Last year, after I came back from Congo I felt weightless and changeable, and this year I’ve been thinking about that time, and times like it. When we moved to North Carolina. Just like that. Packed everything up and left, just me and Jesse and our cat and our mismatched stuff. The feeling of leaving the state where I spent my childhood, the feeling of living in a place where we knew no one and no one knew us. Right before we left Florida, I cut off all my hair. I came to North Carolina with a pixie cut and no one here knew I’d had long hair most of my life. My memories of that time are all buoyant and sunshine coming through star-shaped leaves. I have to remind myself I still live in that same town, and the beach has not changed, the weather has not changed (much, though I swear it’s getting hotter). It’s just me. It’s just me who has changed.

* * *

Flux:

I’m beginning to think I live in six-month cycles. That nearly everything that has been certain about the past six months is coming up for review. Maybe it’s just the new year. I said at the beginning that I felt 2009 was going to be a change year, and so far it has not disappointed. Perhaps it’s Africa, the fact of the Congo, its existence, the flowers there and Fiston’s clean shoes walking over the dirtiest roads I’ve ever seen.

I’ve felt isolated this year. If the second half of last year was characterized by community, the first half of this one has been characterized by its lack. Friends are a habit, and at times it seems our friends have fallen out of the habit of us. We’ve been sick, we’ve been out of town, we’ve been busy–and now that we are not sick and are in town and are not busy, we find that people have formed new habits and we are no longer among them.

This is probably melodramatic. But I don’t mind–I gravitate toward the melodramatic, the sad songs, the long movies.

Jesse and I went to an outdoor concert Friday night to see Third Eye Blind. It rained during the opening act, and we huddled together under our umbrella, and as the main act took the stage and the rain stopped, I listened to the words of songs I’ve been hearing for years, songs that meant something to me when I was 16 years old, songs from albums we listened to together when we were teenagers. And I felt like anything was possible. I could go home and pack my things in old boxes and we could load up and move to California, and we could walk through the Haight on sunny Saturdays and eat burritos and buy funky sunglasses. And we could live in a tiny apartment in Berkeley and sit under the redwoods and think about important things like what we would cook for dinner. And we could drive on roads lined with eucalyptus trees, watch Shakespeare plays in outdoor amphitheaters where strings of white Christmas lights glowed like little stars in delicate tree branches.

And it felt good. It felt lovely to be there, with Jesse, the battleship behind us and the river to our left, listening to music that stretches far before Wilmington, far beyond it. Sometimes it feels good to be in a state of flux. Sometimes it feels good to have roots, to feel connected. And sometimes it feels good when those roots wither, when I’m weightless and anything is possible.

In the next six months, odds are good that things will settle, return to earth. The rhythms of last year will probably resume themselves. We will not move to California.

But I think there are things set into motion that I will not understand until I get more distance on them. And I am changing. There is Congo, and the way it has creeped under my skin, the way going has provided more questions than it answered. I think in six months, in a year, in another six months after that, I will look back on that concert, and I will know that I felt the echo of a change that hadn’t yet happened, that I knew as soon as “Motorcycle Drive By” started that something was ending, I just wasn’t sure what.

Don't let her expression fool you. She LOVED being a chicken for Halloween.

Jesse and I moved to North Carolina in June, five years ago. Hard to believe we’ve been here that long, hard to believe it was five whole years ago when we packed everything we owned into a U-Haul and a little band of cars and drove along with our parents several states north (and further into the South), just us and Oliver, just us and a bunch of stuff, leaving the state we’d grown up in.

A couple weeks after the move, on Father’s Day, we tried a new church (and didn’t like it) and then went to PetSmart to adopt a cat. We thought it would do Oliver good to have a cat-friend.

We must have been there for hours. We couldn’t find “the one.” We held dozens upon dozens of cats and kittens, squirmy ones and sedate ones, striped ones, white ones, patchwork ones, black ones. Finally, just about ready to give up, we decided to try one more bunch, a little cluster of tuxedo kittens. We selected one and took her to a room where we could set her down and play with her.

We knew almost instantly that she was the one we’d adopt. She was playful but not wild. She was active but would still let Jesse hold her. And she was the cutest little black-and-white fluff ball I do believe I’ve ever seen.

It took us days to decide on a name, but we finally settled on Gracie, from a Ben Folds’ song on an album just released. It fit. Oliver eventually warmed up to her and adopted her as his own, grooming her, disciplining her when he deemed necessary, snuggling with her during naps, sunning with her next to the windows. That summer, she and I took naps together on the couch nearly every morning, and I love the memories of her tiny body resting on my chest.

To share our newest addition with family, I put together this video five years ago. She’s plenty bigger now, but just as fun, just as spunky, just as clumsy.

All right then, since we’re on Awkward Topics, let’s talk about my employment status. Let’s just go there. I suppose the technical term for me is “underemployed.” I’m not unemployed, a distinction I feel is important. But the job I have is decidedly not full-time.

After I graduated with my MFA in 2008 (yeah, we’ll go there too—it’s been two years, two full years) I got a job working from home. I wrote stuff, edited stuff, did online stuff, and had to call people to try and convince them to set meetings with someone who would then try to convince them to move their business to our client city. I enjoyed (well, “enjoy” might not be the right word) everything except the calling, which I absolutely hated and dreaded and avoided if at all possible. On the side, I also copy edited for a local business.

I did this for about a year. Then, the recession hit. First, I lost the copy editing. Then, I lost the online job. I had already begun watching A, though, so I still had something. Regardless, I promptly felt depressed at my underemployed status and started looking for a job. Before I found one, though, Jesse and I had a heart-to-heart and we agreed I would take some time off from job hunting to focus solely on the book, which I was in the process of completely re-writing and which had taken a back burner since I’d been out of school.

And that’s been the past year of my life—two or three mornings a week of watching a toddler, the rest of the time writing. And keeping the house clean, and doing laundry, and grocery shopping, and cooking all our food, and washing our cars, and maintaining our lawn, and growing our garden. You know, that stuff.

Now, I’m wrapping up a draft of the book, ready to call it quits on that project (whether it works or not—I’m simply exhausted, creatively, and don’t know how much energy I have left for it). Which means my experiment in housewifery must come to a close.

I, of course, don’t want it to. Not working has confirmed what I’ve been suspecting for quite some time now: I don’t like work. I don’t like having a job. At least, I haven’t loved any of the jobs I’ve had, and I’ve had a variety. I’m much happier at home, cleaning the house and baking bread and doing all that stuff a good feminist isn’t supposed to like.

The inherent problem is I married a man raised in my generation, a generation very used to two incomes, a man philosophically on board with stay-at-home mothers but bewildered at the prospect of a stay-at-home wife. I can’t say I blame him. I know he’d rather stay home too. (Though I’m convinced that about two weeks of domestic chores and responsibilities would have him running back to the office.)

And while stay-at-home mothering seems to be experiencing, at least in my circle of friends, a comeback, a little stamp of Oprah-approval, the noble act of sacrificing career for the raising of productive citizens, I can probably forget about the possibility of the return of the housewife. Women make up more than half the workforce now. We’re better educated than men are, and we’re more likely to be managers (though not CEOs).

Today, I read Hanna Rosin’s article—“The End of Men”—in the new Atlantic and found it fascinating, and probably true. She writes,

Dozens of college women I interviewed for this story assumed that they very well might be the ones working while their husbands stayed at home, either looking for work or minding the children. Guys, one senior remarked to me, “are the new ball and chain.”

But, shhh, don’t tell Jesse. He might want to try a little experiment of his own.

This past weekend in Charlotte, Dad was sick, and we didn’t know what was wrong. And as he lay there on the floor of Joannie’s empty apartment, eyes closed in pain, I wanted to scream, No, you are not allowed to be sick. How cruel it is to have to see your father—someone so strong, someone able to do anything, someone who is never ill—how cruel it is to see him in pain, to see him weak. And sometimes when I talk to my sister, I think one day it will just be us, and we’ll not have anyone to tell us what’s wrong with our cars, to tell us how to get rid of dollar weed, to remember what we were like as babies.

I thought maybe this anxiety was just an only-child thing, or because my parents are older than the parents of most of my friends. But I mentioned this to Jesse last night as we ate the leftover waffles for dinner, and he said he feels the same about his parents, that he feels it too, the feeling of unstoppable, the quiet dread. I know all the right answers, the parts about worry, about control, contentment, all that, but there are days when I wish I could be nine again, protected and cared for, there are days when I don’t like this adult thing one bit, the knowledge that I might live to bury my parents and exist in a world without them, when there is nothing more I can say.

So, there’s that. There’s that.

When I think about the trip, I still alternate wildly between excitement and bewilderment (what am I doing? Why would anyone go back?). There isn’t a lot I can do right now to prepare, to keep myself occupied. I’m in that strange in-between time—it’s too far out to start shopping and packing, but it’s too soon to just forget about it for now. So, I just sit here and remember, and last year’s trip comes to me in flashes, when I’m not expecting it. Things I’d forgotten, moments unremembered.

Like, one night Luke and Evan and I (I think—it may have just been Luke and me, or perhaps Robin was there…the details are fuzzy) were left in the van to wait while the others went into the church to grab something before we went on our way back to the guesthouse. The night there is unlike anything else—a night with no power, a city without electricity, and whenever the moon went behind a cloud things got so dark we could couldn’t see as far as the hood of the vehicle. We could just hear things outside the van, voices, people walking, sometimes far away, and sometimes right next to the van. We were in a sea of no-light, on a downtown street at night, hearing voices through a window cracked open. At first we talked about it, chuckling softly at how creepy it was, but then we hushed, not wanting to draw attention to ourselves with our English. In the dark, we could hide, we could dissolve. Then the moon would come out and we could see shapes, faded silhouettes of people moving around. We were a handful of foreign kids with a van full of camera equipment, the window cracked open to let in the cool night air.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget how scary that trip was, because we came home fine and because we came home high on the fact of surviving, on the thrill of going there and coming back no worse for the wear. And when you come back from that, you immediately want to do it again. And then you sign up for another trip and spend the months leading up to it slowly remembering how dark night gets on city streets with no street lights.

Well. It will be fine. I remind myself that this trip is far less risky, the group I’m going with far less risk-taking. We’re taking Christie with us, who is cautious and careful and extremely well-traveled. We’ll not be sitting in vans after dark, we’ll not be walking Bukavu alleys to catch buses back to the guest house. Luke will not be riding on the back of a Congolese motorcycle, casually holding a video camera, grinning and saying, Don’t tell Bishop. We’ll be carefully shuttled here and there, we’ll be watched over and kept off motorcycles, and we’ll be brought back to the guest house each day—before dark, even, I’m sure, especially since the days will be longer in May than they’d been in March. And I’ll be glad for the memories of the first trip, the risks and the payoffs.

I’d watched Hotel Rwanda before the trip last year, but this was the first time I’d seen it since. It was a shock in the beginning to realize I recognized things. I couldn’t pick out or label any building except the airport, but it was immediately familiar to me. When we landed in Kigali and drove out of the city and toward the border, it had seemed entirely and utterly foreign, as if I had walked off an airplane and onto another planet. But now, having seen parts of that city, having passed through those streets, the sights seem familiar. I wonder what it will feel like to be there again. To walk across that border.

Before I went to Congo last year, my parents worried over our itinerary, which had us spending the night in a Rwanda border town. They knew about the genocide—by now, pretty much everyone knows at least a little about the genocide. What many fewer people know is that when the architects of the genocide fled the country, they fled into Congo. Set up camp. Reorganized. There’s a line at the end of Hotel Rwanda, just before the credits roll, that references this, a line of text about Congo. When I saw that line, I thought, And so it begins. How strange to think as one story wraps up, another begins. Or maybe the story never ends, it just relocates.

But the funny thing is, for all my parents’ concern, Rwanda has done spectacularly well, all things considered. I’d vacation there. Lots of people do just that. You’d never guess something so ghastly could happen in a place so beautiful; that’s what was running through my head as we drove on fairly good roads from the capital to the border. The closer we got to Congo, though, the worse the roads became.

Rwanda gives me hope for Congo, to see how far a place can come, to see what odds can be surmounted. Maybe one day, we’ll see a movie about Congo, and we’ll say, can you believe that happened there? Can you believe the country was once in ruins? And that, I know, will be a wonderful day.

Recently, I’ve been downright homesick. Though, to be fair, I’m not sure whether I’m homesick for the actual place or for my childhood. The two are inextricable.

There were the space-themed exhibits at the National Air and Space Museum in DC, the lunar module and rover, the paintings of the lunar landings. There’s the talk of Marvin and Amie maybe visiting Florida next year to see a launch. And just today, I thought—homemade lemonade. How I would love to have some homemade lemonade.

So, the things I took for granted, growing up in Florida:

1. Launches. Rockets, space shuttles. We’d watch the countdown on TV and then if it was really going, we’d run outside to the front yard to watch. And there it would be, a big plume and a glowing ball at the top, rising above our house. I’d stand smack in the middle of our street and look up, and I can still feel the warm asphalt on my bare feet. I can still hear the rumble of the launches, the deep, almost crunchy sound. I remember waking up to that sound, the windows rattling, terrified for a split second, thinking we were having an earthquake or something, before realizing it was just a shuttle launch and going back to bed.

2. All the space stuff. I didn’t realize it was special to grow up a few miles from Kennedy Space Center. Space was so normal to us. Everybody’s dad worked at KSC or at Cape Canaveral. Our next-door neighbor was a retired NASA engineer; he helped me with math. My first official date with Jesse was to the KSC visitor’s center, and our first kiss was beneath a bright orange shuttle external tank. One of Jesse’s dad’s friends was an astronaut, and we got free tickets to see an IMAX movie he’d helped film at the International Space Station.

3. Fresh fruit. Dad’s thumb has always been impossibly green (I got my mom’s hands), so in our backyard we had quite the collection of fruit trees—oranges, grapefruits, lemons, limes, tangelos, starfruit. Bananas for a while, though I believe they were killed in one of our rare deep freezes. My childhood winters were full of oranges, the sounds of my mom making orange juice in the kitchen, picking bags of them to give away when someone visited from out of state. And when I was sick, Dad would make me limeade or lemonade, sometimes ice cold, sometimes heated up if I had a sore throat. The fruit I can get at Harris Teeter tastes nothing like the fruit that came out of our backyard.

4. All things tropical. I didn’t think I’d miss palm trees and the ability to take a day trip to Miami, but I do. I miss the colors of Florida, its neons, its flamingo pinks. I miss how gaudy it could be, how bright the sun was.

5. Theme parks. There, I said it. I miss Disney. I miss how just about every billboard advertised some new ride or attraction, how everything was geared toward tourists, how it felt like a perpetual vacation. When I lived in Orlando, I loved to roll my eyes at the constant barrage of theme park ads, but now I miss them. And though I was often bored, there was the sense that I never really had to be. There was always something wanting to entertain me.

There was just something fundamentally exciting about Florida, something I didn’t appreciate until leaving. The space stuff, being so close to something that represents what we can do with enough determination and brainpower and creativity. And all the rest, the excess of family fun and a growing season that never stopped, there is something wonderful about having grown up in such a place.