You Moved How Many Times?

  

This was my home for the first 4 weeks.

I will soon be seventy years old, which blows my mind. This morning, while reading a biography of Louisa May Alcott and seeing that she moved around a great deal as a child, I decided to count up my moves. 

One of the things I realized as I made the list is that my memory does a lot more spinning than it used to as it tries to retrieve information. I can picture the little buffering circle going round and round. So I'm not sure I got them all, nor can I remember very many street names. 

The final count, in my just-short-of-70-years, is fifty-one. Five. One. Including a few instances of couch-surfing and camping out, which I never think of as homelessness even though I technically didn't have an address and had to use my grandparents' home address as mine. I never lived with my grandparents.

Evergreen, Colorado 1956

My parents moved quite a bit, every year or two, even once during the school year in spite of the fact that my father was a teacher. After they started teaching for the military dependent schools overseas, things actually settled down. Then everyone around us moved and we were in the same place for several years at a time.

Unlike Louisa, I didn't grow up with a fanatic father whose beliefs precluded him from working for wages or owning property ----- or eating regularly. My father was a musician, though, and an aspiring, frustrated concert pianist who always felt like his big break was around the next corner. If only he hadn't somehow saddled himself with a wife and four kids! So there are similarities. 

My sister Barb at our small, plain house - 1958

By the time I graduated from high school in Rota, Spain, I had attended 8 schools. I married at 18 and lighted out on a remarkable journey of geographical cures for anything and everything that ailed me. By the time I was 30, my lifetime score was up to 32 moves and still going. Thirty was a turning point, though. That's the year I got sober for good.

I've been in the same house now for 15 years. Jill and I bought separate new houses when we met and it took us three years to merge. We've been stable ever since.

Sometimes, I get itchy feet. Sometimes, I lunge at the internet looking for a place to move, a desirable house in a new city or country. I may never get over that urge to pack up and search for adventure. But it's different now. I love my wife and the house we live in. She has a hometown not far away with family and familiar places. Occasionally, I even want to move there and try to adopt her home since I've never had a hometown of my own. 

In the meantime, here we are growing older together in a house I still think of as brand new, though it was 2002 when she got it.  That's long enough to launch an entire kid from scratch! (we didn't.)

 

My children have houses of their own, and marriages and careers to go with them. They've been more geographically stable than I, despite my best efforts to haul them from pillar to post in the early years. 

Seventy, huh? That means what, fifteen or twenty years more? Twenty-five if I stretch it? Considering my grasshopper-wastrel days of yore, I'm already living on borrowed time. And here, in this house that is definitely a home, I have found a measure of peace I never expected to have. 

Feet on the ground, breathing the air. Who knew it could be like this?

Buddy and Nana

Normal is as Normal Does

I used to live in Normal.  Normal, Illinois, that is.  That's where I finished my undergraduate studies and took my master's ---- Illinois State University.  I was always amused by the thought of living in Normal, even though I knew it derived from the fact that the university used to be a "normal school" --- a training college for teachers.  That's what they called them, back in the day.  Don't ask me why.

So did living in Normal make me normal?  I suppose it depends on your point of view. If paying enough money, putting in enough work and jumping through enough hoops to be awarded two degrees is normal, then yes.  I was normal.  As a matter of fact, considering the heavy emphasis on education and academic achievement that I learned at home, I felt as though it was not only normal, but imperative to earn a graduate degree.  That's how you become a good person in order to lead an upright, normal life.

But did I consider myself normal on the inside?  Not in the least.  Since I had long since developed the habit of comparing my insides to other people's outsides, I always felt like a mess.  From the inside out, it felt like I was always on the verge of collapse, ever in peril of being discovered to be a fraud.  I went through all the motions, and I developed real skill at hoop jumping, but I never felt that I earned my diplomas like other people did.

Now I feel pretty normal, for the first time in my life.  And this is in spite of living a life that many other people would consider abnormal.  Two Old Broads --- that's us.  Enjoying wedded bliss.

DIGRESSION ALERT: I've been annoyed lately about the word "lifestyle" being used to describe how I, and others of my tribe, live.  Lifestyle is what you buy at the mall. I didn't purchase lesbian at Pottery Barn.  Being gay is one of the aspects of who I am.  It defines me in a limited, but profound way.  I'm also short ---- very short.  Not even 5 feet tall.  But I assure you, I don't live a "short lifestyle".  END OF RANT

Normal.  When I was growing up in the 1950s in rural Iowa, it was normal to go barefoot a lot, to have the run of the town and surrounding countryside without adult supervision, to create your own games and amusements out of whatever raw materials were available, and to be fed candy and cookies by any kind lady whose porch or kitchen you fetched up in, whether you knew them or not.  That was normal because that's how most people lived.  It would have been abnormal to cosset your kid indoors in front of a screen all the time and away from other people.  Folks would have thought there was something wrong with you, that you were not parenting your kid correctly.

Now I'm not saying that was right and people do it wrong now.  Not at all --- I don't have a cane to thump on the floor while declaiming "Back in my day..."  What's changed is what NORMAL is.  Normal comes from the root word norm.  Norm is defined as a standard or average.  What is most common?  Today, because of changes in society, changes in parenting standards and educational practices and employment, it is more normal for kids to be in structured activities or institutional settings during what used to be playtime.  More people live in neighborhoods where it is unsafe, or it is felt to be unsafe to let kids play without direct supervision.  So the new normal involves a great deal more direct supervision and less opportunity for chance discoveries or encounters.

Normal has shifted in so many spheres --- watch a few episodes of Mad Men or better yet, old 50s and 60s sitcoms, and it's easy to see the underlying assumptions about relationships, roles, behavioral expectations, etc.  It's startling to see how many people smoked and where they did it, now that the norms have shifted so much.  Drinking and driving?  It's always been a scourge, but time was, you'd get off with a warning or rarely even be stopped in the first place.

At my doctor's office there is a sign above the scale that says "Normal is just a setting on the washing machine."  What's the worst part of going for a checkup?  Not the fasting, not the needles, not the long wait in a flimsy gown --- it's the scales.  It might as well be SCREAMING --- "You pathetic excuse for a human being, you waste of oxygen, get the hell out of here and don't come back till you lose forty pounds!"  The sign doesn't drown it out, but it helps.

For most of the last decade,  my normal was working 60+ hours a week and never being done.  It was always thinking about school, the kids, the job, the unfinished tasks, the new things to try, the things that didn't work.  Normal was guilt about being an inattentive wife, a negligent daughter, an unavailable mother, an infrequent friend.  Normal was putting self-care dead last on the to-do list.

I'm glad I live in a new normal now.