Where the Green Grass Grows

I’ve had, quite literally, months to contemplate this post.  You might not have wondered at my absence from the blog (since it seems to happen fairly often!) but I was back in a place where the biggest thing on my mind was not something I could share – which for me is a recipe for writer’s block.  But things are so close now and I see no reason to keep mum any longer – I have fulfilled the promise that kept me silent and now I reclaim my right to share our news. 

We’re moving to Arkansas.

Perhaps I should start at the beginning.

More than a year ago now I was trying to convince my husband that we should leave OKC.  I wanted to be somewhere… greener.  Somewhere where being outside could be more natural for us, a part of our lives rather than something we had to work at.  My initial desire was Seattle – most of you probably know that the Emerald City has a strong pull on my heart.  But my Oklahoma born-and-bred husband just could not wrap his mind around the incredible distance from all that he has always known.

We were having one of about a hundred conversations about this dilemma last year on our way back from Christmas at my parent’s Arkansas lakehouse when Colin dropped an idea into the mix that, until then, we had never considered.  We love visits to my parent’s house – we walk under the trees, throw rocks in the lake and (attempt to) help my dad with the cows.  As Grady has grown over the past year, we have watched him love it too – days filled with rosy cheeks, puppy kisses and lots of time in the sun.

So really, in hindsight, it wasn’t a huge leap when Colin posed the question – “What about Arkansas?” even if it had not occurred to us before.  We spent the better part of 2012 considering the question, pondering the what and why and how and then came a moment of peace and then complete clarity – a moment where we looked at each other with that smile we both know, and the decision was made.

This is about so much more than location – it’s not just trading in Oklahoma City for Northwest Arkansas.  It’s about a lifestyle shift.  We’re going to try something that, quite frankly, I would not have foreseen in our future when I first realized I was going to marry a man raised on a country club golf course.  We’re going back to MY roots, to where I spent my summers and where I developed my love of quiet spaces.  We’re going to the country.

I can’t even begin to tell you how excited I am for this next phase of our lives.  As we’ve started to really begin to develop what this dream might look like, opportunities we would never have imagined have come our way.   That moment of clarity I mentioned?  It happened on a crisp, beautiful November day as we stood in the middle of the plot of land my parents are giving us for our new home.  A piece of what they call the East Farm, it’s the perfect place for a house – near the end of a country road with a wide open space edged by trees on one side and a gravel lane on the other.  We had talked about renting for a while longer after the move to save up money for acreage and then here it was – all that we had hoped to have, offered up as an incredibly precious gift.  The perfect place to raise our son.

The tricky part about announcing this to those of you who will read it here has been work.  We told our respective firms in early January that we intended to leave OKC by the end of April 2013.  We were asked to keep the news to ourselves while decisions were made regarding potential transfers and we have done so.  But our time here now is short and I can’t spend another moment guarding such a secret (too many times already I have nearly slipped – I am not good with hiding).

I know that this is a huge shift for us and that for some people that thought is nerve-wracking.  We always worry for the people we love when they make big decisions, because sometimes big, risky decisions become the biggest mistakes.  But please know that Colin and I never do anything without great amounts of consideration and we are committed to this choice with all that we have.  For us, for our son, for our future, we believe this is the path we are meant to take.

Honestly, it reminds me of the moment I looked at Colin and said “I want to have a baby.  As in, let’s try to get pregnant – NOW.”  And within a month, after doing our typical consideration and due diligence, we were staring at two lines on a tiny plastic strip and giggling like lunatics – and Grady now is, quite frankly, everything to us.  But there was something in that first moment, a peace in the choice, that took away all the fear I had previously felt when we considered having children.  And I feel that same way now – peace, and excitement, and no hesitation; knowing that my city-raised husband is right there with me just increases that sense of “Yes.  THIS is it.”

So over the next six weeks, we are packing up our lives and preparing to step out on a (sturdy) limb to somewhere different and exciting and new.  There is so much that we will miss about Oklahoma City, but the trip down the turnpike is an easy one and I feel certain we will make it fairly often for family, and friends (and let’s be honest, food) that we are having to leave here.  In a lot of ways, I think that our time in OKC saved us from some of the darkest times our marriage has had to endure - and the strength that we found here together is what will carry us forward into this new adventure. 

And I can't wait to see what happens.

Hard to Love

I’ve been thinking about something lately and want to post about it but find it difficult.  I don’t want to sound like I’m whining – because I’m not.  But I’m puzzling something out and it involves talking about things that still, years later, are sad to me.

Several years ago I had a rough several months friend-wise.  I lost a couple of my dearest friends all at once, though for very different reasons.  I had made a promise to myself several years before even that – that when someone chose to give up on me without a fight, that I in turn would not fight to keep them.  I stuck with that promise then and there are days that I deeply regret it.

But lately I have been thinking that there have been, perhaps, more subtle repercussions to those events then just the periodic twinge of regret I was familiar with.   Building new friendships has been hard and I have found myself reluctant to fully commit to new people.  Often I feel myself emotionally recoiling from that vulnerability as I would physically from an open flame.  When I get the slightest sense that I may have allowed someone to become more important to me than I am to them, I immediately withdraw and work to pull apart those connections in my heart.

What I have been realizing is that… well… this sounds ridiculous but I think I have made myself even harder to love.  I have no delusions about being easy to love – I am moody often bordering on morbid, a natural recluse with too much interest in books and a somewhat prudish sense of humor.  I can be demanding of others and yet personally lazy and there are days I think Colin must have the patience of a saint not to throw his hands up and walk away.

Add on top of that an inability to trust my own value to others and you have what I can completely understand as a truly obnoxious combo.

And really, that is what is a new realization to me – that underneath the regret and the disappointment over the broken relationships and sad memories is a deep current of distrust.  If I was so easy to discard by people who had known me for years… how can I hope to build up anything new that won’t prove to be just as flimsy?

But then – when asking myself that question, I realized the hypocrisy in it, because those same people could feel the same way about my actions – because I let them go.  When given the opportunity to defend myself and fight for my friends, I gave in to pride, raised my chin and said ‘if we were truly friends, I wouldn’t have to prove myself to you.’

But isn’t that what friendship is, in the end?  Proving yourself?  Showing another person that you deserve that piece of themselves they chose to entrust to you?  And that you’ll take the stripes that inevitably come when people aren’t perfect and they wound you, but as a friend, you love them through it?  If that is a test of friendship, then I am the one who failed it.

And if I am harder to love as a result, it is my own fault.

I can't help but feel frustrated with myself for taking so long to see this.  I have long understood what pulling inward and pushing away has cost me - but I called it self-preservation and accepted it as a result of the pain inflicted upon me by someone else.  Never once did I stop to question whether I might have caused it myself.

All of this winds around and back into something I have been contemplating for months.  Forgiveness.  I desperately want to be better at forgiveness.  In speaking with a friend last fall just a few short weeks after she lost her father unexpectedly, I realized again how short life is and how quickly it can slip through our fingers.  And bitterness, anger, frustration, resentment - are they really how I want to be remembered?

But forgiveness is hard when you cannot see what you yourself need to be forgiven for.  Does that make sense?  Until I can see myself as someone who NEEDS to be forgiven, I can not hope to be able to truly forgive someone else.  When I focus only on that I stand in a position to forgive someone else, I think that I am better.  That I have the ability to choose to forgive.  But I need to break myself down to understand that I stand where they stand - that I also need to be forgiven and someone else stands in that same position relative to me - the position to choose.

If I were to come to the end of my journey today, and would have to trust someone else to tell Grady someday who I was and what I was like - I would want them to say good things.  I would want them to focus on whatever good there is in me and leave out all the rest.  But I have to inspire that - I have to be the good things I would want him to hear, have to BE that with all that I am, with all that I do.  And that begins, I think, with understanding that I am not those things.  That I am, in fact, the opposite of a lot of those things.

And I ask you to forgive me.

And I promise to try to deserve it.