Re-assimilation Not Complete

Sometimes I become homesick for Turkey. I have not thought about my feelings long enough to decide whether it is for Turkey or for the "other" life that seems so much cooler now that we left it.

That distinction does not necessarily make it any cooler, but it just seems like it was since we came back to what we left and some days it seems like nothing has changed. And that wasn't what we were going for.

Of course things have changed. Of course. Time has passed, so things must have changed. But the outcome of our lives is right where we left it and in many ways how I would have expected it had we never left. But we did leave.

Sometimes I think, too, that maybe our life would be the same but easier had we never left. I imagine it is the same thought process people go through when they think about the child they had too early or the child they never thought they would have. Was it the right time? Could it have been better planned? Should we have even done it? (I hope most people don't really consider that last one).

I found myself glued to the computer screen, searching for new "footage" of the place we left. I was trying to hold onto something that doesn't exist anymore. And it doesn't exist because we wanted what we have now.

The romanticism of living abroad is so alluring, but it is so not for us. I loved the travel planning and the packing an unpacking of bags and the airplane flying and "other" language speaking and food eating. I loved the strong relationships that come out of such adversity: trying to live somewhere where you don't really fit and will never really understand.

I still love all those things. I still wish they could exist in our lives. But alas we are Americans. Bound to our culture by all that land that Lewis and Clark helped appropriate.

It is hard to just be. But I'm working on it.