Flying Away

Tomorrow me and Len will board a plane and head back to our first home, Canada. It has been a very strange, sometimes amazing, sometimes gruelling first couple of months living in a new country. And although we are just south of the border, it still feels that things are quite different. The moments pass and I'm beginning to understand that it really isn't very different after all. Just sunnier. We will spend a week in Vancouver with family and friends and then fly back to our new life here in Southern California.

Vancouver in Autumn

Moving is sort of something I prize myself on being skilled at. Mainly because I moved regularly throughout my life. And I'd like to say it has slowed as an adult but really, it seems to be keeping up a pretty good pace. The longing and loneliness of moving is the hardest part. But they don't last long. So you have to ride it out, to take the time to accept the emotions you are feeling, and watch as they dissipate into thin air. At first, you only want what you know and the excitement of this new place is overwhelming. You long for the past and for your old home, which is still very much your home in your mind. And like any homesick person, you want and will travel back to where you used to live, to the place that seems so far gone and so heartbreakingly perfect. Except, like anything you romanticize about, it of course is never as amazing as it seems. Because the truth is, the place is the same but it is you who have changed, grown into a new and evolving person. Suddenly, the past doesn't seem so awesome and instead, you are free to look at everything new and inspiring around you. You are alive and exploring and very few things are better for the soul.

Santa Monica in Autumn

At least this is what I am telling myself at the moment. That I won't love the cooler weather and seeing my mama every day and my closest friends and having my pants soaked up to my knees in the always wet Vancouver autumn. Who knows, I may desperately miss my Canadian existence but something shifted this week after I accepted the difficulty of the present and the reality that it doesn't need to define my future, and I truly looked around. I'm in one of the most gorgeous places to live. And the people are wonderfully kind and there are a lot of mamas with kids going through the same experiences as I am. It's just a matter of getting out of the past and embracing the present, all its ugly realness included.