Re-Entry

This weekend my husband and I went away on a wonderful trip to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary; I haven’t decided yet how much to blog about it without making everyone sick when they see my posts pop up here or on Facebook, but for now, rest assured that it was lovely and special and once-in-a-lifetime, as Paris always seems to be.

But now we are home, and real life is here.  There’s laundry to do and dinner to figure out and grocery shopping; there’s a girl who says she doesn’t like school any more and wants to talk about it at 7:30 in the morning instead of brushing her teeth, because she wants you to make her feel better.  There’s trying to figure out how to warn your kid about the dangers of a habit that’s dogged you all your life, the “grass is always greener” comparisons that can spoil whatever you have because it’s not what that other person has. Once again you remember how hard you thought it was to figure out when to start feeding her rice cereal, when really, it’s these emotional landmines that are much more complicated. Thinking about big changes and small nuisances and trying to handle them both with grace.  Did I mention the laundry?

There are happy cats and stacks of unopened mail and emails and souvenirs to unpack and presents to pass out; there are pictures to sort through and fresh memories to retell and cherish. There’s pick-up and drop-off and juice boxes. There’s your husband, your partner in adventure, who ate baguettes and cherry jam and Camembert with you on misty gray French mornings, who’s been waking up next to you for a decade and says he will for many more.  You’ve got a job to get back to, papers to assign and grade, new exercises to try with your students, new challenges and changes there too.

Now, real life begins anew, and you have to go and meet it.