When she looks back, what will she say?

When I was 7 months pregnant with Sierra, I closed on my first house. I swore to never make my baby live in an apartment. Never is a dangerous word. We need to be careful when we use this word.

I brought my darling daughter home to a house; it wasn’t exactly a home though. We lived there two years before I decided I want a bigger house. What I know now is that I was running away from what I had created, and I thought more space was the answer. Needless to say, I bought, we moved in to, and I sold the second house of my daughter’s life in under a year. (Details of the chain of events which led to that omitted purposefully.)

I found myself, almost 30, a single mother, and moving back home, with my parents…pretty much every independent American’s worst nightmare. It wasn’t a nightmare though; it was wonderful—thank God. The year and a half Sierra and I lived with my parents afforded her a relationship with her grandparents she would not have otherwise had if life had dealt us a different hand. It was also a time in my adult life that, like it or not, I needed Mom and Dad, and I am extremely thankful that they had the means to be there for me during that time. I am luckier than many because they were, and it afforded me a relationship with my parents I would not have otherwise had.

After a year and half, I was able to buy my third house. It was a townhouse, but it was the last unit. We had a yard and space for a barbeque, and it was all ours. We lived there for almost three years, and I liquidated every last item (minus four boxes and three suitcases worth) when I decided to pick up and move my daughter to another country—to what kind of living arrangement you ask;  an APARTMENT. Remember that never phrase I mentioned, well, never is a dangerous word.

We enjoyed five years in our 10^th floor Rio apartment, overlooking the Lagoa, Rocinha, and a distant view of the ocean. More than a dozen kids for Sierra to play with and never leave the apartment complex. We had two pools, a gym, a large play area, 24 hour security, friendly doormen, and a home.

And I just traded that in. I lived in that apartment longer than any other place in the 20 years since first leaving my parents home. BUT…We are back in a house, and it is a HOME. It’s comfortable, warm, welcoming, peaceful. It feels good here. But…

You knew there would be a but, right?

It’s FAR. It’s far from Sierra’s school. It’s far from my work. It’s far from most of her friends. It’s far from most of my friends. It’s far from the beach. Distance-wise, it’s only 20 kilometers (12.43 miles). It’s actually closer to my work than my mom’s and dad’s house was when we lived with them 10 years ago. But we live in a mega-tropolis, and traffic makes even a few kilometers (or miles) long sometimes.

We average an hour to go to school in the mornings and an hour and a half to come home. 2-3 days a week Sierra is riding public transportation to get to and from school, and the time this consumes in her day can be one hour to three hours depending on…traffic, the weather, the attitude of the drivers, the position of the moon in relation to the Earth…you name it, it’s unpredictable in the end.

With that said, I recently find myself thinking: What is she going to say when she’s an adult and she looks back on this time in her life. Will she have fond memories of our beautiful, peaceful, welcoming home? Or, will she tell her friends, partner, colleagues what a chore it was to be so far away after five years of being in the middle of one of the biggest cities in the world? Will she resent me for the choices I made and forced her to live? Or, will she thank me for the opportunities I provided her?

I hope it’s the latter.

Memory Loss?I received an email once, you know, the mass forwarded email with a message that says you'll have eternal good luck if you forward it on to eight people. I don't remember exactly what the email said, but it had something to do with friends and the kind of friend they are. Something about how people come into your life for a reason, to complete a purpose. If you have friends for a short time or a lifetime, they are equally as important because the reason for that person entering your life is significant and perhaps something you don't know or won't ever know for that matter.
This is so true. I think I'm losing my memory. I seem to have a hard time remembering details. I vaguely remember having been somewhere or seen something or a weekend trip. Then something happens to jog my memory and it comes back--usually. Or someone retells the whole story and in the end I say, "OOOOHHH! I remember!"
George Michael's "I Want Your Sex" was on the radio this morning as I drove to the beach. I could sing along word for word, and I did. I don't think I've actually heard that song in 20 years, but I turned up the volume and sang along, not missing a beat (Bira looked at me strangely a couple of times during the song). As the song was coming to an end, I found myself smiling (not because the song is ridiculously perverted). I found myself smiling because I was 17 again, in Hibbing, MN at the Holiday Basketball Tournament with Dee Tousignant, in our hotel room, decorating the last of the door signs for the guys on the basketball team, eating Wheat Thins with peanut butter covered in chocolate, and screaming our lungs out to George Michael. Yet I can't remember what I did last Sunday.
Living in a foreign country messes with my memory too. I think it's because I still don't think in Portuguese all the time, and being an expatriate means people come and go--a lot. You make new friends and you say good-by--a lot. It's hard at first, especially if you aren't used to the transient life. But a person adjusts, and it ends up being kinda cool in the end when you can say things like: my friends in Abu Dabi, or this friend of mine in Mexico...and things like Skype and Facebook make keeping in touch with people living internationally easier and the loneliness or saudades manageable.
I met one of those friends this week for breakfast. She lives in Luanda. She's here until January because she's pregnant with her first baby and Luanda doesn't have adequate health care facilities to provide the pre-natal, delivery, post natal care she wants/needs/deserves. We met for breakfast at 7:45; I left her house to go to work at noon! There was barely a moment of silence between us as we caught one another up on what life has been like in the two plus a few months since she and her husband left Rio. And we barely scratched the surface. It was great to see her, spend time with her, know that she is healthy and happy and growing (literally at the moment since she's pregnant). But more importantly, I left thinking about that email. The one I received, about friends coming in and out, for a lifetime or for a moment. My visit with my friend who lives in Luanda left me reminiscing about the first couple of years I lived here in Rio. Memories of afternoons on the beach, my first trip to Ilha Grande, my first Escola de Samba enseio, The Black Eyed Peas on Ipanema Beach for New Year's Eve...memories I had thought I had forgotten. 
Sometimes we think we have control of our own lives and then something happens, and we are reminded that we in fact are not the ones guiding this passage. We make decisions or leaps of faith in a moment or over time. We share our joys, and our pains, with others. We strive to be successful, to do the right thing. We congratulate our friends on a job well done or a promotion, and we say good-bye.
I'm starting to believe that perhaps my quase-amnesia (so I have self-diagnosed anyway) is all part of this grander scheme. Maybe I'm not supposed to remember everything all the time. Maybe forgetting for a little while makes the moment when I remember that much sweeter...and it's meant to be that way.