Moving and Clown Cars

Moving is hard.  Change is hard.  Moving is change amidst a giant ameba of unknowns. And it is hard. Moving internationally, now that is one big blur of chaos and ambiguity swirling around inside of a vortex of change.  It’s like the hard knock life of hard and you come out the other side, well, changed.  

Alright, so I am currently just moving across the county line. However, I want to take you back to the time I was moving across continental lines. When God taught me about His perfect timing… which never feels perfect at the time.

After living in Singapore for almost three years, our expat life had come to an end and it was time to move back home.  This time we would actually, factually be gathering up our people and belongings for relocation to a country, and better yet, state we grew up in. Unlike other times. Where, in a far off land, we were forced to learn ten thousand new and unique things all within two weeks in order to survive. Instead, back to Texas. Don’t get me wrong, we absolutely adored our time in Singapore and even more so, the people that we lived our expatriate lives with. Our Singapore people became our family and we loved them. We celebrated our American holidays together and raised our babies on foreign soil together.  We grew to love so so much about that gorgeous slice of God’s creation. This time however, our new location was home. Both known and familiar. It was going to be easy. So we thought.

While looking for a new home in Houston, we decided to save our housing allowance, and instead do our temporary living, for two months, with my sister and her family. OF EIGHT.  For TWO months. We ourselves, a family of six.  So, do the math.  That equals precisely one of those tiny clown cars. You know the ones, the brightly colored VW bugs, where the clowns just keep pouring out of the car and you have no idea how they all fit inside in the first place.  We were basically clowns and my sister, God bless her, had allowed her four bedroom home to become the circus. 

I know what you are thinking.  You are thinking “why in the world is she making us do math? This is casual reading.  Not algebra.”  Maybe you are wondering what in the world convinced my sister and me to spend the bulk of our prime of life days pregnant. Or nursing and pumping and trying to keep it all together with only three hours of sleep. Or caring for every single stinky, sticky, sloppy, smelly messy thing that goes along with life among many littles.  Well, that is another story for another time all together. For now, I must move on and get back to the circus. 

Allow me to paint a picture, will you, of the state of the homeland during this particular international move.  Lots of change, unknowns, chaos, babies, toddlers, preteens, blur, vortex, circus. Got it? Ok, good. Hopefully by now, I’ve managed to stir up enough sympathy from the state of my personal cyclone that you will not be temped to vote me off the island when I share this next bit.

One afternoon, my sister asked me a simple question. She asked if I might be pregnant. No big deal right? I mean I was technically still in my child-bearing years and this would appear to be normal sister dialogue. You see, apparently I had been taking frequent afternoon naps during this time of bunking up with my sister and all of our clans people. However, for my little sister, this automatically triggered her “bun in the oven” radar, which is like a finely tuned instrument at this point in her baby making years!

I on the other hand, had just chalked up my fatigue to jet lag, house hunting, living out of a suitcase, learning to drive on the right side of the road again, lots of littles to care for, you know, the exhaustion of the international-vortex-move thing.  You must have gathered by now that my baby sister had been around the pregnancy block more than a few times to say the least.  (She is the one with eight offspring) So, she had this hunch honed to an exact intuitive science. Therefore, she suggested, in her professional opinion, the obvious. Maybe I was not jet-lagged… but pregnant.  To which I replied, are you kidding me? (insert eyeroll)  That is seriously doubtful. You see, in my mind, I had checked that box off after my fourth doll baby came into the world.  (Even though it was just literally a mental box, created in my own head, and not an actual medical, sign on the dotted line, go under anesthesia box, that my husband and I decided to check.)  Still, I had convinced myself that it was highly unlikely. 

Well, baby sister was not at all buying it… Click here for THE REST of the story. And, yes of course, the lesson in it.

XOXO,