Changes - Then and Now

I'm not really good at adjusting to change.  You'd think I would be because I've had plenty of practice in my life.  Since my parents were either preparing for or working on the mission field during my entire growing up period changing and moving were pretty central to their job description.  Their job was pretty central to the events of my life.  I was, and am, a missionary kid.  Sometimes people who grew up in situations similar to mine are called Third Culture Kids a description that can be extended to include the children of diplomats, some service people and some international businesspeople - to name the ones that come to my mind quickly.

The other night I was thinking (again) about the number of different countries, schools, houses and even churches I lived in/went to before I finished high school.  The numbers are pretty impressive, although they are skewed since I was in boarding school on-and-off during this time:

• Countries:  3
• Schools:  6 (counting preschool, which maybe I shouldn't, but not counting changing from elementary to middle to high within the same school system.)
• Houses:  16 (I'm really not sure on this one.  It's confused by the fact that I was often living in as many as three houses at the same time.  Also, some houses are only counted once when in reality I lived in them at times years apart, involving several complete moves in between.)
• Churches:  10 (Honestly, I just gave up on this one after about seven and made a sort of educated guess.  Again, often I was going to more than one church at a time.)

I've heard that some people take these changes in stride and become really good at organizing, the physical aspects of moving and even making new friends.  As adults they are restless - feeling the need to move on every three or four years.  I was not one of those people in childhood and as an adult I have not become one of them.  

So adding a member to our family, as fun and exciting as it is, is also a little stressful for me.  All right.  Sometimes it's extremely stressful.  I don't even like to rearrange my furniture.  I know that major changes are coming to many aspects of our schedules and dynamics as a family.  I want to prepare for them - to at least think things through and have a picture of how the future might look.  But once again the reality is that, as with most changes, we go in pretty blind and make things up as we go along.

I tell myself that this is a change that Allen and I chose together - and that we are and will continue to navigate it together.  I remind myself of the amazing joys I've experienced in the ordinary changes in what, as an adult, has been a pretty ordinary life.  I look into the faces of the people I love and know that if I could predict everything about them and their lives I wouldn't love them any more, and maybe not as well.

But at the moment I'm tired.  A lot of changes have come our way in the last seven months and big ones are headed down the pike.  And I need to get my furniture rearranged - some time in the next couple of weeks.  And my plan for how to do that isn't going to work out the way I thought it was, so I need to adjust.  So all of my metaphorical baggage is trying to dump down on me and distract me from the reality of right now.

Today we planted seedlings in our back yard.  We got out the kiddie pool for the first time this year and Liam (literally) shrieked with the excitement of pouring cold water over his head.  Later he lay on the couch, loosely covered by his towel, and paged through two different storybook "treasuries" describing each page in his own running musical commentary.  I used to think that Broadway style musicals were completely unrealistic.  Some people, it turns out, do spontaneously break out in song.  Sometimes the unexpected is joyful - or funny.  If we can manage to notice it.