Re-Entry (or, I'd Rather Be in Bali)

Before we left on our grand adventure, we were repeatedly told the same thing....re-entry is hard! While I knew it would require some adjustment back into our normal day-to-day, overall I thought it wouldn't apply to me in the same way. After all, we were only gone 8 months, and we have a great life at home - we certainly weren't running AWAY from anything - more like running TO other things.

How wrong I was. Re-entry is, without a doubt, really hard. It is hard to explain why exactly.  Of course, there is always the fall-back answer of "we've all changed" which we have - in ways that are both easy to see (Jacob is now 2 inches taller than Luke!), harder to see (views on the world, on people, and ourselves), and those that we can't even figure out yet.

Things we wanted to stay the same have changed, and things we hoped would change haven't. None of this is surprising to us, but it does force us to re-evaluate where we put our efforts, our relationships, our time.  Spending 8 months as a tight-knit unit with very few external pressures on how we chose to live our lives was incredibly refreshing.  We come home, and suddenly there is pressure and demands everywhere - school, soccer, work, etc. While some of these are inevitable and necessary, many aren't - and so trying to weed out what is important has become an important part of re-entry.  I think we all expected to come back and just pick up where we left off - but that is neither realistic, nor particularly healthy, all things considered.

Brian and the boys (did I mention that we came home and had the boys' b'nai mitzvah 9 days later) seem to be having a less emotional response to being back.  Brian is back to work (new job - but started last Friday) and the boys seem happy to be back with their friends, finishing up the school year and getting ready to return to their overnight camp where they have spent the last 5 summers.
Maggie is hanging tough - definitely more sensitive and emotional, but blending back in to life fairly seamlessly with the help of her cousins and friends.

I, however, am a wreck.  Perhaps because this was all my grand plan from the start, returning home meant the end of that dream. I look at our giant map in the office that mapped out our journey and consistently feel as if I have been punched in the stomach as I realize....That's It! We Are Done With Our Trip. While there will certainly be other trips in our future, our BIG one, the one that felt SO RIGHT while we were living it, is over. And we probably won't have a chance to do anything like that again - at least, not with the kids.

The next five (that is all we have left with our boys at home!) to eight (and then off goes my Maggie) years will be spent in a blur of school, homework, sports, clubs, friends, and pressure to get the kids ready to be adults.  One of the biggest gifts (and admittedly, frustrations in the moment) that this year gave us was time with our kids.  I already see, 3 weeks into being home, my boys leaving us for their friends - which is as it should be - and I know it would have happened earlier had we been home.  And I think we forged a bond with them that will allow a closeness that might have been overlooked had we not gone through such an adventure together.  But the reality is that our "gap year" is over, and the good, the bad, and the ugly of our "normal" life swallowed us up the minute we got off that last plane.

There is, of course, a lot of the good in coming home, especially for the kids. They missed their friends, their school, their rooms, their stuff (they really had pretty much nothing but clothes, some cards, and their Kindles), and most of all - their family. We are exceptionally lucky to live within a 10 minute drive not only of my parents, but also of both of my brothers and their families.  We all eat dinner at my parents' house every Sunday night.  Maggie, especially, really missed her cousins who are more like sisters to her.  

We are happy to be a bit more spread out (our not very big house feels practically palatial to us now), to have time apart from each other, to have conversations with other people, to have someone besides Mom and Dad to teach the kids, to have casual dinners with our friends on weekends, to giggle together over our thousands of "inside jokes" and memories, to not be packing and unpacking every few days, and to have familiarity in our surroundings.

I'm sure that after a couple of months, life will return to a mix of old/new normal, and much of our trip will seem like a somewhat distant memory, and much of the sadness of not still being on the trip will become a memory as well.  I assume that I will eventually reconcile the fact that I feel much more comfortable/excited/alive/happy/complete wandering through a crazy Cambodian market, or hiking through the hills of northern Vietnam than I do in my own hometown.

Until that happens, however, I'm still daydreaming that we can just pack it all up again, move to Bali, and send the kids to the Green School.  One thing I learned this year - never say never.