Bon Courage

I'm not ready to go.

I wasn't ready to come here, and now with two weeks left of our life-altering-sabbatical, I'm not ready to go. Actually being faced with packing our bags has flooded me with regret for all the could- have-beens that never were. And anxiety about whatever lies ahead, in the world I used to know.

(Damn if I could just for once get with the program and just be whereverIam.)

As we were preparing to go on this trip, our friends told us how brave we were being, just stepping off a convenient ledge of our lives into the unknown of a foreign world.

This always struck me as a wholly charitable interpretation. They spoke about our trip to Southern France as though we were off to Zimbabwe to dig wells or something.

From my vantage point, as the one setting out on the trip, I just felt stupid and scared. Stupid to jettison a terrific job and a lovely, settled neighborhoody existence for a place I’d never been and couldn’t adequately describe when people asked about it. A place we had never even visited.

I was scared to leave my life and my friends to face the big fat unknown. France was the least of it. I was also facing stay-at-home motherhood for the very first time, and that truly struck fear into my feeble little heart.

I wonder if people who are actually being courageous ever recognize that quality in themselves. On the few occasions when I have been accused of displaying courage, (as opposed to the more frequent occasions when I have been called a rank coward, if not in so many words) I have never seen myself as others see me. In all of those instances, I felt motivated by mission, or passion, or avarice, or sheer dumb bliss. So when it looked from the outside like I was being courageous, odds were that I saw it differently.

For example, there’s our girls, who have showed more courage this year than you could possibly imagine. Grace, the fifth grader who fought back panic every day for two solid months until we finally relented and discovered the miracle of homeschool. Abigail, our sweet little eight year old girl who has fought French school tooth and nail, but still gone to class every day. I’m quite sure that from their vantage point, their own courage has felt at times like failure and futility.

Now, I’m facing down the return trip (on a cheap flight via Iceland, if that counts as bravery rather than stupidity), and going back feels awfully scary again. Today I started packing to bring our little family back safely to its shores, and suddenly all these feelings I had been so assiduously squirshing down into their awful little holes came surging forward.

Anxiety and regret, mostly. Anxiety for all the change I can not yet foresee, and regret for every change that never got made. For all those verb tenses I never mastered, for all those dishes I never learned to cook. For the friends the girls never made.

We've been here for nine months now -- nine months of discovery, confusion, loneliness, and really terrific cheese. And now we're suddenly about not to be, and I can't help but wonder about what I'll bring back, and what I'll have to leave behind.

Here, away from everything we knew before, I've been able to really dig deep and make a home for our little family. What will happen to that home when we uproot it and drag it back?

Here, I've really been able to pay attention. I have nothing to distract me, nothing to get in the way between me and my girls. What will happen to that focus once we’re back in the land of too much to do?

Here, I’ve been able to fall back in love with my family more deeply and fully than I ever thought I could. What will become of that love as we leave our cocoon of French life – à table, and tout la famille?

So far, I’ve only found my answers on this trip by moving forward. Call it courage, if you'd like. Mostly we've gone forward because that's the only way to go.

But this time around, moving forward takes us back.

(thanks to momalom.com for the thematic inspiration provided by their five for ten challenge. Click over to their site to find many more posts on courage.)