-off approached, I had a three-page, single-spaced To-Do list I was checking off. Making things more difficult was that we had company coming the day after we left. We hadn’t planned on subletting, but then good friends of my sister’s were house-hunting in the area and needed a place to stay just in the time span we were gone, so we decided we would help them out. And also, they would give us shopping money! I mean rent, honey! Our place didn’t really feel like my “home” anyway. The problem was the apartment was overrun with strollers and garish plastic toys and overflowing bins of stuffed animals; I had to make room for adults to stay there. It kind of felt like moving day all over again.
The other minor yet burdensome issue was that it was going to be Sydney’s winter while we were there. Mild by America’s Northeastern standards, but still it ranged from the 40s to 60s, cusp weather, so I had to pack quite a wide array of outfits and outerwear for everyone. We also were considering a trip to the Great Barrier Reef and skiing in New Zealand, so essentially I was to pack for every weather condition short of glacier sight-seeing in Antarctica and Saharan camel riding. It’s much easier to pack for a summer away, with lightweight gauzy outfits and flip flops! Plus, three months seemed so looooong in my mind, it was a challenge to envision what I would need for that long, what kind of variety I needed, how sick of my clothes would I get in that period of time?!
I was also shipping a load of things over so had to pre-pack a couple of weeks in advance for the movers, and I also had to determine what I would need short-term (approximately two weeks until the boxes arrived). I needed a mini-version of clothes and coats for all the weather conditions and toiletries and toys and electronics and camera/video equipment and so on, it took a bit of planning and organization.
Things were slowly if haphazardly coming together. It would have been an easier task had it not all been happening a) after my husband had already left for Australia, and b) during the month of May, which can be as busy if not more so than the holiday season in New York. There were copious year-end activities for all three kids’ schools, especially for my daughter since she was “graduating” from preschool. I was also a class mom for my daughters’ class so had lots of extra responsibilities related to that. And then there was one social activity after another, and various get-togethers with friends I wouldn’t be seeing for three months. It would have been enough to fill my plate even without preparing to go half-way round the world for a quarter of a year. And I was doing it with a chronic low-grade buzz of anxiety humming through my brain…
Tears for fears
If you know for me for any length of time, you will probably eventually glean that I have a lot of unreasonable fears. It’s in my blood, as my mother and older sister are both prone to panic attacks, and unreasonable fears. I also attribute it to motherhood. Prior to having children, my main unreasonable fear was a fear of flying, despite all of the statistics pointing to greater dangers in just walking around. Post-kids, however, I have developed an uncanny ability to instantly size up any setting or situation and imagine what could go horribly, tragically awry. Like, what if those air conditioners hanging from the apartment above suddenly came loose and headed straight toward us, what if my kid’s toe got snagged on the escalator and it sucked ‘em in like a meat grinder, what if my kid suddenly leapt out of the stroller at the street corner and charged headlong into traffic (oh wait, that actually happened!) (luckily I grabbed the collar of his coat in the nick of time!). I can work myself up into an adrenaline-charged gasp in an imaginary instant. I also credit some real-life unfortunate circumstances that have added to this mind-set. Two completely random tragic accidents happened to beloved people in my life, one in an ordinary car on an ordinary day, one in a back yard. It seared into me the idea that terrible accidents can happen anywhere, to anyone, even to people you love desperately. There was an innocence lost. It really doesn’t just happen to other people.
This is all to say that I was mired in a lot of fears about the Sydney trip. A lot of it was focused on the flight itself – mainly, the flight from the coast of America to the coast of Australia, with miles and miles of deep deep ocean in between. It was silly, particularly given that I would be flying Qantas. All my life I had wanted to fly Qantas! Well, ever since I watched Rain Man and learned that it was the only airline that had never crashed. I looked it up online, and sure enough, even since the movie came out, Qantas has never had a fatal crash. And yet… I knew that that didn’t make it impossible. There were also lots of news reports at this time about the data box being recovered from the Air France flight that had gone down in the Atlantic Ocean on its way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in 2009. It had just inexplicably disappeared from the radar in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. This chilled me to the bone. My other fears included, but were not limited to:
Tears for fears
If you know for me for any length of time, you will probably eventually glean that I have a lot of unreasonable fears. It’s in my blood, as my mother and older sister are both prone to panic attacks, and unreasonable fears. I also attribute it to motherhood. Prior to having children, my main unreasonable fear was a fear of flying, despite all of the statistics pointing to greater dangers in just walking around. Post-kids, however, I have developed an uncanny ability to instantly size up any setting or situation and imagine what could go horribly, tragically awry. Like, what if those air conditioners hanging from the apartment above suddenly came loose and headed straight toward us, what if my kid’s toe got snagged on the escalator and it sucked ‘em in like a meat grinder, what if my kid suddenly leapt out of the stroller at the street corner and charged headlong into traffic (oh wait, that actually happened!) (luckily I grabbed the collar of his coat in the nick of time!). I can work myself up into an adrenaline-charged gasp in an imaginary instant. I also credit some real-life unfortunate circumstances that have added to this mind-set. Two completely random tragic accidents happened to beloved people in my life, one in an ordinary car on an ordinary day, one in a back yard. It seared into me the idea that terrible accidents can happen anywhere, to anyone, even to people you love desperately. There was an innocence lost. It really doesn’t just happen to other people.
This is all to say that I was mired in a lot of fears about the Sydney trip. A lot of it was focused on the flight itself – mainly, the flight from the coast of America to the coast of Australia, with miles and miles of deep deep ocean in between. It was silly, particularly given that I would be flying Qantas. All my life I had wanted to fly Qantas! Well, ever since I watched Rain Man and learned that it was the only airline that had never crashed. I looked it up online, and sure enough, even since the movie came out, Qantas has never had a fatal crash. And yet… I knew that that didn’t make it impossible. There were also lots of news reports at this time about the data box being recovered from the Air France flight that had gone down in the Atlantic Ocean on its way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in 2009. It had just inexplicably disappeared from the radar in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. This chilled me to the bone. My other fears included, but were not limited to:
· How would the children do on the flights, who would be up at all hours and prone to sleep-deprived psychotic meltdowns as toddlers are
· How would I manage JFK check-in by myself, getting in at LAX and getting all my bags and the kids to a hotel, then entertain them for a full day and drag them back to the airport for a 10:30pm departure (i.e., 1:30am New York time)
· Driving in Sydney; they drove on the “wrong” side, which had accident written all over it to me, how would I override my thirty years of driver instincts and not plow into oncoming traffic? Nevermind just crossing streets and not looking the right way for traffic…
· Our apartment would be on the 71st floor, what if I had vertigo, what if there was an earthquake, what if the kids crashed through a window, what if a plane… (well I was in New York on 9/11, it’s hard to not let that thought enter, especially if you’re me…)
It all culminated in a teary talk at a bar one night. I was out with a bunch of mom friends, and after a couple of glasses of wine was confiding to one friend about all of my irrational fears. As a science person I understood statistics and in an objective moment could talk myself down, but then the cloud of dread would seep right back in. I told my friend about my fear of flying. She tried to reassure me about the safety of flying, and then added, “But then if you do crash, at least you all go down together!” We burst out laughing. “OK,” she said, “Maybe I’m not the best one to talk to about this!” Then she suggested taking something with me from home that would be comforting. What might that be? I thought about it, and my eyes welled up with tears: my pillow. I have this old spongy rubber pillow I’ve slept on forever. I had gone back and forth about whether I would bring it, feeling a bit childish about it; I used to bring it along on trips and even sleepovers as a kid. But in that moment all the fears rose up at once and I started to cry thinking about how much I needed my pillow. I wanted to say: I am not this person! I swear! I’m not a crier, I’m not scared of travel, I’m the person who moved to New York City without knowing a New York City soul after college, I’m the person who traveled all over Europe and North Africa without a care in the world! But there I was, crying about my pillow. Even as it was happening, I was cringing at myself.
A fine time for diverticulitis
And then things got worse. My one source of comfort was that, not long after I told her we were going to be stationed in Sydney for three months, my mother had announced that she’d love to join us for the first month. She wasn’t so much an on-the-floor-entertaining-the-kids grandmother, but she would have been a loving presence for the kids and good adult conversation for me while my husband was out. It would have been so wonderful to have her there just womanning the fort while I checked out the area, ran errands, and snuck in some occasional Me Time, not to mention getting a little nighttime babysitting for Couple Time. It had been quite cheering to me that the person most familiar to me on the planet would be there alongside me, during the trip over, and with me initially, so very far from home. But alas…
Not one week from take-off, I got a call from sister Julie saying my mother was in the emergency room. She had had severe abdominal pain and had passed some blood, so they were admitting her to check things out and run some tests. After a nerve-wracking two days of speculative diagnoses, it turned out she had diverticulitis, which is basically inflammation of your large intestine due to pouches that have formed in the lining of the colon. It’s not uncommon in older people, and generally not serious, so that was a relief. But she did need to stay in the hospital for a few days, and was by and large feeling pretty weak and ill.
The other thing was, during the MRI, they had discovered an unusual cyst in one of her ovaries. It was unrelated to her hospitalization, but she’d need to get it checked out by her Ob/Gyn at a later date. It was unnerving, given that her hospital doctor had explained that it “didn’t look normal.” (Small town doctors drive me bonkers. “Didn’t look normal.” Really?? That is the amount of detail you’re going to give me! He even told my mother he was going to run a Ca-125 test on her, failing to mention to her it was an ovarian tumor marker. I was the one who told her what it was for, not really my place if you ask me.) (It was negative, by the way, thank goodness.) In any case, it quickly became painfully clear that my previously healthy-as-a-horse mother was going to be holed up for a while recuperating and making sure everything else was okay. Her trip to Australia was indefinitely postponed.
The other thing was, during the MRI, they had discovered an unusual cyst in one of her ovaries. It was unrelated to her hospitalization, but she’d need to get it checked out by her Ob/Gyn at a later date. It was unnerving, given that her hospital doctor had explained that it “didn’t look normal.” (Small town doctors drive me bonkers. “Didn’t look normal.” Really?? That is the amount of detail you’re going to give me! He even told my mother he was going to run a Ca-125 test on her, failing to mention to her it was an ovarian tumor marker. I was the one who told her what it was for, not really my place if you ask me.) (It was negative, by the way, thank goodness.) In any case, it quickly became painfully clear that my previously healthy-as-a-horse mother was going to be holed up for a while recuperating and making sure everything else was okay. Her trip to Australia was indefinitely postponed.
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