My sister and niece came for a visit last week. I love having family around, and I often wish we lived a little closer to my sister and parents-but when she was here, my sister said "I know you like having some distance between us," and that caught me off guard. I had to stop and think for a moment about whether I actually like living away from my extended family or if that's just a function of the way my life has worked out.
I won't deny that I really like the way my immediate family operates as an autonomous little unit. Because Mike and I never had our parents, aunts or uncles to lean on, our four-person family team has pretty stable borders. We enjoy each others' company a lot, and my kids get along with each other really well, for the most part. People routinely comment on the fact that they're so good together--when they were younger, they walked home from school holding hands every day. (My daughter took her Big Sister role very seriously.) In fact, when someone recently gave my daughter a mini-lecture about how much she'd miss her annoying little brother if he weren't around, she came to me later and said "She obviously doesn't know me very well if she thinks I need to hear that." I had to agree.
I also won't deny that I love living in Texas. If you'd told me, ten years ago, that this is where my family was going to end up, I would not have been happy. Texas was never on my list of Places I Hope To Live Someday. I have a very clear memory of seeing the ad for the job I now have and thinking "Come on, it's a church-affiliated school in Texas. Are you really that desperate for a new job?" Because the answer to that question was a firm "Yes, I am," I went ahead and applied for the job, thinking of it as a last resort. When I got a job offer--my only offer that year, as it happened--I accepted. And I'm glad I did, because I would have missed out on many wonderful friends, students and experiences if I'd let my preconceptions about Texas get in the way.
And, finally, I have to admit that I like the way my kids have grown up, which is very far removed from the way I grew up. Because Mike and I have always worked at universities, our kids spend a lot of time around people who grew up in lots of different parts of the country (and, in some cases, different countries altogether.) These are educated people who have intelligent conversations with each other, people who travel often and view all kinds of a diversity as a strength rather than a threat. They're great role models for my children. We did more traveling when the kids were small and easily portable than we do now, but they're still great travelers. They know their way around an airport. I didn't set foot on an airplane until I was 17 years old. Partly that was because my parents didn't have a lot of money to spend on family vacations; partly that was because my parents didn't see travel as something we needed to experience. My dad spent 22 years in the Army, and my mom followed him around for 14 of those years--I imagine they'd had their fill of travel by the time they had children. I imagine they thought we could travel on our own, when we were older, if we wanted to.
Still, I didn't choose to leave my family in Idaho because of anything they did or didn't do. I left because I never felt like Idaho was where I belonged. As a teenager, whenever I was sick of my parents and angry at the world, I'd drive up to the airport and sit at one of the gates and imagine I was about the leave for wherever that plane was headed. (This was in the 1980's, when anyone who wanted to could walk through the metal detectors and sit at the gate.) I'm still not exactly sure why I felt that way about the place, and I still get nostalgic for Boise every now and then; it's not as if I shook the dust of my hometown off my feet when I headed out.
But when I go back to visit, as I've said before, I often find myself feeling claustrophobic. I always thought that had to do with the landscape, with the fact that Boise is situated in a valley, and I still believe that's true--but I understand now that it also has something to do with absent possibilities. When I left Idaho for graduate school, I had to become a different person. The role I played in my family wasn't relevant anymore; I had to figure out what role I wanted to play in the new networks I was creating. And, of course, I had to create those networks--professional contacts, yes, but also friends. I had to find people I could talk with before class started; I had to figure out which of those people I could count on to help me out in a pinch; I had to decide who I was willing to help, and who asked for too much time and energy in exchange for friendship. This wasn't an easy thing to do, since I'm not social by nature. But once I'd done it the first time, I knew I could do it again. Moving on to new places wasn't the least bit scary after that. It was an opportunity for reinventing my life, something I actually looked forward to.
In Boise, I always knew who I was--within my family and my hometown, among the people who'd known me since I was in kindergarten and the people who knew me only in high school. The place has changed a lot since I lived there, but the old Boise is always in the back of my mind--I see the absence of the old places every time I look at something new. So I have to believe that, no matter what I did while I was living in Boise, I would continue to be the person people used to know, at least in some small part of their minds.
But when I moved away, I became who I wanted to be. The girl from Idaho, who'd rather drive in snow than rain. The girl who used to sing all the time, but doesn't anymore. The girl who hadn't seen lightning bugs until she moved to Kansas. Who hates butterflies. Who never played sports and was never anything like athletic but discovered, at age 41, that she loves to run.
I love the life I'm living now precisely because it let me leave my old self, and the people who knew her, behind--and I didn't do that because I wanted to hide anything, or even escape anything or anyone. I just wanted to be who I chose to be. I don't know who I would have become if I'd stayed in Boise, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be who I am now, because there's little room for reinventing yourself in a town where people insist they already know what they need to know about you.
