The Same River Twice

I'm somewhere new today.  Somewhere far away from where I've been.  My little fingers ached to tell the story as it unfolded, but there was no time.  It all happened so fast.  Here's a summation.

I wrote furiously.  I worked my way through the mess my life was by writing about how I wanted my life to be.  Then, I took my own advice, on the suggestion of my therapist.  This is what I did:

1. I quit my job.  I made a decision for my mental health, the health of my marriage, and the happiness of my children, to leave a job that made me miserable.  Financial hit?  You betcha!  In my life though, the thing that trumps finances is my family.  So, is making dinner every night, arriving on-time for swimming lessons, and relatively unrushed mornings worth it?  Is Kindermusik with teacher Erin, park play dates, the gym, and playing with my kids worth it?  Is maximizing the time Dave and I have together worth it?  You betcha!
2. I went back to school.  The thing that sucks about choosing a major when you're 20 is that you're kind of stuck with it when you're 30 and don't really know what you want to do when you grow up.  With my slate clean, I found myself in the unique position of choosing from virtually anything in the world that I might want to pursue.  Since I've been involved in sports, health, and fitness for nearly my whole life (all of you who knew me when I smoked are completely welcome to shut your mouths right now.  Same goes for all of you who knew me as a waitress.), I felt that becoming a personal trainer might be a great fit for me.   So that's what I did.  I've enrolled in a course to become certified.  I spend my spare time studying now, although my little fingers itch to write...write...write.

Two items seem so unimpressive.  The headers are deceptively simple.  I quit my job and went back to school.  The words are so easy to write.  Actual execution of the action proved excruciatingly challenging and emotionally draining.  These two simple events sent our home and family into turmoil, and we're only just emerging. 

So that's the digs.  That's what's been going down for the past few months. 

Then we decided we needed a vacation from all of the above craziness.  So we packed up the car and drove.  For two days.  With a 4 year old and a 1 year old.  We drove to Utah.  On the same road that took us towards the biggest change of our lives.

In September 2005, days after Katrina ravaged New Orleans, my boyfriend Dave and I set out on a road trip.  We packed up the truck full of camping gear and headed east.  Our trip took us through the desolation of the Mojave Desert, Apple Valley, and Las Vegas (how does one drive through and not stop?!?).  We followed the road into the Virgin River Valley and then up to the beginnings of the toppled Colorado Plateau.  We thought we would drive into the side of a mountain, but insead veered right and drove through the grandeur of brown, red, and gray rocks of a million years past.  Remember that degree?  no.  Up, up, up to red and black and plateaus and valleys of Nevada, Arizona, and finally to Utah.  Beautiful green and red Utah.  We camped at a site called Red Bluffs, outside of St. George.  I recall how thick and dusty and warm the air felt against my skin, so familiar with fog and ocean.  We would follow the road out of St. George that took us east to Moab, and then up to Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and finally, home.  We spent 14 days and over 3000 miles together, never once even disagreeing.  That trip changed everything.  I would come back engaged, in love completely with my fiancee and our trip and the possibility of our future.

Yesterday, we got into that same truck, but as a family of four.  We drove the same road through the same mountains and valleys, through Las Vegas (again with no stop...) to St. George.  There we stopped for the night.  As a family, we didn't camp.  We donned bathing suits and went in the hotel pool.  As a family.  Family.

This morning, we enjoyed our Continental breakfast and took a different road, because as a family, we do different things than couples.  This time, we continued north on the road to Park City, UT, to see my sister's family.  The me from five years ago had a vague concept of what being a nuclear family meant, but I know she didn't understand this.

Me-from-five-years-ago didn't really understand that the same places will never be the same again.  That revisiting a place from the past means seeing something old with new eyes.  We could take both of our children on the exact roads of that trip again, to show them the place in Idaho where their dad asked their mom to marry him, along the roads that took us west to the bluegreen of Seattle, down though the stripped forests of Oregon and through northeastern plateau of California, finally heading home.  We could do all of that again, but we will have these 5 years worth of life and experience tagging along.  We'll never be as carefree and careless about being out of cellphone range again.  That becoming a wife, seeing babies come into the world, celebrating the arrival of three nieces, fighting, making-up, sacrificing, gets packed right along with toothpaste and clean underwear.  All for this possibility.  I drove the same road with the same person, but with a radically different destination.  This time, we opted against building a cocoon and living inside, away, for two weeks, and instead visited family.  Children.  Babies.  Our years together with our children has built up to this. This magical moment in our lives when our children are playing with their cousins, staying up way past their bedtimes, the beginning of memory.

We visit these places again, come back to the familiar in the vain hope that we can restore some beauty that is lost to the past.  Too often though, we seek that same memory, that feeling that the past evoked, at the expense of the feeling of right now.  Yesterday, we were on the same river, dipping our toes in the cool rushing water, but this time, we listened to our kids splash and laugh with us.