way too many exclamation points

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Weigh In Wednesday: Family Who Live Nearby

Ever since my parents left this past weekend, I’ve been feeling a little low. It was so good to have them here. We spent many hours together each day, drinking wine or taking walks or watching Jeopardy or playing games or reading near each other. My parents spent so much time with my daughter, doing sewing projects and baking projects and house repair projects and taking her to activities and listening to her practice her instruments. They took us out to dinner and watched Carla so my husband and I could take a mini vacation. They fixed things and helped tremendously with Thanksgiving dinner. And now they are gone and the next time we plan to get together is in March. I miss them. I hate saying goodbye. 

But there is a distinct possibility that our goodbyes will be fewer and farther between. I am so reluctant to post about this because I am afraid I will jinx it… but things are moving forward, and it looks like my parents may be moving to our state. Like, thirty minutes away from us. I am suppressing an excited squeal just at the thought of it!!! It is so exciting!!!! All the exclamation points!!!!!

I am looking forward to this for many reasons – not the least of which is that I will breathe a little easier once they are no longer spending 100% of their time in the remote northwestern forest surrounded by literal wolves and lions and bears, a ninety-minute drive from the nearest emergency room. But I am also just so excited that we will live near other! Within a reasonable driving distance! We could just decide, out of the blue, to get together for dinner!!!

Ever since I left home for grad school, I have been separated from my family by no fewer than 1,500 miles. Currently, we live 1,900 miles away from my parents. Previously, it was 2,200 miles. (My brother, for comparison, lives 2,400 miles away from our parents and 4,000 miles away from me.) Planes fly to cities near my parents’ house, but there are no direct flights to these cities and then you have to drive 90 minutes to get to their house. Visiting one another requires long hours of travel and lots of expense. When my husband’s family lived in Europe, it took less time to get to their house than it took to get to my house in the United States, from our college, which is also in the United States. This is a lot of boring numbers to say WE LIVE FAR AWAY.

You are starting to understand my excitement, yes?

I am also excited, of course, for Carla. She will have grandparents nearby! They will be able to attend her sporting events and music performances! When she has an urge to make a pumpkin pie with a real pumpkin, she could just… join my mother in her kitchen and make one like they did this Thanksgiving! Maybe my parents will babysit occasionally, or even have Carla over to spend the night! I don’t know; we haven’t worked out the expectations yet. But it’s all really wonderful. I feel sort of breathless with the possibilities.

I grew up seeing my grandparents very infrequently. My parents moved away from their (separate) home states once they got married, to a very rural town in the northwest. Their siblings, too, scattered to farflung states across the country. If I was lucky, I saw my grandparents once a year. Maybe an aunt and a cousin or two every couple of years. (Although admittedly, my memory sucks. I can remember specific occasions with family, but not the dates or frequency with any sort of reliability. Maybe we saw them every year; I don’t know.) 

All this means that I have NO IDEA how to exist in the same place with my family. And I don’t want to overwhelm my parents with “CAN WEs” and “WHY DON’T YOUs” and “I CAN’T WAIT TOs” when they are probably going to want to settle in and make their own friends and establish their own routines. But obviously I want to be part of their routines!!!! 

* Deep, calming breath. * Okay. Clearly, I need to chill out. I am just so over the moon about them being close to me. 

Here’s where you weigh in: If you live (or have lived) near family, I want to know how and when and how often you interact with your family members.

First of all: Which family lives nearby, and how near are they? Is it your family of origin, or your partner’s? 

How often do you see each other? And what do you do? Are there regular get-togethers, or one-off interactions? Do you have Sunday dinners each week? Do your parents take the kids every Friday? Do you go out for coffee with your sisters every first Wednesday? 

What do you do for holidays? Do you all get together, or do you split things up? 

Do you have a “come over any time, let yourself in the front door” type of relationship? (I… do not think I could do that. And I don’t think my parents could, either. But I think my in-laws would be that kind of people.) Do you get antsy if you go an entire day/week/month without seeing your family members? 

I am most curious if anyone has been in my specific situation: where you went from No Family to Family Nearby. What kinds of adjustments did you undergo?

If you could re-design your family interactions, knowing now what you didn’t know at the outset, what would you change?

Possibly because I grew up in a small family – just me and my brother, and we are six years apart in age – and spent so little time with our extended family, I find bigger/more tight-knit/more physically-near families to be so fascinating. Like my friend whose brothers all get together weekly on Zoom for a family chat. Or my friend who goes to her in-laws’ house every single Friday for dinner. Or the friend whose sister married her husband’s best friend. Or the sisters in Bad Sisterswho are so up in each others’ lives they plan a murder together. What do I know – maybe that is a totally normal level of familial intimacy. 

I want to know all about your experiences – and hey, even if you don’t live near family and never have, I want you to weigh in on what your ideal Family Interaction Situation would be.

Guess what? It is the final day of NaBloPoMo! I made it! Thirty posts in thirty days. Congrats to everyone who participated and thank you to San for hosting! Thanks so much for sticking with me, this month and beyond. To find a list of other NaBloPoMo bloggers, visit San’s blog here.

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Things That Are Good But Also Somehow Extremely Stressful

Unrelated to the title of this post: Carla has recently begun speaking with what I can only describe as a Baltimore accent. We do not live in or near Baltimore.

Now to the topic at hand.

You know how sometimes there are good things going on in your life – good, or at the worst, neutral – and you know you should feel happy and grateful… and you DO, you do feel happy and grateful… but also they are kind of stressing you the cluck out?

Yes. That.

It’s kind of like saying that you have an exotic luxury cruise coming up, and you are so stressed about whether the new bathing suit you ordered is going to give you weird tan lines but you may not have enough time to get the strapless version shipped to you from Milan… and you are having anxiety about making sure that your Ferrari is going to be driven once a week while you’re gone… and you’re hosting a welcome party for Beyonce’s twins but the caterer isn’t very responsive and you’re not sure if she was able to get the live baby lobsters you wanted to give out as party favors.

Why are you complaining about something that is a) voluntary and b) positive? Why are you expending energy on being anxious about THIS when there is so very much going on in the world to which you could direct your worry? CAN YOU NEVER BE HAPPY?!?!?!?!

I mean, I’m not saying I’m going on a fancy vacation or that I even have a Ferrari. (Nope. My turn-of-the-century Honda doesn’t even dress up as a Ferrari for Halloween.) And Beyonce and I are just not that close. But… good things, nonetheless.

[Edited to add: This is nothing crazy out of the ordinary, by the way. It’s more along the lines of — but not quite — buying a new house: great! But accompanied by lots of meetings with the mortgage broker and dealing with home inspections and packing and learning the new neighborhood. Or like — but not quite — getting a promotion, where you may get a raise and a new title but you have added responsibilities and maybe need to take a management class and also now you have to give presentations to the whole company. That sort of Good Thing with Added Stresses.]

So. Good things. And yet… I am stressed out.

There are so many logistics! And planning! And phone calls! And Unknown Things!

My face is breaking out from the overwhelming weight of Copious Junk Food and Excessive Anxious Thoughts (not to mention the heat, that awful old-dish-sponge heat that lies on you in a stinky, sticky, damp layer). I cried on the phone to a stranger this morning. My sentences tend to begin in my head and end in speech, leaving the person I am speaking to feeling confused and a little concerned that I am in need of medical attention. I am forgetting things, and having to re-do things.

Part of this is because I have not had an uninterrupted night’s sleep in a week, instead spending the wee hours of the morning staring at the ceiling fan as all sorts of horrific tragedies play out in my brain in Game of Thrones style gore.  Waking up at every hour like clockwork solely to watch the ticker tape of Things That Have to Be Done scroll across the bottom of my mind screen while a wide-eyed newscaster screeches Breaking! News! of Things That Are Making Me Anxious one right after another. Sitting straight up in bed in a panic about something ridiculous, like the well-being of the (now two) baby deer who live part time in our yard. And when I am sleeping, I am having nightmares of the trying-to-save-my-child-from-a-shooter variety.

On top of everything, Carla is turning FOUR, which means that I am also smack in the middle of my annual Mooning About the Relentless Passage of Time and also Having Strong Feelings About Carla’s Birth because that will apparently never stop being a hot topic for my brain to stew over.

Also, there was a centipede in my kitchen this morning.

[Edited to add: Not five minutes — MINUTES — after I posted this, I went into my bathroom and there was a giant silverfish lounging on the floor, all, come at me, bro.]

To combat the stress, I am: A) Making lists. B) Reminding myself, in a stern but kind way, that the stress is in service of a positive outcome. C) Working out as often as possible (which makes it sound like I am at the gym multiple times a day, when really I am trying to get back up to the baseline of multiple times a week), because there is something weirdly soothing about sweat and working-out-related pain. D) Writing it all down in great melodramatic whiny paragraphs, then deleting it. (This post is, um, the not-deleted part.) E) Telling you, in hopes that you Get It and/or will distract me with something, anything. F) Trying to take some of the creative energy that is currently going toward catastrophizing and redirect it toward my actual writing. G) Keeping caffeine to a minimum. H) Reciting the things I am grateful for in a loop while in the car, in bed, in the shower.

Are any of these things working to keep the anxiety at bay? Not so far, no. But these are early days. And what do I know? Maybe they are keeping the stress at a lower level than it would be otherwise. WHAT A FUN THOUGHT THAT IS.