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Walk a little slower daddy
“You know,” Doug said to me last night when we were sitting on the porch watching the kids ride the scooter up and down the drive while the dogs trotted along beside them, “I have no interest in knowing what’s going on anywhere else...no desire to read a paper, watch the news, nothing. All that’s happening that matters is here.”
All of our lives together I’ve been waiting for him to have some kind of similar revelation about our home and family life. He’s a workaholic. A highly dedicated one, at that. Work comes first and he don’t mind saying it. It was work, and what it made possible for our family that mattered – never mind the fact that it left nothing for us once it made it all possible. For more than ten years he got this glazed over look (“Yes I understand you want to go home to the country, you simple little girl.” - pat me on the head and look sympathetic) every time I talked about feeling drawn back home to the place I grew up, my need to be “out” away from neighbors close enough to sit on your lap when they are in their house and you’re in yours.
He didn’t get it.
Since the beginning of the year we’ve gone through one of the most stressful things we’ve ever embarked on together…house hunting and house buying. There were times both of us were ready to throw our hands up and say “It’s not worth it!” but we didn’t do that, because we both felt it was. That might have been his first inkling.
The last week has been a rush of packing, tossing in the car/truck/van/whatever and running to and fro – one house to the other, feeling stuck somewhere in between, not belonging completely at either. It’s been hard, really hard. And expensive, the cost of gas alone has been enough to blow our budget for the next 3 months.
But something has been happening to both of us. We’ve been all smiley. Colon, shift D smiley, even when unloading carelessly packed boxes in the rain.
He kept saying things like, “…so you can be happy,” but with this look on his face that made it seem like he doubted it. A place can't do that, he seemed to be thinking. Like it’s all in my head.
He’s spent his life growing up in various places so even though he knows everything from the back roads to the big city, he’s become highly adaptable…he can do his thing anywhere. Me? I grew up in the country, spent my life sitting in late afternoon shade, climbing trees to pick apples and cherries, walking through the woods carrying sticks, hearing nothing but barking dogs and the hum of tractors in the fields. The last ten years have been hard on me. I’m not highly adaptable, my spirit suffered greatly the loss of the place I belong. It’s that sense of belonging that I think he never understood. Since he moved around so much I think he had no way to comprehend the draw of the place I called home. Home is not where you hang your hat, not to me. Home is the place that sings softly to your soul. It’s the feeling, more than the actual place, and I’m sure that for some it is the city, for me it is the country, the woods, the solitude. We joked a lot while house hunting that I wanted to be invisible and anti-social when I described what I wanted in a place. Doug didn’t care what kind of place we had exactly. He wanted a garden (which I was sure I’d end up taking care of because of his work schedule), and he did want more land than we had before.
When we found this place it was so much more than we had hoped for. More land, more house (albeit in need of a lot of work), more strawberries (we didn’t know it was the old strawberry farm).
We never expected that Doug wouldn’t adjust, or that he’d have a difficult time doing so. We are closer to work than before, you know. How convenient? He could be there within 5 minutes. But I don’t think either of us expected for him to be leaving work early every day, or to find him sitting on the porch for a long time, or playing bad-mitten in the back yard come evening.
Every day I find my self marveling at the fact that I longed for a place like this so that I could be more content within myself and hoped that it would make the life we live without my husband/the kids dad most of the time, a bit easier for me and the kids. We figured if I had the peace I felt the country would bring me, and the kids had room to play, the dogs had room to run (outside, thereby being a lot less work for me), we would be more satisfied and in the end he would be more satisfied without having to deal with the unhappiness we experienced because of no room, loud neighbors, speeding cars.
Not one of us ever suspected it would give him back to us.
I am not sure how long it will last, I have no similar experience in our past to judge by, but we hope that years from now he will still be rushing home from work to sit on the porch and hold my hand while the sun sets and playing with the kids in acres of grass flickering with lightening bugs.
Home is the place that sings to your soul so it has a song of its own.
“You know,” Doug said to me last night when we were sitting on the porch watching the kids ride the scooter up and down the drive while the dogs trotted along beside them, “I have no interest in knowing what’s going on anywhere else...no desire to read a paper, watch the news, nothing. All that’s happening that matters is here.”
All of our lives together I’ve been waiting for him to have some kind of similar revelation about our home and family life. He’s a workaholic. A highly dedicated one, at that. Work comes first and he don’t mind saying it. It was work, and what it made possible for our family that mattered – never mind the fact that it left nothing for us once it made it all possible. For more than ten years he got this glazed over look (“Yes I understand you want to go home to the country, you simple little girl.” - pat me on the head and look sympathetic) every time I talked about feeling drawn back home to the place I grew up, my need to be “out” away from neighbors close enough to sit on your lap when they are in their house and you’re in yours.
He didn’t get it.
Since the beginning of the year we’ve gone through one of the most stressful things we’ve ever embarked on together…house hunting and house buying. There were times both of us were ready to throw our hands up and say “It’s not worth it!” but we didn’t do that, because we both felt it was. That might have been his first inkling.
The last week has been a rush of packing, tossing in the car/truck/van/whatever and running to and fro – one house to the other, feeling stuck somewhere in between, not belonging completely at either. It’s been hard, really hard. And expensive, the cost of gas alone has been enough to blow our budget for the next 3 months.
But something has been happening to both of us. We’ve been all smiley. Colon, shift D smiley, even when unloading carelessly packed boxes in the rain.
He kept saying things like, “…so you can be happy,” but with this look on his face that made it seem like he doubted it. A place can't do that, he seemed to be thinking. Like it’s all in my head.
He’s spent his life growing up in various places so even though he knows everything from the back roads to the big city, he’s become highly adaptable…he can do his thing anywhere. Me? I grew up in the country, spent my life sitting in late afternoon shade, climbing trees to pick apples and cherries, walking through the woods carrying sticks, hearing nothing but barking dogs and the hum of tractors in the fields. The last ten years have been hard on me. I’m not highly adaptable, my spirit suffered greatly the loss of the place I belong. It’s that sense of belonging that I think he never understood. Since he moved around so much I think he had no way to comprehend the draw of the place I called home. Home is not where you hang your hat, not to me. Home is the place that sings softly to your soul. It’s the feeling, more than the actual place, and I’m sure that for some it is the city, for me it is the country, the woods, the solitude. We joked a lot while house hunting that I wanted to be invisible and anti-social when I described what I wanted in a place. Doug didn’t care what kind of place we had exactly. He wanted a garden (which I was sure I’d end up taking care of because of his work schedule), and he did want more land than we had before.
When we found this place it was so much more than we had hoped for. More land, more house (albeit in need of a lot of work), more strawberries (we didn’t know it was the old strawberry farm).
We never expected that Doug wouldn’t adjust, or that he’d have a difficult time doing so. We are closer to work than before, you know. How convenient? He could be there within 5 minutes. But I don’t think either of us expected for him to be leaving work early every day, or to find him sitting on the porch for a long time, or playing bad-mitten in the back yard come evening.
Every day I find my self marveling at the fact that I longed for a place like this so that I could be more content within myself and hoped that it would make the life we live without my husband/the kids dad most of the time, a bit easier for me and the kids. We figured if I had the peace I felt the country would bring me, and the kids had room to play, the dogs had room to run (outside, thereby being a lot less work for me), we would be more satisfied and in the end he would be more satisfied without having to deal with the unhappiness we experienced because of no room, loud neighbors, speeding cars.
Not one of us ever suspected it would give him back to us.
I am not sure how long it will last, I have no similar experience in our past to judge by, but we hope that years from now he will still be rushing home from work to sit on the porch and hold my hand while the sun sets and playing with the kids in acres of grass flickering with lightening bugs.
Home is the place that sings to your soul so it has a song of its own.
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