Aug
26
It feels like the last truly summery day of summer and I suggest a post-dinner trip to the aquatic center. Once we arrive, it’s clear that every other family within a 20-mile radius has had the same idea: the kiddie pool teems with froth and squeals, splashes and shrieks.
Most of the parents lounge poolside, chatting with one another while their older children attack each other in the water. JB and I reluctantly submerge ourselves and settle into the task of keeping an eye on Dylan while ducking flying water toys, thrashing kicks, and careening inflatables.
Everywhere I look there is a wet blonde head, churning movement, a flash of goofily-colored swim trunks. Riley calls from a few feet away to look at him, look at him. I wipe stinging chlorine from my eyes after a little girl practices her kicking next to me. Dylan is giggling and bouncing around and sometimes he slips off his feet but catches himself, flailing back upwards.
Then, suddenly, he falls and can’t push himself up. He is, for a brief and utterly horrifying moment, immobile: his legs dangling down and slightly behind him, his upper body floating, his face in the water.
In Suzanne Finnamore’s Otherwise Engaged, she refers to what her friend Jill calls a Grand Klong: a sudden rush of shit to the heart. “A Grand Klong is when you look in your rearview mirror and you see the police car.”
Your child, floating facedown in a pool, is most definitely a Grand Klong.
I scramble to my feet, scraping against the concrete steps and peeling a strip of skin off my back, and yank Dylan up and out. He splutters and briefly rubs a fist against his eye, then laughs and squirms, eager to get back down.
He’s off again, happy and upright, and I’m sagged against the side of the pool, chest hammering. I shake my head at JB, who looks back at me and grimly nods. Parenthood. Jesus.
Aug
24
It was always in our plan to move to Oregon. That’s where JB’s family lives, it’s where he’s from, it’s where we wanted to raise our children.
Then JB was working for Microsoft, and, well, you don’t quit Microsoft. You stay there as long as you can while they grind everything they can out of you, while simultaneously firehosing money and benefits in your direction. If you stay there long enough, you retire on a bed of gold ingots. Sure, your vocabulary will be replaced with Dilbert-speak, your eyelid will spasm whenever you get a new email, and your teeth will be permanently bared from years of aggressive turf-defending, but you will have a SAILBOAT.
We talked about Oregon a lot in those days, but it was never the right time. There were ladders to climb, promotions to get. My job was going well, too—I’d joined the company when they could only afford to pay starving-artist salaries, and now we were getting fat holiday bonuses.
After an insane amount of work and stress and plotting, JB and his business partners turned Vioguard from a dream into a reality. And he did quit Microsoft, which was a terrifying, epic decision and I’m so proud of him for having the balls to do it.
Forget those sailboats. They’re made of souls.
Somehow during all of this, the months and years just slid right by. The child who was a suspicious newborn will be a suspicious five-year-old next week. We thought we’d have plenty of time to figure out how to get to Oregon before the kids started school, then suddenly we were looking at local school scores and trying to figure out if we should move across town instead.
We ran low on money and we learned we didn’t need it the way we thought we did. We spent a week in Oregon with family and realized we didn’t want those moments to happen only a few times a year. JB’s father had another cancer scare. Traffic has gotten worse and city-living expenses keep piling up.
When the home you want for your family is a few hundred miles from where you’ve made your life, all you can do is keep checking that balance. For years, the scales have tipped in the favor of staying put. The timing wasn’t right. This summer, the scales finally tipped the other way, and it became clear that for a change of that magnitude, the timing will never be right. It will always involve risk and fear and compromise.
So that’s why we put the house on the market. If it sells, we’ll move to Eugene and start a new life there, and JB will continue his work with Vioguard. If it doesn’t sell, we’ll stay put until we figure out the next thing. We’re in a good position, in a lot of ways. Nothing’s forcing our hand with this move. It’s hard, once you’ve made such a big decision, to have no forward momentum—but we can afford to be patient.
At least we took that step, I tell myself. We broke out of the inertia of the timing isn’t right. Fuck the status quo. Fuck being comfortable. Fuck staying still and never reaching out to grab the ring behind the gold, the one that really means something.
August thus far has brought more changes than I ever would have thought possible—and none of them in the area I’d been focused on. Our house hasn’t sold, we don’t appear to be moving any time soon, and yet everything has tipped upside down like a snowglobe: all the little routines and realities floating off in a new direction, sparkling and winking as they catch the light.
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