It's raining out. Hard. Colorado doesn't get these kinds of rains, except in the high altitudes when your camping. Thunder. Distant lightening. Our boys are in their beds, looking out of the windows at unfamiliar weather. Not often do Colorado kids go to sleep with the sound of thunder and rain outside their windows.
Everything here is different. TV is different. Food and currency and words and cars and rain. It rains here. Different is not all bad. But it is different. Watching my two boys navigate this change is both fascinating and frustrating all at once. As a dad, I want to negate the differences and make it home for them as soon as possible. I want to ease their sense of distance from familiar things. But I can't. They have to navigate the change for themselves.
Yesterday, I had a meeting at the Institute of Development Studies in Brighton. Brighton is on the coast, so I took the family, dropped them off at the beach, went to my meeting, then met them all again later in the day. It was great to watch the boys play in the water, jump the waves, body surf. This was no California coast, but there they were, two boys swimming in the English Channel. Melia and I watched them play and I think for a moment realized that they'd be ok. They'd learn to be kids in this new place. We'd find our places to play.
Of course, on the drive home, they both wanted to know when and where we could go skiing.
Sometime next week, our household goods will finally arrive. I'm sure I'll have deep thoughts about the meaninglessness of stuff, but right now all I want - all we want - is our familiar stuff. Our big couch. Our square bookcase. What we are really looking for is familiarity. Some of that arrives in a shipping container, someday next week.
As for now, it's still raining out.
- Andrew
About Us
- Andrew Syed
- Humanitarian worker / Human Rights activist / Campaigner / Researcher / Member-at-large of humanity / Citizen of the world
1 comment:
right before we moved from san diego to texas, i promised chris and corey that there was a beach in texas and we would visit it soon after we got there. they both had grown up with wet suits and boogie boards in the pacific ocean from the time they were five. my promise seemed to calm some of their fears of making the move.
so a few months after we arrived, we made our trek down to galveston (what did we know?). when we got to the beach, my boys opened the trunk, pulled on their wet suits, grabbed their boards and ran down to the water. wanda and i followed a few minutes later...
when we reached them, they were standing in the water up to their calves. chris had this pissed look on his face and corey was crying, "daddy, somebody peed in the water...", as the 93 degree temp water lapped at his legs. all chris could say was, "where are the waves?" needless to say, it was a disaster.
we survived. chris and corey made their own "familiar" in weeks and months to come. so will yours.
i hear you on the couch, though.
mike
Post a Comment