These last few months have been exhausting. While fun and exciting, most of what moving abroad with a baby means is a lot of stress, logistics, and downtime spent worrying about the many things you’ve neglected. Parenthood certainly brings with it whole new areas for feeling potentially inadequate if you let it, and when you uproot your family and move to a new country no amount of time spent worrying on these issues seems enough to compensate for the changes in your child’s life.
But now is the time to start our Madrid experience…and I am ready. Intellectually I know I have to but I have a lot of momentum around putting myself last on the list of priorities that needs to change. It feels better already to admit this. It’s been great to feel the vicarious excitement of others in our European adventure but I don’t know that I have actually felt a lot of that excitement yet. My natural tendency is to be a bit guarded in my reactions, attempting to anticipate what could go wrong. My parents do the same thing, which drives me nuts sometimes in them, but I know I do it as much or more than they do.
Our move to Hong Kong had a lot of this same pattern to adjusting; however, there I had more time to explore because I wasn’t working as much and we weren’t parents. Also, there, I got very luck to fall in quickly with an awesome group of friends through a Stitch ‘n Bitch. I haven’t yet found that outside group that is not work and is not parenting that I feel fully connected with here and selfish in attending. So, the exploring begins. We are no longer moving to Spain. We are no longer new. We live here; get into it! There are a lot of possibilities and things to be excited about. All the worries and things unfinished will still be unfinished later!
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