Transition is complicated. Kind of like spinach.

“So how do you feel about going back?”

It’s a reasonable question, and I appreciate people asking.  It’s also one of those stupidly difficult ones, like, “Where do you live? Do you love China? Do you love America?”

Almost exactly a year ago I sat in a hotel room in limbo between our life in China and our year in America, and I wrote about the equally hard question, “Are you excited about going back to America?”  I didn’t know how to answer that one either.

How do I feel about going back?  I’d say I feel all the things. If I were an emoji I would have at least three heads: wailing head, smiling head, stress head. Stress over packing and trying to get all of our prescriptions in time.  Grief over saying goodbyes and leaving this place where we have settled for a year.  Grief for the goodbyes and transitions my kids have to go through again and the difficulties they will face.  Anticipation of getting settled back into our own familiar space where we lived for four years.  Anxiety over how much our community and the environment of our city has changed in the last year.  Eagerness to see friends we have missed.

I am a pre-griever.  I feel all the sadness before something happens, dreading the coming change.  I have been known to feel sad about Juliana going away to kindergarten and to college at the same time.  My pre-grieving knows no bounds.  But once the dreaded event occurs, it is easier.  Once I get on the plane, I can focus on what is ahead.

I also know that adaptability is not one of my strengths.  When I face going anywhere, I always think, “Or we could just stay here...”  It doesn't help when the first step is 30 hours of travel. I like the familiar and have very low desire for adventure.  Maybe in spite of or because of living in China, I love stability and routine and everything staying the same.  Fortunately I have been through enough transition to have gained a self-awareness.  I never want to leave, but when I get there it will be okay.  Right now everything seems up in the air and the room is cluttered with suitcases, but one day soon we will be settled again.

When I think about going back, what I look forward to most is the familiarity.  I think of our apartment and how it will look once we have everything unpacked and organized.  I think of our friends who are still there, ones that we know and understand, and who will understand all the feelings that come with transition.  I think about the familiar roads we drive down every day, and about the familiar faces – the fruit seller, the restaurant owners, the neighbors.

When we have been in China for a while, I will think, “I cannot imagine living in America.  What would that even be like?  What would it be like not to live here?  This is our life.  This is normal.”  But in those first days back, I know I will look around at the dull gray skies and the dull gray buildings and wonder, “Why are we here?  Why is everything ugly? Why would we choose this?”  It takes a while to notice the glimpses of beauty.

Similarly, when I first get back to America I always think, “This place is crazy.  I cannot imagine living here.  Look at the size of these houses! How much everyone thinks they need to own!  Why are there so many choices??”  But after so long in America – a full year – I think, “It’s pretty nice here. I could get used to this.  We could settle in and our kids could go to school, we could keep going to our church, we could drive around in a van and fill up a closet.”

So there is always an inner conflict.  America is so in-your-face prettier and easier and bigger and has ten options of anything you could ever want.  China has to grow on you.  Everything is harder but also simpler.  In China, I would love to buy one of those pre-washed bags of spinach and skip the whole process of “wash with soap, rinse really well until the water is no longer dirty, rinse with drinking water, dry completely and use in the next day before it wilts.”

But there is also something wholesome about stepping into the tiny vegetable shop or bending down over the blanket of vegetables along the side of the road.  In the middle of the city, there is something grounding about spinach covered with dirt, a reminder it came out of the ground not a factory.  It was probably carted into the city on one of those incredibly loud banging tractors and sold by the farmers, directly to us or to the vegetable shop.  And I probably bought it for 40 cents.

So my feelings about China are kind of like spinach.  I miss the ease and convenience of sanitized spinach in a fancy container inside a ridiculously clean supermarket, but I also enjoy the connection I feel through my dirt-covered spinach sold in a cold, cramped vegetable hut by the same person I see every time, who tells me if my kids are wearing enough clothes or not.

In fact, maybe this will be my new analogy.  “How do I feel about going back to China?  Well it's complicated; kind of like spinach."

Unsettled

“Are you excited about going back to America?”

I’ve heard this question a lot over the past few months. Usually my response is something like, “Um, yeah? I guess so?”

Even this super definitive answer is somewhat of a lie. But a soft lie, used to keep conversation from grinding to an awkward halt when you say, “No.”

Excited is not the right word. If I were to answer honestly, I would have to say,

“It feels weird.”

Or

“I don’t really know how I feel.”

Or

“I feel anxious. And relieved. And unsettled. And expectant. And a little lost.”

The truth is, when we dropped our friends at the airport where they would fly back to China, to sleep tonight in their own beds in their own apartment in their familiar city, I felt a pang of jealousy.

I just want to go back to our home. Except that it’s not ours anymore.

I want to go back to our normal life. Except we have to do the hard work of creating a new normal.

I want to be with all those people who get us and understand our lives. Except I also want to be with family and friends.

I want everything to stay the same, even if it wasn’t healthy or sustainable.

I want everything to stay the same, and of course it never does.

It is no reflection on our family or our friends in America. It is just that…we live in China. We visit America. But right now approximately everything we own is packed up in boxes, and we can’t go back to where we lived for four long years, and we won’t see our China friends for at least a year.

It’s just that we have repacked these bags over and over, and it will be at least a couple more months before we can really unpack and settle in. Somewhere that is yet to be determined.

It’s just that sometimes I lie awake at night thinking, “We don’t even have spoons. Or a broom. How are we going to live in yet-to-be-determined-housing without spoons or a broom?? It seems wasteful to buy a broom just for a year. Aren’t brooms kind of expensive? I don’t know how much brooms are. I don’t know how much anything is. How do we possibly budget for a year in America if we don’t even know how much a broom will cost?

“Where will we live and what will we do and what if we just spend this year wandering confusedly around grocery store aisle ranting to strangers about the meaninglessness of ten different varieties of canned tomatoes. Chopped, diced, stewed, seasoned, name brand, store brand – why are you ruining our lives?

“What if our friends don’t understand us and we don’t understand them? What if our kids talk about kuai and three wheeled vehicles and places in Thailand and everyone thinks they are too weird to bother with? What if they forget all their Chinese? What if they prefer America? What if we keep getting sick and nothing changes? What if we can’t go back to China, or back to our city, or back to our school?...”

It’s just that the things I packed and carefully portioned into four 23 kg suitcases plus carry-ons already confuse me. Why does Juliana have so many clothes and Nadia so few? Why did it seem so important to bring that book and not the other one? What happened to that game I was sure we packed? Why did we bring so much and it’s still not enough?

We painstakingly discussed which stuffed animals the girls would bring. Adalyn was definite: kitty, dolly, and worry-eater. She is not like Juliana, who sleeps with a pack of animals and panics if one falls under the bed. Adalyn’s animals stay in the suitcase or fall under the bed - she barely even cares they are there.

Until the night she lay in bed wailing, “I want my hedgehog! Where is hedgehog? I wanted to bring my hedgehog and you wouldn’t let me! I don’t want kitty!”

She was just tired. She was just reacting to Juliana’s temporarily missing hedgehog. She was just lashing out. She was just responding to the stress of sleeping in different beds in different cities and countries and not even knowing where your things are or if you will actually see them again and what if you made the wrong choice and brought the wrong things? What if you didn’t know what you really wanted?

The next morning she was fine. She hasn’t mentioned hedgehog since. But the feeling will continue to resurface.

We will keep traveling – another airplane, another country, another bed before eventually we settle and try to make ourselves fit into life somewhere for a year, less than a year. Knowing this is temporary, knowing that this is not the place we really live.

Maybe I will feel excited.

But for now, if you ask me, I will probably just look confused.

I’ll probably say, “Um, yeah? I guess so?”