The Longest 43,300 Minutes Ever... Part 3

So it's been about a month since our story left off (about two weeks into our journey). And that month has been, well, not so much fun, as you may have guessed from the title of our little series.

Now that we've adjusted to our new apartment, gotten Lulu and Boo settled in their new school, and generally found our way into a semblance of a normal life, it turns out that my life in Australia is a lot like my life at home... only without family, friends, bagels, or decent Mexican food.

Sure, there are good things... Boo, always a little monkey at heart, has started gymnastics and is already quite the star, outdoing even some of the instructors in pull-ups. The weather here, while in the middle of the"wet season", still affords me the ability to wear flip-flops and tank tops every day. There are at least five kinds of mangoes available at even the most prosaic of grocery stores. All important things.

But mostly, I am stretched thin trying to be a good mother and a decent employee while occasionally making time to exercise, run errands, and sleep. As at home, I never feel I am doing very well at any of these things, and there I have the benefits of a co-parent, a school bus stop a block from my house, after-school care, and a boyfriend who drags me to the gym several times a week. Oh, and margaritas. Also all important things.

What that all boils down to is simply: I'm not having any fun. I have, I think, succeeded in helping Lulu and Boo make the transition relatively smoothly, but I vastly underestimated the toll that would take on me.

So I've been neglecting work and hauling myself to hot yoga several times a week, where I attempt to sweat out all the stress. Of course, then I don't get enough work done, which causes more stress. Back to not having any fun. And now I'm sore and dehydrated too.

Yes, yes, I know I will survive, and it may all in some way be worthwhile eventually. For one thing, everyone should live as a stranger in a strange land at some point in their lives. It does wonders for one's patience and tolerance for others when you know what it's like to have no idea how anything works. I certainly have more appreciation for my family and friends, especially ex-H. He makes me crazy at times, but I really miss his contribution to the kids' lives for better and worse. And I have some insights about myself that I will share at some future, less exhausted time. 

For now, sleep.

The Longest 43,300 Minutes Ever... Part 2

I realize I have failed to provide an answer to the very important question I posed in a previous post: Can just anyone hold a koala?

Yes, pretty much. Lulu's birthday fell a week after we arrived here, so I wanted to make it memorable. I found a Groupon for a wildlife reserve not to far from where we were staying and we lucked in to a relatively tolerable day, heat-wise (it's summer here, and quite hot, a welcome contrast to the freezing winter we left behind). We went immediately to the koala area, where we got to hold a very cute, slightly smelly, and entirely disinterested koala for a few seconds each and have photos taken to prove it. It's one of those things you must do in Australia, because where else will you get the chance?

After wandering through the park, watching a bird show, and having a snack, we stumbled onto the kangaroo area. I had pictured a regular zoo sort of habitat, where we would watch them behind a gate and take lots of pictures. But to our delight, it was a massive enclosure where you could walk freely among the kangaroos, pet them, and feed them from a little cup of food. We spent at least an hour there, fascinated and thrilled. There were lots of joeys (both in and out of the pouch). There was a strict rule against touching the babies in the pouch, but those already out were fair game and very sweet and soft. Periodically a little train would come by to take visitors to another area of the park, and as it approached the kangaroos would all pop up and start hopping around. Quite charming.

Afterward, the heat and the walking had gotten to us so we headed toward the cafe and gift shop for lunch and then to pick out Lulu's birthday gift, a giant stuffed sheep with curled horns like we had seen in the reserve. ("Sheepie" is so large that I doubt he will fit into any suitcase we have and may have to have one specially bought to transport him home.)

Queen Money

But back to the story. We made it through the 14-hour flight surprisingly well (we loved Virgin Australia and its free movies and delicious meals) and arrived, a bit sleep-deprived, a 7 am in Brisbane. We sailed through customs, and managed to steer two luggage carts piled with our hoard of suitcases to the Hertz counter, stopping only to get some Australian money from the ATM. We were all fascinated by multicolored bills, which Boo has deemed "Queen Money" because of the ubiquity of Elizabeth II on it. (Did you know Australia isn't even entirely a free country? Its head of state is still the British monarch. Sounds like someone needs a revolution!)

After a shockingly fast stop at the rental counter, we had our car loaded with suitcases (literally every free spot was stuffed with a bag or a kid) and were ready to make the 60-minute drive to our hotel in Broadbeach.

That drive, and every one for a week or so after, took a few years off my life. I held my breath, insisted on total silence from the kids, and tried my best to follow the car in front of me. I don't know how, but we made it without incident and collapsed in the hotel lobby, where we discovered we would have to wait five hours for our room.

It was a very long five hours. We had breakfast, walked down to the beach, sat around the lobby, had lunch, and tried to avoid a total nervous breakdown (with limited success). Once we made it to the room, we collapsed. I raided the 7-11 downstairs for dinner food and we were all out cold by 6 pm.

That was the first day.

Swedish Meatballs and a Side of Pressed Wood

It got a little better after that. We visited my boss on day 2 and Lulu and Boo instantly made friends with his three children. We still fell asleep by 6:30 most evenings, and woke up around 3 am. It took at least a week to get on anything like a normal schedule. Since school wouldn't start until three weeks after we arrived, we had a lot of quality time together. Dragging the kids on nearly daily apartment-hunting ventures in the 90-degree heat were tough on all of us, but daily trips to the pool were more fun. Somewhere in there we accompanied my boss and his family to a surfing lesson (more fun than I expected) and a horseback riding lesson, and we found an apartment that we all liked and whose smell did not offend Boo's over-sensitive nose.

It was exhausting but we managed to have a good few weeks, marveling at the strange accents and new words, blanching at the cost of familiar items like a small bottle of Coke ($4!) and Krispy Kreme donuts ($3 each!), and relishing the delectable tropical produce. Lulu cried for ex-H nearly every afternoon for a couple of weeks, and P's mother died not long after we left, both of which tore at my heart for not being home. But mostly, I was too tired to think or feel anything much.

Once we got moved into our new furnished apartment, it began to sink in that we were here for a long time. One day shortly after we moved, we headed to Ikea to buy a desk for the new place. We were all giddy with excitement over being somewhere so familiar. We wandered the aisles buying things with funny names, ate swedish meatballs, and stocked up on frozen swedish food. It was maybe the best day we'd had so far.

Part 3 coming up next...

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!