The Longest 43,300 Minutes Ever

How long is a month? 30 days? 720 hours? 43,200 minutes? Sure, by the strictest of calculations. But a month in which you fly halfway around the world, alone with your two tired, scared young children, to a country you've never set foot in before, where you are to make a life of some sort for an entire year?

That's a month that expands to fill more squares on the calendar than are generally allotted.

I think this expansion and contraction of time is the greatest mystery I've encountered in my 38 years. I've seen a lot of things that are hard to explain in my lifetime... love that comes and goes, without rhyme or reason; tragic deaths of good people; illness that strikes out of nowhere; people who show up, like angels, when you least expect them but most need them. I'm not religious, but I've come to accept that there are things you simply cannot begin to explain.

But time? Time you can measure, on a watch, a clock, a calendar. It's there, ticking away second by second on every electronic device I own. Everyone else can see it, too, and give or take a moment or two, we are all united in this reassuring structure of minutes and hours and days.

So how to make sense of the last days before we locked up our beloved home and boarded the plane? They sped by like a NASA countdown and suddenly there was no more time to say goodbye to friends and family or to comfort the poor sweet cats, who knew something was terribly wrong but could not understand what.

Or what of the four-hour layover that stretched on for what must have been a week, me trying frantically to calm an exhausted and teary Lulu and a restless but equally exhausted Boo. I kept looking at my watch, my phone, my laptop, thinking, there must be something wrong with all these clocks because time cannot possibly move this slowly.

Somehow we got through it and on to the plane that would take us from the edge of all that was familiar (well, LA) to the edge of another place entirely.

Across the ocean

So here we are, a month after that flight. I wish I could say that I am thrilled with the decision to come, that it was absolutely the right thing, but I'm not there yet. What I am is constantly exhausted. If moving is one of the most stressful life events, then moving to another country is exponentially so. Yes, we have held koalas and fed kangaroos, which is pretty damn cool, but everything else has been hard.

From driving on the opposite site of the road on the opposite side of the car, to finding an apartment with two kids in tow, to buying a car that is not a total lemon, to trying to maintain a not-entirely-shameful level of professional productivity, to getting internet service, to helping the kids adjust to a new school, new friends, and wearing uniforms, nothing here is easy, inexpensive, or quite like home. And I am tired.

All that, and I haven't even talked about P yet.

Mostly because I don't even know where to start. Even though he is there and I am here, we are still together, after much hand-wringing and debating. Ultimately, he simply couldn't or wouldn't make the trip for reasons that I don't fully understand, and I struggled to believe that wasn't a reflection of how he felt about me. It was not an easy month or two while those talks were going. And I still don't know how I feel about it, but he said he wanted us to stay together and since I had no plans to even consider adding dating to my overseas adventure, I decided it couldn't hurt to try and see where we end up. It turned out, in a terrible way, to be a good thing he didn't buy a ticket. His mother was diagnosed with cancer in December, and sadly passed away a few weeks after I left. So it is a good thing he wasn't here, because he really needed to be there. But I wasn't there for him and that was hard, too.

Fortunately, since I am so completely drained by everything else, I haven't had much time or energy to put into thinking too much about the relationship, or even miss him on any significant level. We talk almost every day, so I feel as connected to him as I can be this far away, and it's not that I don't miss him, because I do. It's just a quiet feeling that lurks in the background instead of a monster feeling that claws away at me. So that's either a bad thing or a completely healthy one, and I don't have enough experience of "completely healthy" to sort it out.

So what's it actually like here? That will have to wait until later in the day. Stay tuned!