in which I am the pinball

In my new year's post, I talked about my word for the year: climb.  When I wrote it, I imagined myself bravely soldiering through the everyday life of a wife, mother, and homeschooler - pausing to take in and admire the view; working hard to find purpose and inspiration in the monotony; daintily wiping a tiny bit of sweat from my (unlined) brow from time to time.  I had this it-will-be-hard-because-it-will-be-the-same-old-same-old attitude.

Turns out, it will be hard, but it will not be the same-old-same-old.

Mr. Cyrus has been asked to go do his job elsewhere, but in a good "we want you" kind of way.  He'll still be working with Target, but in a different building in a different state.  In California.  Where Californians live.  (I read something funny about this California-Oregon thing, written by a Californian.  Californians think: "There are other states besides California?  They don't count as much as we do.  Oregonians think: "We love everyone in the United States except Californians."  From Sips of Jen and Tonic.)

I said to my husband, "well, have fun with that."



The problem with writing anything down is that your words always come back to haunt you, or sometimes even to smack you around a bit.  In my Climb post, there is this thread of courage that I really liked when I wrote it, but not so much when I was looking at it through the lens of an out of state move.  As we talked over this great opportunity for my husband, I kept coming back to the quote from Streams in the Desert:*

We do not know what is lost by our self indulgence, what glory awaits if only we have the courage to climb, or what blessings we will find if we will only ascend the mountains of God.

This year, Classical Conversations students are learning Newton's First Law of Motion: that an object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. Grant and I are about family and community and roots, and we are blessed beyond measure in these areas. Moving our family away from all of that felt wrong.  I, in particular, am not what you might call adventurous. But as we prayed over the job change together, we both felt acted upon by an outside force. I came to feel that my resistance to moving is self-indulgence, and that sometimes the courage to climb means changing routes.

So next Monday I'll send Mr. Cyrus down the I-5 corridor to his new job (he'll be back and forth for a while) and then work on packing up my household and sweet-talking my children into not freaking out. The sweet-talking is going pretty well so far.  I've employed the prepping strategy used by countless homeschool parents - book saturation.  First I brought in a few about Yosemite National Park, which will be a few hours away from our new home.  (And we watched a National Geographic documentary about Yosemite which included detailed descriptions of catastrophic rock slides and lighting storms, so that might have been a fail.)  Then I picked up all the books the library had about California, but I decided that was too suspicious, so I threw in a bunch about Oregon and Washington.  Look kids, we're doing a study of west coast states!  After that, I started slipping in books about change and even about moving.  So by the time we sat them down and told them our news, I think they were about as subconsciously brainwashed prepared as possible.

We will know our exact move date once we find housing in California, but we are aiming at the beginning of March.  As Grant said to me, "buckle up, baby, here we go!"


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