A New Chapter: My Thoughts This Far

Last Sunday I left church a little early.  This is something I never do.  Our church building is right around the corner from my house.  In fact, it stands directly behind our backyard (quite the reminder to do what is right every day!) and is just a quick walk around the corner.  It was my turn to hold Ian the third hour (Kris and I have a great turn taking system with our babies at church.) But with only twenty minutes to go and Ian clearly not able to be quiet enough to sit in Relief Society, I walked him home and put him to bed. About half an hour later, I heard jolly, familiar voices running up the front walk.  I opened the door and this is the happy scene I took in:

 

I loved seeing these four beautiful faces happily coming home to me, clearly having enjoyed their time at church, and looking forward to the warmth and shelter of home.  After all we've been through transition-wise this year, it is a reassuring sight and experience for me as a mother.  It caused me to reflect a little on the journey we've been on in.

When Kris was suddenly offered the job he accepted last summer in Park City, I was initially full of excitement.  I love Utah.  Growing up, it was a vacation destination for McOmber family reunions.  Though we left by the time I was 2, and I obviously have no memory of it, I was born into Salt Lake City and lived in Farmington, Utah in the first home my parents ever bought.  I was surrounded by a cold and snowy world just as my kids are now.  My parents met and fell in love in Utah.  My ancestors sacrificed everything they owned and knew to walk across this entire country and settle here in "Zion" (then not even a part of the United States) so they could worship peacefully and not be tormented ruthlessly and cruelly by hateful mobs who plundered, burned, killed, and raped these faith driven pioneers when they already had so little. I love that when I visit the Salt Lake Temple I connect with these brave men and women who were part of its construction.  I feel connected to the generations before me whose sacrifices have played such a major role in who I am today!  

As a young child, already feeling a sense of supreme sophistication because I was eating off of beautiful cranberry red and white china plates and using heavy silver utensils in my Grandparents' dreamy Palo Alto, California home (I promise you, even when I was 5 years old, I noticed how cool that was), I would listen to my parents, aunts and uncles fondly reminisce about their college days at mystical places they referred to as the "Y" and the "U." They would laugh hysterically, and though I never completely understood what they were talking about, I just knew I HAD to go there someday.  And I did.  I spent four enlightening, fun, and life changing years (minus a five month program studying art history and British literature in London, England) in Provo, Utah.  I dated my husband in Utah.  We married in the castle-like Salt Lake Temple.

Utah has four glorious and distinct seasons.  Something an OC girl like me never experienced growing up.  And though I love the sand and sun with a passion, I also love singing "White Christmas" and actually seeing snow outside.  I love crunching in blankets of orange and yellow fall leaves.  I love the magic of spring blossoms bursting through a late season snow storm.  I love the heat of summer that drives me to playing hours in a pool and eating abnormal numbers of Popsicles with my children.  I love the churches and temples that cover the valley.  I love the concentration of people who haven't lost the "old" traditional values.  I love the family-centered environment.  I am constantly in awe of the wonderful opportunities available in Utah for children to serve, develop talents and perform.  I love the trees (East coasters, don't laugh.  I've been in the desert for ten years!) clusters of groves, crisp and clean mountain air, breath taking snow caped mountains, skiing (for the sake of Kris,) hiking, lakes, combined with the history, culture and urban feel in downtown Salt Lake.

All of these things I love about Utah whirled through my head when the opportunity to move here arose last summer.  Yet equally prevalent in my mind was the sadness of leaving the ward and friends we had in Las Vegas who had really become our family.  Living in a place with no family around, caused me to rely on my friends in deeper ways than I ever would have otherwise.  Now that we've been gone for five months, I can see with hindsight just how deep those relationships became.  Because I have such strong ties with my parents and siblings, I haven't had to bond so intensely with many people outside my family before.  I can see learning to do this with more people has been a wonderful lesson I was able to learn during our decade in Vegas.  I hope that even though we have so much family here, my relationships with them will intensify as much as with the friends we make here.

The Sunday in Las Vegas that the news of our sudden move had circulated at light-speed, I was pacing the halls with my three-and-a-half-month old Ian, and passed through the library where a couple friends worked who were always up for a good chat.  (Actually, these ladies, whose children had grown and who could look at life with a bit more humor than I naturally find in it, were always up for fueling my soul with praise and encouragement.  I often would walk into the library for chalk and an eraser and leave with a more optimistic attitude and a renewal of confidence in my abilities as a mother, wife, teacher, and a woman.  Never underestimate the calling of a ward librarian.)

That Sunday as I strolled through the library with my fussy little infant, my life coach librarian friends peppered me with questions about the move.  I remember feeling particularly sad that day surrounded by so many beloved friends I would soon be leaving and probably not really seeing again.  But I mustered up some strength and talked about where we would go and why.  I finished by saying  in a sigh, "It's a new chapter for us."  They kind of "oooed" at the idea of a "new chapter" and said, "Oh I'd LOVE a new chapter."  And then it hit me: a way to deal with the sadness I knew would inevitably creep over me every time I missed my friends, my FAMILY in Las Vegas, despite how much I would love being in Utah.  I knew because we'd be renting for months until the long process of buying a foreclosure came to fruition, "settling" in Utah would be a prolonged course.  But the enthusiasm and mystery behind the way my librarian counselors just said the words inspired me.  It is the sadness and the unknown, that makes this new chapter an ADVENTURE. 

It is worth accepting the uncharted waters with their ups and downs so we can embrace the will to conquer.  I have already faced the challenge of watching my children nurse their own heartache from the move by finding more loyalty, fun and creativity with each other. I've seen them bravely walk next door and knock for the first time to see if a child they have never met wants to play.  I have consoled my tall, handsome, naturally confident son, who looked at me with big disappointed eyes after school when he was left out by a group of kids, shocked that other kids could be so mean.  Then I felt the joy of knowing I still have the ability to soften the blow and encourage him to try the next day to make a connection. We've exhausted ourselves and our realtor by looking through countless homes, still can't quite swallow that other people are renting our beautiful Las Vegas home from us and call it "their" own, laughed as the kids realized that living in Utah does not mean playing with cousins from morning till late at night every day like it did during our week long visits at Christmas.  I have a new reverence for anyone who has uprooted their family and started anew from the beginning of time.  This adventure never fails to present its own circumstances of challenge and victory day in and day out.

Our transition has not completely made full circle.  We are still in our rental home, still waiting to move closer to my husband's work, still have half of our belongings in storage, still know that the friends we are making right now will be left behind and we will be surrounded by unknown people for a time once again when one of the many offers we have standing on homes is accepted.  But one wonderful element has undoubtedly made a happy and completely satisfying accession in our lives, and I think has made all this chaos, change, and challenge worth it.  Every member of my family knows that being together is enough.  Our children know that our family is stronger than the world around us.  We are happy, loved, accepted, entertained, compassionate, charitable, forgiving, encouraging, and loyal to each other in this family.  Our new chapter has created a wonderful life-long lesson: that as long as the six of us are together, we are home.