Moving

I’m moving again.  There’s a pile of boxes, some random furniture, and a couple of cleared off bookshelves and some tables in my living room, ready to be moved over later today to a new studio apartment closer to my son’s house.  I’ll also bring his bed and his things, ready to occupy pride of place in the new apartment.  I need to buy a bed and a mattress for myself; the queen size bed I have now doesn’t make sense for a studio.  I’ll get a ZipCar van today and get the bed, then swing by my current apartment and pack the rest of the furniture, and move in.

I’ve been in this apartment for two years, and I’m ready to leave, but the act of moving is a difficult one.  It’s not so much packing up the stuff – I’ve reduced the amount of material goods I have to such an extent that the actual move will be pretty straightforward, and whatever doesn’t go to the studio will get packed up by movers and put in storage, everything but my clothes and the usual grab bag of personal electronic items and papers.  It’s the emotional roller coaster that you go through when you shift places.  The memories come flooding back, which is a cliché I suppose, but more than that, you close off a chapter of your life, and you’re forced to think about what will come next.

When I was thinking about moving to the east coast to live with the now-ex girlfriend, I told her that I had a solid plan – I’d take I-90 to I-94, then connect to I-90 again outside Chicago, slip over to the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and head smoothly into Philly.  She said that’s a route, not a plan, but I had no real plan, so it seemed like a good compromise.  I still don’t have a real plan in the sense she meant – not that I think she’d really endorse planning in that way anyhow – but the momentum has turned and that seems like enough.  Now instead of hitting the turnpike, I’ll snake up across Michigan, into Canada, visit some friends outside Toronto, and then drive to Maine.  In Maine I’ll end up at my parent’s house, and I’ll take things from there.

I don’t leave for two weeks, and a lot can happen in two weeks, I’ve found.  Once I get to my parent’s place, I may have a new job.  I may not.  I’ll take a few days and catch up with people, head back to Seattle for the first of many long weekend turnarounds to see my son in the new studio apartment, and then I’ll head back to Maine.

Probably.  But that first trip back to Seattle from Maine is three and a half weeks away, and a lot can happen in three and a half weeks, I’ve found.

My friend outside Boston, when I told him I was moving back to Maine, challenged me a bit and said “is this just a plan to set up a child-free nest in your life”.  No, it’s not.  It is a plan to get out of Seattle, I told him, and I feel really good about that.  If my son and his mom would head to Maine on their own, it would be lovely – great for my son, I think, and great for his mom, too, on many levels, but not all.  She doesn’t want to move, and I get that.  But I do, and the longer I’ve stayed here, the more trapped I’ve become.

The truth is, I’ve been living in Seattle because of my son, and that’s been wonderful but living somewhere for someone else’s life isn’t a real life, even if he is your son and even if his life is just starting out and it’s amazing and endlessly interesting to him.  Seattle was never home to me, even if my ex-wife and I did move here thirteen years ago because I wanted to.  I moved for a job, at a bank that failed, and when the bank failed the crisp clean air that seemed to make everything in this city brighter and cleaner and full of potential was replaced with a dim fog.  I wasn’t from Seattle, and most of my time with the bank had been spent on the road, holding true to my nature as a permanent exile even from the things I choose for myself.  Once it failed, I left – first to go around the world on a post-failure holiday, then to Canada, then to London – and when I came back, I realized I had no purchase here, there was nothing to hold on to for myself.  Except my son, of course – but again, it’s his life.

He started kindergarten yesterday.  The school courtyard was filled with kindergarten parents, some in tears, some chatting happily with their neighbors.  My ex-wife found the mom of a boy our son had met in the pre-first day week that the school held for incoming students a few weeks ago, and they talked about playdates.  We watched our son file into line with his teacher and new classmates and walk – well, more waddle; all the kids had overstuffed first-day-of-school backpacks, which weighed down their small five year old frames and made them look like a Technicolor penguin troop heading off to swim for herring.  He looked back just as he walked in the door and I waved to him and said goodbye, have a great time, and he looked at me and said “bye Dad” and then turned and disappeared down the hallway.  I got a quick photo on my phone as he was starting to turn into the school.

And with that, he is truly firing up his world.  When he was born he started living, but he lived in a world created and shaped for him, not yet by him.  Starting today, though, he gains his first real ownership of a physical space that is not his mom’s or his dad’s, or anyone’s except himself.  Sure, the school has been in existence for 50 years, but his experience will be unique to him.  His mom or I or a grandparent have, so far, always shared his physical spaces with him, at all times – and through watching and caring for him, a community has been formed which shares a collective memory of him-before-school.  But that community will now only get scripted glimpses and report card updates of the world he entered yesterday morning, which is actually far more than we’ll get of the personal worlds he may start creating in the not too distant future.

I’m glad I spent the last two years here, and on a real level, I’m glad I had nothing to hold me in Seattle.  I focused on him; for awhile I also focused on the ex-girlfriend, but I couldn’t get that mix right, and she left.  And so I focused even more on him, and it was wonderful because his life was so small.  He’s a small kid, but his life was framed by just a few things.  His mom’s house and my apartment.  His preschool and the outdoor day program in the park.  A few “friends” that had birthday parties and play dates and who we ran into occasionally at the store or the park.  My dog.  The ex-girlfriend, a few times in person and then in stories and on FaceTime.  Some neighbors of mine, and the neighbor across the street from my ex-wife who let him pick berries in the summer off his garden bushes.

It has been a gentle kind of privilege to help shape the world he faced for the past two years.  That has made this not-my-Seattle world of mine easier to bear; while I wasn’t finding enough to feel nurtured and at home here, I could understand and embrace the exercise of helping my son to navigate where he was.  I could help him start to see how to frame his own relationship with the world.  And hopefully I was teaching him how wonderful it is to share that world, with not only your dad but his friends, his neighbors, in writing and painting and in the simple act of moving through space.

But he turned the corner yesterday morning and entered his own, personal, non-parental life.  The principal got up on a platform after all the children had headed off to class and reminded us that we really couldn’t visit them in the classroom today – it would be too disruptive and we’d probably cry and then our child would cry and then everyone would cry, and so no one was allowed to see the classroom.  It’s the start of a whole world that I won’t see – well, I’ll see his classroom, but not the way you could watch a preschool, quietly observing from a corner your child as he or she plays or draws or runs or sits quietly with a snack.  All those things will now be done invisibly to me, and that’s actually terrific.

I’ve spent two years trying to work with my ex-wife to help my son learn how to create his world, and it’s been good.  I’ll keep trying, but school and friends – many of whom I may never know – and new places that I may never visit will now form a bigger and bigger part of his world.  It will be his world, not mine.

I’ll need to pay attention to him in the coming months as I relocate to Maine – or wherever, who knows what will happen in the next two weeks or months – and as we both start to create a different, joined world.  I’ll want him to stay connected to my new pathways, and if he isn’t, or if I don’t do a good job keeping him with me, I’ll have to think about whether the world that I create is correct for me.  And his mom will be thinking about that too – she may not care a fig for me, per se, but she does care that her son feels connected to his father, which is all I could ever ask.  I’ll also pay attention to his world, now being something that I haven’t had a central role in creating, and start to see what parts he wants to share with me and look for the shadow zones that signal the parts he wants to keep to himself.  He has that right – he is a human being – but as a parent I’ll look for signs that the shadow zones are good places, even as I recognize the necessity of his creating his own spaces which aren’t for me to see.  We’re always suspicious, I think, of places which are held from view.  I’ll try to be trusting but also be watchful and careful and thoughtful about where he is, but it is his space, and I can’t wait to see whatever views are on offer of what he creates.

He and I will share the small studio space together.  It’s not my space, the way this big apartment is, that I rented with an eye to having both him and the ex-girlfriend in a space I could see.  It will be our apartment but only a small slice of either of our worlds.  We’ll both have zones the other can’t see, and that’s correct.  And actually, it’s better than this old apartment, which was really my space and never was my son’s or my ex-girlfriend’s, and the fact that they couldn’t ever really claim it – neither, I think, wanted to claim it – was painful to me.  So I’m glad the studio will be for my son and me from the start.

Moving has actually been a critical part of the process by which I’ve framed and shaped and created my own world.  I’ve created one over the past forty odd years that is astonishingly beautiful, chaotic in its way but that’s because I know the world is chaotic and I’m happy to let my world mirror the larger one that we all form collectively.  As I’ve grown older, I’ve recognized how wonderful it is to let people into your world, to shine the light of friendship and love on those dark spaces that I used to jealously guard as mine and mine alone.  The great thing about creating a world is that it exists, and it is beautiful, and you can share it.  I’m looking forward to sharing my new world with my son.

First, though, I have to move.