After yet another cycle in which I managed to foolishly get my hopes up (or at least not to assume that there was no hope, which is pretty much the same thing these days) that I might just get pregnant without intervention (I know, I know), my period arrived yesterday, a full three days ahead of schedule.
So, today I trundled off dutifully to the RE. I hadn't actually seen her in person since Eggbert was born, and it was surprisingly nice to get the chance to thank her in person for the incredible gift that she helped to give Mystery and me.
After conferring frantically with the calendar, she confirmed what I had suspected--that I will only have time to do one IVF cycle before leaving Korea in June. If my period had arrived three days ago, we could have squeezed in a second, but now it is truly out of the question. So, that's where I stand. One chance. I really don't know yet how I feel about that. On the one hand, Eggbert took two tries, and I was two years younger then, so obviously the odds are not on my side. On the other hand, the odds wouldn't be on my side in two cycles either, or even three. We will have to call it quits sometime, so at least this draws a pretty sharp line in the sand for us. Once we are back in the US, I will have infertility coverage, but with a lifetime maximum of $5000, which means that the out-of-pocket costs would be about $10,000 for one more cycle, and with odds of success of only about 20%, that is not a terribly appealing proposition. I guess we'll see how we feel if/when it comes to that, but right now, it's looking like this will be my last IVF cycle.
I'll start BCP tomorrow for one month, and then the fun will begin.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Monday, March 9, 2009
Baby steps
This isn't a confession that I am proud to make, but before I started trying to get pregnant, there was a part of me that was dreading the first few weeks of my baby's life. I figured that spewing forth a live human being from my loins (or a big old incision, if it turned out that way), and then being subjected to an intense sleep-deprivation experience all while bleeding from my chewed-on nipples and having a hormone-storm the size of Katrina raging in my body would be fairly unpleasant. It seemed that this was just something that I'd have to endure to get to the good part, which would come later.
As my pregnancy progressed, and it eventually became clear that an actual baby was likely, I realized that I was already not sleeping, and somehow had remained alive, so I thought that if I survived the whole huge head meets small vagina event, all that I really had to fear was post-partum depression. After the great long depression that was infertility, I expected that PPD would happen, and thought that the only real question was how bad it would be.
Boy was I wrong. Birthing was indeed as painful as I had imagined, and it's true that I didn't sleep for more than three hours in a row for the next ten months or so, but Eggbert's first days were absolutely glorious for me. I remember in the days, weeks, and months after her birth wondering if there was such a thing as hormone-induced post-partum Euphoria, and praying that if that's what I had, I would never be cured.
A lot of things were hard in her first year, but they were a good kind of hard. The kind of hard that made me feel strong and empowered and even perhaps a bit proud. She was a needy little things, but as it turned out, her wish was not only my command, but also my wish. There was nothing that made me happier than meeting her needs. And her needs were fairly simple--food, warmth, comfort, and about a gajillion diaper changes/day. Not necessarily easy, but at least straightforward.
As she's grown older, I have struggled a lot more with the whole meeting her needs thing, because sometimes it is very unclear what she actually needs. Despite her fairly limited vocabulary, she is fantastic at communicating her wants, but since her wants include things like chewing on her shoes, jumping on the bed, playing in traffic, and eating only corn and animal crackers, I have found her guidance to be increasingly unhelpful in allowing me to identify her actual needs.
Up until recently, I had never questioned my belief that we are lucky that Mystery is a stay-at-home dad. I love it that they have this time together, that they have such a special relationship, and that I can go to work knowing that my child is being taken care of someone who loves her more than anything else in the world. I know that not everybody has the option of having a stay-at-home parent, and I do think that we're lucky. However, lately when I watch my own little Egg and compare what I see other people's children doing, I kind of wonder what she is missing out on by not being in day care. In my most insecure moments, I wonder if somehow we're cheating her out of the chance to learn from child care professionals, rather than just her goofy parents, and even if we're somehow causing her lasting harm.
The thing is, while Mystery and I are both patient, involved, and interested parents, we both find it very hard to teach little Miss Egghead anything. She has always marched to the beat of her own drummer, and while her development is on average right on track, it's always been wildly uneven--she was walking very early, but at almost 16 months she still has no interest in using a spoon or fork, and I gave up in despair at patty-cake months ago after she left me hanging one too many times. She is curious about the world, but seems absolutely determined to do things her own way. I am 99% proud of this, but there is 1% of me that worries when I see other mommies and babies playing out scenes right from parenting books, and realize that not only has Eggo not read the book, but she likes to rip the pages out and eat them. She has been talking for about three months now, but to this day, she only says what she wants when she wants to, and no amount of questioning will elicit words on cue (although bribery does work if animal crackers are involved). She won't follow instructions to make animal sounds, or point to things, or really to do anything at all that she didn't already mean to do (although we have made some headway in stopping her from doing things that we don't want her to do). I see other moms and toddlers walking along in public, hand in hand, or even just side by side, while the very thought of unleashing a free Eggbert on the public makes me shake and sweat. When we take her to the park, the only place that she's allowed to walk outside, given her tendency to bolt, she starts sprinting the second that her feet hit the dirt. Nothing that we can do, short of picking her up and turning her around, has any effect on her trajectory. We can scream and shout, or sing and dance, or offer her all of the tea in China if she will just for the love of God STOP RUNNING TOWARD THE CLIFF/PIT/RABID DOG! but she will ignore us completely and do her own thing. I end up running along behind her holding onto the back of her jacket just to keep her from running off of the edge of the world.
Lately, I've noticed that my apparent inability to lead, guide, or discipline the Egg effectively has been getting me down. It's not her behavior that bothering me, but rather my concern that her behavior means that I'm doing something wrong. I can't really put my finger on it, but she's just so different from other people's kids that even though I am for the most part delighted by the differences that make her her own unique and special person, they also make me worry.
Last Sunday we had kind of a bad morning. I had spent days searching through all of the wrong stores to find some crayons so she could start to learn to draw. Finally I found them, and we had the big "reveal" on Sunday. I let her hold all of the different colors, showed her how to use them, scribbled a little myself, just to show her that it was fun, and then she poked the crayon into the paper three times, looked disconcerted, sat there for a minute doing nothing, and then bit the end off of the crayon. After which she picked up the paper and started shredding it while I fished waxy bits out of her mouth. Not quite the tableau that I had envisioned. Then I tried to do a puzzle with her and she just wanted to throw the pieces, and I tried reading a book and she walked away, and I put on some music so we could dance and she wanted no part of that either, yet when I decided to let her play alone, she got upset about that too, and spent the rest of the morning whining. Nothing was wrong, but we were just obviously not on the same wavelength. That had never happened before, and it really took me by surprise. For the first time, my recent worry about her made the leap from the category of "things that I occasionally think about idly in moments when my brain is otherwise unoccupied" to "the sick feeling that something might be really really wrong." I started thinking things like ADD and autism and attachment disorders and leprosy and things that go bump in the night. You know, the usual suspects.
That afternoon, I popped the Egg in the baby carrier and took her to the park, even though it was kind of cold. As usual, when I put her down she was off like a shot. She ran straight to the muddy ditch, then to the rusty grate that looked like it had been infused with some kind of special military-grade vaccination-cracking tetanus spores, then to the big pile of cigarette butts. Every time I redirected her by physically picking her up and moving her to another region, she found something more dangerous and filthier to race for. I kept trying to interest her in pinecones, trees, birds and other pretty and nice things that she could look at, while she kept her head down and her legs spinning as she searched for some kind of dirt-encrusted toddler holy grail. Within a few minutes, she looked rather a lot like Pigpen. Eventually, we made our way over to an area with a lot of trees, each surrounded by its own individual mound of dirt about 1 meter high. Upon spotting the mounds, she immediately stopped her aimless running and spent the next several minutes walking straight up to a mound, falling down when the grade got too steep or the ground too loose, getting up, marching right back up the hill, falling down, getting up, falling down, getting up, etc. At first I tried to stop her, but then I realized that the ground was soft, she was well-padded in a winter coat and hat, and she was having a good time, so I just let her be. After many failed attempts on a big mound, she looked around, chose a smaller mound, and started working on that one. Within 10 minutes she was running up and down the small mound, after which she moved back to the big mound. A few minutes later, she was standing at the top beaming. Then she came down, ran right over to me, and hugged me. I picked her up and started talking about something-or-other, and she somehow picked out the word "tree," (which she hadn't used before) and started saying "twee?" "dwee?" I pointed at a tree, and said "tree", and she then pointed to every tree on the landscape, saying "dwee! dwee!" Then just to make sure I got the point, she wiggled until I put her down, ran over to a tree, patted the trunk, and said "dwee!" Then I showed her a pinecone, and she held and patted it and carried it around for several minutes before giving it back to me, I assume for safekeeping.
The whole way home, she beamed out at all of the passers-by, and the second that someone so much as looked at her, she started waving cheerily at them. Our walk home was punctuated by a trail of "awwwww's."
I think my little girl is going to do just fine, as long as her mama can just relax and let her be herself. I'm working on it.
As my pregnancy progressed, and it eventually became clear that an actual baby was likely, I realized that I was already not sleeping, and somehow had remained alive, so I thought that if I survived the whole huge head meets small vagina event, all that I really had to fear was post-partum depression. After the great long depression that was infertility, I expected that PPD would happen, and thought that the only real question was how bad it would be.
Boy was I wrong. Birthing was indeed as painful as I had imagined, and it's true that I didn't sleep for more than three hours in a row for the next ten months or so, but Eggbert's first days were absolutely glorious for me. I remember in the days, weeks, and months after her birth wondering if there was such a thing as hormone-induced post-partum Euphoria, and praying that if that's what I had, I would never be cured.
A lot of things were hard in her first year, but they were a good kind of hard. The kind of hard that made me feel strong and empowered and even perhaps a bit proud. She was a needy little things, but as it turned out, her wish was not only my command, but also my wish. There was nothing that made me happier than meeting her needs. And her needs were fairly simple--food, warmth, comfort, and about a gajillion diaper changes/day. Not necessarily easy, but at least straightforward.
As she's grown older, I have struggled a lot more with the whole meeting her needs thing, because sometimes it is very unclear what she actually needs. Despite her fairly limited vocabulary, she is fantastic at communicating her wants, but since her wants include things like chewing on her shoes, jumping on the bed, playing in traffic, and eating only corn and animal crackers, I have found her guidance to be increasingly unhelpful in allowing me to identify her actual needs.
Up until recently, I had never questioned my belief that we are lucky that Mystery is a stay-at-home dad. I love it that they have this time together, that they have such a special relationship, and that I can go to work knowing that my child is being taken care of someone who loves her more than anything else in the world. I know that not everybody has the option of having a stay-at-home parent, and I do think that we're lucky. However, lately when I watch my own little Egg and compare what I see other people's children doing, I kind of wonder what she is missing out on by not being in day care. In my most insecure moments, I wonder if somehow we're cheating her out of the chance to learn from child care professionals, rather than just her goofy parents, and even if we're somehow causing her lasting harm.
The thing is, while Mystery and I are both patient, involved, and interested parents, we both find it very hard to teach little Miss Egghead anything. She has always marched to the beat of her own drummer, and while her development is on average right on track, it's always been wildly uneven--she was walking very early, but at almost 16 months she still has no interest in using a spoon or fork, and I gave up in despair at patty-cake months ago after she left me hanging one too many times. She is curious about the world, but seems absolutely determined to do things her own way. I am 99% proud of this, but there is 1% of me that worries when I see other mommies and babies playing out scenes right from parenting books, and realize that not only has Eggo not read the book, but she likes to rip the pages out and eat them. She has been talking for about three months now, but to this day, she only says what she wants when she wants to, and no amount of questioning will elicit words on cue (although bribery does work if animal crackers are involved). She won't follow instructions to make animal sounds, or point to things, or really to do anything at all that she didn't already mean to do (although we have made some headway in stopping her from doing things that we don't want her to do). I see other moms and toddlers walking along in public, hand in hand, or even just side by side, while the very thought of unleashing a free Eggbert on the public makes me shake and sweat. When we take her to the park, the only place that she's allowed to walk outside, given her tendency to bolt, she starts sprinting the second that her feet hit the dirt. Nothing that we can do, short of picking her up and turning her around, has any effect on her trajectory. We can scream and shout, or sing and dance, or offer her all of the tea in China if she will just for the love of God STOP RUNNING TOWARD THE CLIFF/PIT/RABID DOG! but she will ignore us completely and do her own thing. I end up running along behind her holding onto the back of her jacket just to keep her from running off of the edge of the world.
Lately, I've noticed that my apparent inability to lead, guide, or discipline the Egg effectively has been getting me down. It's not her behavior that bothering me, but rather my concern that her behavior means that I'm doing something wrong. I can't really put my finger on it, but she's just so different from other people's kids that even though I am for the most part delighted by the differences that make her her own unique and special person, they also make me worry.
Last Sunday we had kind of a bad morning. I had spent days searching through all of the wrong stores to find some crayons so she could start to learn to draw. Finally I found them, and we had the big "reveal" on Sunday. I let her hold all of the different colors, showed her how to use them, scribbled a little myself, just to show her that it was fun, and then she poked the crayon into the paper three times, looked disconcerted, sat there for a minute doing nothing, and then bit the end off of the crayon. After which she picked up the paper and started shredding it while I fished waxy bits out of her mouth. Not quite the tableau that I had envisioned. Then I tried to do a puzzle with her and she just wanted to throw the pieces, and I tried reading a book and she walked away, and I put on some music so we could dance and she wanted no part of that either, yet when I decided to let her play alone, she got upset about that too, and spent the rest of the morning whining. Nothing was wrong, but we were just obviously not on the same wavelength. That had never happened before, and it really took me by surprise. For the first time, my recent worry about her made the leap from the category of "things that I occasionally think about idly in moments when my brain is otherwise unoccupied" to "the sick feeling that something might be really really wrong." I started thinking things like ADD and autism and attachment disorders and leprosy and things that go bump in the night. You know, the usual suspects.
That afternoon, I popped the Egg in the baby carrier and took her to the park, even though it was kind of cold. As usual, when I put her down she was off like a shot. She ran straight to the muddy ditch, then to the rusty grate that looked like it had been infused with some kind of special military-grade vaccination-cracking tetanus spores, then to the big pile of cigarette butts. Every time I redirected her by physically picking her up and moving her to another region, she found something more dangerous and filthier to race for. I kept trying to interest her in pinecones, trees, birds and other pretty and nice things that she could look at, while she kept her head down and her legs spinning as she searched for some kind of dirt-encrusted toddler holy grail. Within a few minutes, she looked rather a lot like Pigpen. Eventually, we made our way over to an area with a lot of trees, each surrounded by its own individual mound of dirt about 1 meter high. Upon spotting the mounds, she immediately stopped her aimless running and spent the next several minutes walking straight up to a mound, falling down when the grade got too steep or the ground too loose, getting up, marching right back up the hill, falling down, getting up, falling down, getting up, etc. At first I tried to stop her, but then I realized that the ground was soft, she was well-padded in a winter coat and hat, and she was having a good time, so I just let her be. After many failed attempts on a big mound, she looked around, chose a smaller mound, and started working on that one. Within 10 minutes she was running up and down the small mound, after which she moved back to the big mound. A few minutes later, she was standing at the top beaming. Then she came down, ran right over to me, and hugged me. I picked her up and started talking about something-or-other, and she somehow picked out the word "tree," (which she hadn't used before) and started saying "twee?" "dwee?" I pointed at a tree, and said "tree", and she then pointed to every tree on the landscape, saying "dwee! dwee!" Then just to make sure I got the point, she wiggled until I put her down, ran over to a tree, patted the trunk, and said "dwee!" Then I showed her a pinecone, and she held and patted it and carried it around for several minutes before giving it back to me, I assume for safekeeping.
The whole way home, she beamed out at all of the passers-by, and the second that someone so much as looked at her, she started waving cheerily at them. Our walk home was punctuated by a trail of "awwwww's."
I think my little girl is going to do just fine, as long as her mama can just relax and let her be herself. I'm working on it.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
The best-laid plans
My RE doesn't take appointments (except for retrievals and transfers), she just has office hours, and the patients show up and are seen in the order of arrival. It may sound inefficient, but in fact, the waits to see her aren't any worse than they were to see my last RE in the US, even though she sees about 10 times as many patients. My RE usually likes to see patients on CD2 at the start of a cycle, so I thought I'd go on CD2 this time, in anticipation of starting an IVF cycle in March, so she could do any tests that she might want to run in the mean time (like bloodwork or whatever). However, my body had other plans.
About two weeks ago, I started a new self-improvement plan. Since the Egg was born, I haven't been getting nearly as much exercise as I should. I do walk a lot (about 25 minutes each way to work every day, up a huge hill, plus recreational walks with the Egg whenever I get the chance), so I'm not a total couch potato, but I really wanted to start doing something that raises my heart rate a bit more. So, I decided to start running. Truth be told, I hate running. However, it has two features that make it very appealing at the moment: it's free, and it's outdoors. Living in a huge, densely-packed city, the last thing that I want to do is to spend more time in stuffy buildings, so joining a gym doesn't particularly appeal, and I kind of hate the idea of paying to exercise. So, I found a gentle running program on the internet that guaranteed it would get me comfortably running a decent distance in 8-9 weeks without doing me any damage along the way. Sounded good, so off I went. The first two runs went well. A local university campus near my home has some nice paths for running, so it was actually quite pleasant, and astonishingly easy, given that I hadn't run in almost two years. So, for the third run, I decided to add some interest by adding some hillier paths (while still sticking to the recommended distances and times). By that night (when I posted last), my knees were throbbing, and by the next morning, I could barely walk. I did manage to hobble to work that day, and by evening, both knees and one ankle were hot, swollen, and very, very sore. Luckily, I had some work I could do at home, so I stayed home the next day. Then it was the weekend. After a couple of days off, I tried walking to work again on Monday. HUGE mistake. I ended up having to take the next day "off" also and work at home. I tried taking a taxi on Wednesday, but couldn't get a taxi home due to the odd location of my office, so I once again had to limp home. Thursday was the day that I should have gone to the RE. However, going to the RE would have required, at the very least, walking from my apartment to a cab, and from a cab to the doctor's office, which was about 100% further than was possible, given my condition. I finally took my knees to the doctor the next day (tendonitis: rest, ice, and ibuprofin, which was what I had been doing all along), but still haven't made it to the RE.
As a result of this incident, I have learned two things: First, running on hills is really bad for your joints. Don't do it. Second, icing your knees right after you hurt yourself really does make a difference. How can I tell that it was the ice that helped? Easy! I did a home science experiment and only iced one knee. They both hurt the same amount, but I iced the right and not the left, and now look! The right is tons better, but I can still barely walk on the left.
When I realized that my experiment had successfully answered my research question, I was filled with the righteous glow of scientific discovery. It lasted about five seconds. Then I realized that if only I had just iced both knees right away like Dr. Google said, I wouldn't be in pain anymore. Doh!
About two weeks ago, I started a new self-improvement plan. Since the Egg was born, I haven't been getting nearly as much exercise as I should. I do walk a lot (about 25 minutes each way to work every day, up a huge hill, plus recreational walks with the Egg whenever I get the chance), so I'm not a total couch potato, but I really wanted to start doing something that raises my heart rate a bit more. So, I decided to start running. Truth be told, I hate running. However, it has two features that make it very appealing at the moment: it's free, and it's outdoors. Living in a huge, densely-packed city, the last thing that I want to do is to spend more time in stuffy buildings, so joining a gym doesn't particularly appeal, and I kind of hate the idea of paying to exercise. So, I found a gentle running program on the internet that guaranteed it would get me comfortably running a decent distance in 8-9 weeks without doing me any damage along the way. Sounded good, so off I went. The first two runs went well. A local university campus near my home has some nice paths for running, so it was actually quite pleasant, and astonishingly easy, given that I hadn't run in almost two years. So, for the third run, I decided to add some interest by adding some hillier paths (while still sticking to the recommended distances and times). By that night (when I posted last), my knees were throbbing, and by the next morning, I could barely walk. I did manage to hobble to work that day, and by evening, both knees and one ankle were hot, swollen, and very, very sore. Luckily, I had some work I could do at home, so I stayed home the next day. Then it was the weekend. After a couple of days off, I tried walking to work again on Monday. HUGE mistake. I ended up having to take the next day "off" also and work at home. I tried taking a taxi on Wednesday, but couldn't get a taxi home due to the odd location of my office, so I once again had to limp home. Thursday was the day that I should have gone to the RE. However, going to the RE would have required, at the very least, walking from my apartment to a cab, and from a cab to the doctor's office, which was about 100% further than was possible, given my condition. I finally took my knees to the doctor the next day (tendonitis: rest, ice, and ibuprofin, which was what I had been doing all along), but still haven't made it to the RE.
As a result of this incident, I have learned two things: First, running on hills is really bad for your joints. Don't do it. Second, icing your knees right after you hurt yourself really does make a difference. How can I tell that it was the ice that helped? Easy! I did a home science experiment and only iced one knee. They both hurt the same amount, but I iced the right and not the left, and now look! The right is tons better, but I can still barely walk on the left.
When I realized that my experiment had successfully answered my research question, I was filled with the righteous glow of scientific discovery. It lasted about five seconds. Then I realized that if only I had just iced both knees right away like Dr. Google said, I wouldn't be in pain anymore. Doh!
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Infertile days
As an infertile mom, mostly I feel like an ordinary mom. My life is too busy and full with Eggbert, Mystery, work, and, well, life, to think too much about my own infertility. But there are days when it all does come crashing back.
Today was one of those days. I was already having a frustrating day, because I have somehow managed to injure both of my knees, making me hobble around in a piteous manner, and forcing me to work from home (since work is at the other end of a big steep hill that I just can't navigate in my current condition), and then my computer decided that it was time that I be taught a lesson, so I spent the whole day trying (unsuccessfully) to accomplish one fairly simple task. Then my period arrived.
It shouldn't have been a big deal. Eggbert is only 15 months old. My arms and heart are full. But it was a big deal. I admit it, I cried.
Before my next period arrives, I will turn 40. In just a few months after that, we will leave Korea, the land of cheap IVF, forever. Clearly, if I am serious about wanting another child, then it's time to start gearing up for an IVF cycle ASAP.
I don't want to do IVF. I don't want the needles, the expense, the mood swings, the risk of crushing failure. I don't want any of it.
But I do want another child. Just one more.
Once again, I am angry to be in this situation. I know that I'm one of the lucky ones. And when I look at Eggbert, I do feel incredibly fortunate, but it still does kind of grate on me that 85% of couples can just plan their family and have their kids, without ever having to face these kinds of days.
Today was one of those days. I was already having a frustrating day, because I have somehow managed to injure both of my knees, making me hobble around in a piteous manner, and forcing me to work from home (since work is at the other end of a big steep hill that I just can't navigate in my current condition), and then my computer decided that it was time that I be taught a lesson, so I spent the whole day trying (unsuccessfully) to accomplish one fairly simple task. Then my period arrived.
It shouldn't have been a big deal. Eggbert is only 15 months old. My arms and heart are full. But it was a big deal. I admit it, I cried.
Before my next period arrives, I will turn 40. In just a few months after that, we will leave Korea, the land of cheap IVF, forever. Clearly, if I am serious about wanting another child, then it's time to start gearing up for an IVF cycle ASAP.
I don't want to do IVF. I don't want the needles, the expense, the mood swings, the risk of crushing failure. I don't want any of it.
But I do want another child. Just one more.
Once again, I am angry to be in this situation. I know that I'm one of the lucky ones. And when I look at Eggbert, I do feel incredibly fortunate, but it still does kind of grate on me that 85% of couples can just plan their family and have their kids, without ever having to face these kinds of days.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Becoming a Repatriate
Knowing that I'm leaving has changed my relationship with Korea. Things about Seoul that I found annoying before now provoke only amused sighs. Things that I always liked shine a bit brighter. My friends here seem smarter, kinder, and more interesting. OK, not really the last one. They were always pretty interesting, actually. But you know what I mean. Once we stopped trying Korea on for size, both Mystery and I have both been able to relax and admit that it's not perfect, but it's an interesting place, and we've had a nice life here.
While moving to another continent is a pretty daunting endeavor, we've done it together twice already, and I had already done it a few times before I met Mystery, so we pretty much know the drill. Luckily, we didn't bring too many possessions to Korea when we came, and haven't acquired much here (other than tons of baby stuff, most of which we'll just give away). We're also not moving until June, so we have plenty of time to figure out the details. So, while our lives will be upheaved for a while, I'm not particularly stressed about it. And just to make things even better, we have already managed to arrange the rental of a gorgeous house for our first six months back in the US from a family that will be overseas themselves. So, we don't have to look for housing right away, and can look around a bit and see what neighborhood we'd like to live in and what kind of a home we want.
So, on a logistical level, everything seems to be going well. The one thing about this move that has me a little disconcerted is my own emotional reaction to moving back to my own country. I'm mostly feeling good about it, from a practical perspective, but I am feeling a bit wistful. I'm not sure how I feel about not being an expat anymore.
Many years ago, in a former life, I had a friend who went to Japan after graduating from college to teach English. After a couple of years in Japan, she returned to the US. I asked her how it was going, and she said that she was having an identity crisis. When she had been living in Japan, and people in the US asked what she was doing (meaning what was her job), she responded that she was living in Japan, teaching English. The living in Japan part came first. The teaching English was an afterthought. Living in Japan was, for her, the daily accomplishment from which she derived her sense of accomplishment and self-worth. Once back in the US, she went back to being one of millions of relatively new college graduates without much in the way of marketable job skills. She eventually found her way, but for a while there, she felt really lost.
I'm in a different situation, obviously. I am established in my career (which does not involve teaching English), have a husband and child, and have made quite a number of trips around the sun already, so I have a fairly secure sense of who I am. Moving back to the US won't, for me, result in a psychological demotion in the workplace, and I'm moving back with a job in hand. However, I admit that I am feeling a little strange about giving up the perceived glamor (for lack of a better word) of living "overseas". Of course, living in Korea isn't actually any more glamorous than living anywhere else (although the man-purses that I see in huge numbers every time I go out in public do make a compelling argument that Seoul is more self-consciously fashionable than most places). My life here is fairly ordinary on the surface. I go to work. Come home, have dinner. Sometimes get together with friends, etc. But, there is an automatic special something about living in a country that isn't your place of origin, at least for me. The fact that the sights that I see, the sounds that I hear, the smells in the air, and the tastes of the food are different from those that I think of as "ordinary" puts an extra little sparkle on my day on most days. After over two years, I am used to living here, and some of that sparkle has faded into the clear light of day, but there are still moments every day when I take a deep breath and just appreciate the incredible luck that I've had that allowed me the experience of living here.
And soon it will be over. There will be new joys, new sparkles, and new adventures. I'll be able to put down some tentative new roots without any immediate expectation of pulling them up again down the road. I'll be closer to my family, most of my friends, places that sell the foods that I have been missing for so long. These things are huge, and I'm excited about them. But I don't know when, or if, I'll get the chance to live "overseas" again, which makes me a little sad. And I wonder if, when I get back to the US, having seen what I've seen, learned what I've learned, lived where I've lived, I'll fit in.
While moving to another continent is a pretty daunting endeavor, we've done it together twice already, and I had already done it a few times before I met Mystery, so we pretty much know the drill. Luckily, we didn't bring too many possessions to Korea when we came, and haven't acquired much here (other than tons of baby stuff, most of which we'll just give away). We're also not moving until June, so we have plenty of time to figure out the details. So, while our lives will be upheaved for a while, I'm not particularly stressed about it. And just to make things even better, we have already managed to arrange the rental of a gorgeous house for our first six months back in the US from a family that will be overseas themselves. So, we don't have to look for housing right away, and can look around a bit and see what neighborhood we'd like to live in and what kind of a home we want.
So, on a logistical level, everything seems to be going well. The one thing about this move that has me a little disconcerted is my own emotional reaction to moving back to my own country. I'm mostly feeling good about it, from a practical perspective, but I am feeling a bit wistful. I'm not sure how I feel about not being an expat anymore.
Many years ago, in a former life, I had a friend who went to Japan after graduating from college to teach English. After a couple of years in Japan, she returned to the US. I asked her how it was going, and she said that she was having an identity crisis. When she had been living in Japan, and people in the US asked what she was doing (meaning what was her job), she responded that she was living in Japan, teaching English. The living in Japan part came first. The teaching English was an afterthought. Living in Japan was, for her, the daily accomplishment from which she derived her sense of accomplishment and self-worth. Once back in the US, she went back to being one of millions of relatively new college graduates without much in the way of marketable job skills. She eventually found her way, but for a while there, she felt really lost.
I'm in a different situation, obviously. I am established in my career (which does not involve teaching English), have a husband and child, and have made quite a number of trips around the sun already, so I have a fairly secure sense of who I am. Moving back to the US won't, for me, result in a psychological demotion in the workplace, and I'm moving back with a job in hand. However, I admit that I am feeling a little strange about giving up the perceived glamor (for lack of a better word) of living "overseas". Of course, living in Korea isn't actually any more glamorous than living anywhere else (although the man-purses that I see in huge numbers every time I go out in public do make a compelling argument that Seoul is more self-consciously fashionable than most places). My life here is fairly ordinary on the surface. I go to work. Come home, have dinner. Sometimes get together with friends, etc. But, there is an automatic special something about living in a country that isn't your place of origin, at least for me. The fact that the sights that I see, the sounds that I hear, the smells in the air, and the tastes of the food are different from those that I think of as "ordinary" puts an extra little sparkle on my day on most days. After over two years, I am used to living here, and some of that sparkle has faded into the clear light of day, but there are still moments every day when I take a deep breath and just appreciate the incredible luck that I've had that allowed me the experience of living here.
And soon it will be over. There will be new joys, new sparkles, and new adventures. I'll be able to put down some tentative new roots without any immediate expectation of pulling them up again down the road. I'll be closer to my family, most of my friends, places that sell the foods that I have been missing for so long. These things are huge, and I'm excited about them. But I don't know when, or if, I'll get the chance to live "overseas" again, which makes me a little sad. And I wonder if, when I get back to the US, having seen what I've seen, learned what I've learned, lived where I've lived, I'll fit in.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
The Year of the Ox
This weekend a four-day holiday starts, celebrating the end of the Year of the Rat and the beginning of the Year of the Ox. The stores are now stocked with beautifully packaged gift baskets, as gift-giving is a part of the tradition. Lovely boxes containing carefully-chosen, individually packaged fruits can sell for exorbitant prices, as can other foodstuffs, like fragrant oils, honeys, and such. A few days ago, though, I saw a gift box that absolutely blew my mind. In a nice yellow box, swaddled in tissue, lay four parallel rows of shiny, clean, cans of...
wait for it...
Spam. Yes. Good old-fashioned spam. Apparently nothing says Happy New Year like processed pig parts.
Happy Lunar New Year!
(P.S. I took the job. It's now official. USA here we come.)
wait for it...
Spam. Yes. Good old-fashioned spam. Apparently nothing says Happy New Year like processed pig parts.
Happy Lunar New Year!
(P.S. I took the job. It's now official. USA here we come.)
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Limbo
I'm still here. Just having trouble organizing my thoughts. The last couple of months have been pretty intense in a lot of ways. Not bad, just intense.
The big gap in blog posts was originally precipitated by a trip to the US. We were there for almost a month, visiting friends and taking care of some life details. The trip was non-optional for us if Mystery wanted to keep his green card, since staying outside of the USA for too long will get it canceled, and his re-entry permit (basically a permit to stay out for two years) expired, so he needed to get himself firmly planted back on US soil before the expiration date. It was a pretty welcome trip for other reasons as well, though. I have a new nephew that I hadn't met, several of my dearest friends had new kids too, and of course I'm pretty fond of lots of adults in the US too (and previously existing kids), so it was fantastic to get to meet the new people, and reconnect with the "old" ones.
Eggbert had a fantastic time, other than the jet lag which she decidedly did NOT enjoy. (I didn't enjoy getting up for the day with her at 3 am for what seemed like weeks either, but I guess that's the price you pay for switching sides of the Pacific.) It turns out that she loves other kids, even if she doesn't quite know how to play with them yet. It was quite sweet to watch. And of course, the time that we spent with my parents spoiled her rotten--she LOVED having a staff of four, rather than just the usual two. I think that returning to Korea was a bit disappointing for her.
Arguably the most eventful event of the trip was a job interview for me. As I posted some time ago, Mystery and I have come to the conclusion that it just doesn't make sense for us to continue to plant roots in Korea, so we've been working on an exit strategy. Well, that strategy now seems close to fruition. Nothing is finalized yet, but it looks like we'll be moving back to the US in about six months.
I'm really happy and relieved that in this economy, I have managed to find a decent position, but I'm also having some anxiety about leaving Korea. I never quite felt at home here, whatever that means, but it has grown on me, and I know I'll miss it. In the mean time, my mind is neither here nor there. I think it'll be easier to cope once the final decision is made, and it's all official.
The big gap in blog posts was originally precipitated by a trip to the US. We were there for almost a month, visiting friends and taking care of some life details. The trip was non-optional for us if Mystery wanted to keep his green card, since staying outside of the USA for too long will get it canceled, and his re-entry permit (basically a permit to stay out for two years) expired, so he needed to get himself firmly planted back on US soil before the expiration date. It was a pretty welcome trip for other reasons as well, though. I have a new nephew that I hadn't met, several of my dearest friends had new kids too, and of course I'm pretty fond of lots of adults in the US too (and previously existing kids), so it was fantastic to get to meet the new people, and reconnect with the "old" ones.
Eggbert had a fantastic time, other than the jet lag which she decidedly did NOT enjoy. (I didn't enjoy getting up for the day with her at 3 am for what seemed like weeks either, but I guess that's the price you pay for switching sides of the Pacific.) It turns out that she loves other kids, even if she doesn't quite know how to play with them yet. It was quite sweet to watch. And of course, the time that we spent with my parents spoiled her rotten--she LOVED having a staff of four, rather than just the usual two. I think that returning to Korea was a bit disappointing for her.
Arguably the most eventful event of the trip was a job interview for me. As I posted some time ago, Mystery and I have come to the conclusion that it just doesn't make sense for us to continue to plant roots in Korea, so we've been working on an exit strategy. Well, that strategy now seems close to fruition. Nothing is finalized yet, but it looks like we'll be moving back to the US in about six months.
I'm really happy and relieved that in this economy, I have managed to find a decent position, but I'm also having some anxiety about leaving Korea. I never quite felt at home here, whatever that means, but it has grown on me, and I know I'll miss it. In the mean time, my mind is neither here nor there. I think it'll be easier to cope once the final decision is made, and it's all official.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)