Fifteen Years Hence
Fifteen years ago today, my then future ex-husband and I packed up our cars and moved from Rhode Island to California. I hadn’t thought about it in a long time, but I remember the date quite specifically because we settled on it after a fair amount of deliberation. March 15 was a compromise between when I wanted to go (“right now”) and when he wanted to go (“never”).
At 22, a cross-country move is epic. Well, at 22, everything is epic … and quite possibly “life altering” as well. If only I knew then how low the stakes almost always are. Not that I think what we do doesn’t matter, but it’s the accumulation of lots of small decisions, more than one or two big ones, that seems to make or break us in the end.
When I think back on that fateful day, I can’t remember what time we left or what kinds of snacks we packed … or many details at all, really. I do remember that we didn’t have jobs waiting for us. Shit, I’d never even been to California, or farther west than Wichita, Kansas, for that matter. For savings, we had … I dunno … a few hundred dollars each, maybe. Certainly no more than a thousand total.
It’s hard to fathom how much difference 15 years can make in a person’s perception … hard to fathom, that is, until I remember the time I moved to California—a place I’d never been and didn’t know a soul—with no job and less than $500 to my name. Did I mention we didn’t have an apartment lined up either? Ah, good times.
Seriously, though, it’s only as I’ve gotten older that I’ve come to appreciate what a crackpot I can be … and just how equanimous my parents were, given the circumstances. It all seemed very ho-hum to me at the time (something I imagine must have compounded the horror for them).
I was talking with my mom recently about plans to go back to California, and she told me how hard it had been for her right after I moved, how she cried every day for weeks. (Weeks!) I was gobsmacked. I mean, as surprised as I was that my moving had been a big deal for her, what bowled me over was the fact that, in all the years since, she never once told me.
It makes me think about parents and their endless acts of unselfishness, chief among which is sometimes letting us think we know it all.
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Name's Kirsten. I'm a splitter of hairs, a hillbilly, a rock horns devotee, an ellipses-lovin' fool, and queen of the conceptual jinx. I'm also a geek and the grateful human of littleblackdog. I do this and that and some of the other … up to and including writing this here blog.
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