the unfamiliar

I’m sitting upstairs while David and a friend are off taking night pictures at the airstrip in the wind in the middle of the night. Everything is quiet except for the steady howling enveloping our house, and weariness has settled in my limbs.

It has been a long day – one of those days where the world comes crashing down on you a bit – not with any particular reason or big crisis. Just in lots of little moments, where you realize you haven’t found your safe place yet – that corner of the couch or cup of coffee or favorite bench where everything can sort out and make sense again.

Tomorrow marks one month since the van pulled into our house in Kijabe.

I’ve learned to make cookies that taste like home and coffee in a french press with unrefined sugar and cream. We’ve found ice cream and a cow to get milk. I can say “i’m excellent” and “i was tired” and “i will brush my teeth” in Swahili. David knows the short cuts like someone who has been here for much longer and can drive on the opposite side of the road over potholes with ease. He spent the day laughing with friends and building a table without a power saw, and then we made ham and cheese quesadillas for dinner. The curtains are hung and the canvases are stretched.  We have couches  (perfect for children bouncing), mattresses with familiar bedding, and a garden ready to plant.  The girls climb under their mosquito nets at night like they have been doing it all their lives and sprint the climb to school that still makes us lose our breath. We have welcomed people into our lives that we knew only in theory and by blog four short weeks ago, and they have welcomed us with unbelievable openness and love. We have a home, and it is wonderful.

I know this should be enough, yet it seems like these too small victories do not justify the exhaustion in my heart. Life has barely begun here, and I have yet to add the whirlwind that is the hospital to the already fragile days.

No wonder toddlers (and my youngest, daily) dissolve into temper tantrums – when every step and room and food and person is an all-consuming discovery.  When the familiar seems to change with new knowledge and the unfamiliar adds elements of un-understandable confusion that the mind can only process so fast.

Words exist for this, and  books and blogs and articles have been written about it, and I know this is expected and so verynormal. But, that does not ease the day to day – the raw guarded resolve that each morning requires.

So today, I am tired. Grateful for friends who saw subtle panic in my face and met me in the uncertainty with coffee and banana bread. Still amazed at the power of the wind and the laughter of my children as they play in the tree house outside in the afternoon light.  And still certain that this is exactly where we are supposed to be.

But overwhelmed nonetheless, and taking unsure steps, one in front of the other. Tying life in one home to life in a new home, trying to treat relationships with tender care, weaving together small discoveries into big ones, tempering the ridiculous with the wonderful, and the noise with quiet whispers.