roots

Roots have always been a sort of shifting thing for me. My southern roots are deep, it’s true. But when I was 8, I moved to the west coast. I became a successful transplant. And while it’s true that I lived in WA longer than I lived in OK, I spent so much time in OK on vacation and family related trips that my roots there remained strong.

Both states felt like home. Neither state felt like home.

And then I met LH. And when you marry the military it adds a whole other dimension to shifting roots. You’re told when to pick up your entire life and you’re told where to take it. And when you get there, you know on day one that your time in that place is already counting down. So you make friends and you do things, but it never really becomes home. Except it does a little.

Even when LH and I settled in TX and he separated from the Air Force, we knew our time there was limited. Our plan was to go to TX, finish his enlistment, finish school, take the world by storm. That didn’t exactly happen. Not all of it anyway.

The year after I left TX was the most rootless in my entire life. A few months in WA, a few in NY, a few more in WA, and then the move to CA. There were times when I felt homeless, even though I never was. There were times when I was acutely aware that my most major possession was my truck. That inside it’s cab was the only space I could call my own.

I’ve managed to build myself a quiet little life here. It’s a life I’m pretty fond of. But, I’ve been here for almost three years now. So I’m starting to feel that itch. The moving itch. And truth be told, there’s some pretty strong gravitational pull toward the middle of the country. To Texas. To Chicago. To New Orleans. Santa Fe.

Instead, I’ve done something to deepen my roots here. I joined a board of another performing arts organization. It’s not the sort of thing you do if you’re only planning on being around short term. I feel good about the decision. But at the same time, there’s that little part of me that’s aware of it’s larger implications.

There are plenty of reasons to stay here. More reasons to stay than to leave, really. But there’s just something about making an active, deliberate decision to commit to a place that sketches me out a little. Maybe because I view the world as being small and easy to move around in and I don’t want to lose that. Maybe because part of me worries about missing out on something that is happening somewhere else. Maybe because my fear of entrapment really is that big.

I don’t know. What I do know, is that from all appearances, it seems I’ll be staying here for a while.

feathering my nest

The longest move on the planet is finally complete. I moved out of  Texas on January 6, 2006. It took until April 1, 2009 to get all my stuff in one place again. Or mostly anyway. There’s some furniture on permanent loan to my folks, but I’m not counting that.

In those three years I think I gave nearly half of my belongings to Goodwill. It’s amazing how you can lose sentimentality over belongings if you let them sit in a storage unit half a country away for long enough. But also, I think I’m older and wiser now. I’ve pared things down to where what I own is truly a reflection of me. Of my taste, certainly, but also where I’ve been and where I’m going. I’m a pack rat by nature but I’m tired of dragging around so much stuff.

It just feels so good. To not feel like my life is a series of unfinished projects. To have finally cut my ties with a particular West Texas town. For good. To not feel like I’m putting people out by storing stuff all over the place. To actually know what I own. And I’m looking forward to paying one less bill every month.

My apartment looks completely different today than it did this time last week. My dad and Twofer did a major overhaul in the two days they were here. I love it. I’ve said before that this apartment feels like home. But now it’s a home I’m proud of. I home I want to spend time in. Surrounded by the artwork I’ve collected on my various travels. Old photos of family and Oklahoma. Newer photos of friends. My funky collection of furniture that is part heirloom, part thrift store/flea market find, and part IKEA.

There are a few things that need to be reframed. I’ve got four more boxes to take to Goodwill. But for the most part everything has found a home. Even my golf clubs. All I need now is to get some plants, a couple of chairs, and a little table for my balcony and it will be perfect.

rootless exsistence

I’ve been thinking a lot about home lately. About what home is. About what it means. Where do I consider home?

When pressed to define it, I’m most likely to say that for me home is Oklahoma. It’s where I’m from. It’s where I’ll be buried. There’s a whole lot of southern girl in me. I drive a truck. I wear a cowboy hat to shield the sun. There’s a baptist hymnal on my piano. I can speak of a small town with a cemetery where there my family has a section staked out.

There are ranches and farms and livestock in my past. Secret jars of moonshine in the cellar. Set me in front of foods like watermelon and greens and chicken fried steak and grits and I’m a happy girl. My chocolate sheet cake is the stuff of legends. I bake biscuits the way grandma did. I call everyone honey, baby, or darlin. I even found a nice southern boy to settle down with (although he’s from Texas not OK).

But the other day, when my little corner of sunny California turned gray and it threatened to rain. I got homesick. But not for OK. For Washington. Because that is where I spent my adolescence. Truthfully, I lived longer in WA than in OK. Except for the summers. Even after we’d moved, my summers were spent in OK with family. The point is, that I’m very much a product of both states.

But then, Germany is in me as well. Because when I moved away from home for the first time, really away, not just down the road to an apartment with my new husband, I went to Germany. I became an adult there. I lived a very European lifestyle there. It had a big influence on me. Because in that time when you’re figuring out how you want to run your home, your way, not necessarily the way that your parents ran theirs, I was in Germany. When Christmas comes, I get homesick for Germany. For the Christkindl Markts and gluhwein. For the schlagger shows on TV. For the macaroons my landlord would make by the ton.

After Germany came Texas. And, even though I’m an OK girl and we’re genetically bred to dislike Texans, I will begrudgingly admit that I’ve got a very small soft spot for certain parts of the state. I managed to take frequent road trips to my hometown while living in TX. Which was a blessing really. Because I learned to love my little hometown as an adult. Which is a much different thing than letting it just be a place of childhood memories.

But Texas. West Texas. I owned a home. A dog. I had the proverbial picket fence. I had a large house where i entertained frequently. Where the bar was always stocked and their was always a room for a guest. I finished school. I learned to love Mexican food. I deepened my appreciation for good BBQ. I discovered a wide open sky, brilliant with stars. It was a hard town to live in. A town that required deep reserves of inner strength. I discovered I had more than I knew. I learned a lot about myself in that little town. It too, is a place I consider home. I still miss the stars.

NY was a brief stop. But important for me. Because it satisfied a curiosity I’d held for ages. And I made some wonderful friends, even though my time there was minuscule on the grand scale. Once again, I discovered things about myself I didn’t know. I’m grateful for that time.

And now here I am in CA. I’ve been sowing wild oats and really finding myself. I came here to heal. To find stability. To find direction. And this place has been so good for my soul. More so than I ever thought possible. I love it here. I thought for a minute about staying.

But I’m feeling a shift. Internally. I’m feeling the urge to start thinking about the next chapter. It doesn’t necessitate a move, but I’m always open to that. It’s not necessarily right around the corner. I’m not making hard and fast plans. But I want to be ready. Ready to take advantage of an opportunity that comes my way if I feel it’s right.

Hollywood accused me of getting bored. Of not putting down roots. I tend to think of myself as someone who was strong roots. At least in the sense that I know who I am and where I come from. But I’ll be the first to admit that I can’t wrap my head around the idea of staying in one place for 20 years. I’ve accepted that there’s a fair amount of wanderlust inside of me.

Home is sort of a nebulous thing to me, it’s true. I could never move back to my hometown in OK. A three stop-light town is just too small for me these days. And WA, while I love it so, there are too many ghosts for me there. Germany? Texas? Also in the past. I can see myself returning to NY one day, but I lived upstate. If I returned, it would be to the city.

I’ve got a running list in my head of cities where I would love to live someday. But I don’t really think that’s a bad thing. I think part of what makes me interesting and well rounded (not to mention an endless source of stories at a party) is the fact that I’ve moved around. That I’ve lived in 5 states and 2 countries. (And when you tack on vacations to those totals, it’s more like 35 or so states and 15 or 16 countries.) I don’t mind that I’m this way.

Maybe it seems rootless, but really it’s not. There just aren’t any really traditional roots. But lord knows I am anything but traditional.

someday there will be music

SB asked me if I would sing at his funeral. He wants me to sing our song. A song that we adopted as ours a couple of years ago.

It was during the Texas Exodus. He and I were driving in my little truck, dragging a trailer full of our things. We were winding our way across New Mexico and Arizona, into southern California and then up the coast on the way to Washington. It was a trip fueled by desperation and funded by Visa.

Emotionally we were a mess. Both of us. He’d recently attempted suicide. I’d finally gotten the courage to leave my husband. We were trying to give ourselves new starts without really knowing what that would entail. Mostly we were just trying to get to a place where we felt a little bit safe and secure. We were working on pretty low levels of Maslow’s hierarchy at that point.

We’ve long joked that on days when I’m crying about something it’s a pink day. If he’s the one crying it’s blue. That so long as we didn’t hit too many lavender days, we’d be alright. That entire trip was lavender. Sometimes we laugh and shake our heads and wonder how we ever made it through that long drive.

It was someplace in Arizona. The land was flat and barren. There was nothing on the horizon and no one else on the road. He called it horizontal vertigo. We were both barely hanging on that day. I’d pulled out a Simon and Garfunkel cassette. After this song played he quietly said, “that’s the song that describes us best.” And that was that. It became our song.

Someday he will be gone. Someday I will sing for him. This will be the song.

closure

When I walked out on my husband, I walked out on my whole life.

Or his version of my life at any rate. I’d left my own life behind long ago. When I married him. When I gave up control to him. The moment I admitted that the life I was leading was not the life I wanted, I felt a great weight lift off my shoulders. It was not easy to leave, but I knew it was what I had to do.

The next year was the hardest of my life. Well documented in this blog. There was sowing of wild oats. Fulfillment of dreams. Big risks. Lots of depression. Lots of anger.

Then I accepted my current job offer. And started the year in a new place. Signing the lease on this apartment was scary as hell. I hoped and prayed that this would be the thing that would stick. And it did. It has been a wonderful move for me. Personally and professionally. I have created the life that I always wanted. But I didn’t believe it somehow. There were lingering doubts.

He would still pop up. When I unpacked boxes that had languished in storage and discovered that he had defiled some of my things. Or simply taken them. He left me messages to find. I would catch wind through the grapevine of something going on in his life. Occasionally, I would read his email. For sport. Part voyeur and part masochist. His password remains unchanged. Even though it is based on my maiden name and he has moved on to a new woman. One who he has not married, but has born his child.  I would see emails in his inbox. Or comments on his myspace page and I would get alternately angry and sad.

Angry because he was the one that got all of our friends in the divorce. Sad over the loss of those friends. Sad that they didn’t care enough to try and keep in touch with me. And then angry all over again. Fuck them all, I’d say to myself. I know who my true friends are. Why was he the one that got everything and I was starting over completely from scratch? When I’d already given up everything for him once. My only solace was in my belief in karma. Watching from afar as he continued to destroy his own life and to tarnish all those around him.

Last week I went to that Texas town. The one I left almost 2 years ago. I went with a purpose. I had an agenda. Lunch with my old boss. Deal with my storage unit. Tie up a loose end at my eye doctor’s office. I was nervous. Nervous that I would run into him. Nervous that bandages would be ripped off and old wounds scratched into bleeding.

But that didn’t happen. I saw my old town. My old house. My old theater. Even some of my former friends. And instead of feeling angry or sad or nervous, I saw just how far I’ve come. I saw the quicksand that has so many trapped. The quicksand where I once was trapped. And while 90% of me knew that I had made all of the right choices prior to this trip. Now 100% of me knows that.

This is about more than just leaving LH. It is about finding my true self. Letting that self breathe. About not obsessing over the past. Over the things I did wrong. It is about learning not to assign the blame to him for everything that is wrong in my life. It is about accepting that there are things about my life that may seem wrong in conventional eyes, but it is what works for me. It is about learning to be comfortable in my own skin and to not apologize for who I am.

I used to go round and round in my head trying to reconcile the person I was with the person I am. I see the middle ground now. A middle ground I didn’t see before my trip to TX last week. I no longer feel compelled to check in on him, even passively. I still want to know what goes on at my old theater, but only from the perspective as a consultant and potential donor. I have made peace with the fact that people drift in and out of your life. That you don’t always get to choose who and how and when that drifting happens. I see how to be domestic without the picket fence.

My future hasn’t changed. But a chapter of my past has been closed. Finally. And it feels fabulous.