Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

Lisa

Surprised by New York (part 1)

Last weekend (the third one in October), our family took an overnight/day trip to New York City. I ended up with so many thoughts and stories about our time that I broke it up into three parts so if you read this, you won’t feel overwhelmed by it all. If you want to read it all in one shot, come back in three days.

For now: the backstory.

It started months ago, when a comedy trio from Ireland that my husband follows online announced a U.S. tour with stops in Philadelphia and New York City. He had some money left from Christmas to spend, so he bought two tickets. For the show in Times Square.

When he told me this, I began to panic. Philadelphia is right there and Times Square is over there. How in the world were we going to see a show in Times Square on a Saturday night in October? I listed all the reasons it wasn’t going to work, and I freaked out numerous times trying to think through a plan for the kids. How much did hotels cost in New York? Would we hire a babysitter to stay overnight at our house? Try to find someone to keep our kids for a night at their house? Did I even want to do this?

Technically, it would be a date night but the logistics were overwhelming. Date nights take work no matter where they happen for us, and this one seemed especially hard to plan.

So I ignored it for months.

I waited until my surgery was on the calendar before even attempting to start thinking about how we could do this. I wanted to be sure that I wouldn’t be recovering from surgery when our trip was planned.

I should mention that our family has never been to New York City. Not to explore. I mean, we’ve been to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island (technically New Jersey?) when the kids were too young to remember. (FYI: I just re-read that post from 9 years ago and cringed. Grace for the people we used to be.)

Exhibit A: What our family looked like the first time we saw the Statue of Liberty.

We’ve picked up family at LaGuardia. And Phil and I went to a Mets-Cubs game one time. I don’t really count those as visiting New York, though. Having lived in Pennsylvania 11 years, not visiting New York City feels like a crime.

One night, as Phil and I were tossing around ideas about New York, he said something like, “It’s too bad we couldn’t take the kids and have a family day on Sunday in New York.” Take the kids! I latched onto that idea almost immediately. It seemed like the perfect solution to my worries. Surely we knew someone who could hang out with our kids for a couple of hours in New York while we were at the show. My husband was surprised that I was pursuing this idea. He hadn’t necessarily meant it seriously.

I, however, was certain it was possible.

So, I went to my online network and asked: 1. Am I crazy to think that this is possible? and 2. Did anyone know anyone who could help? Almost immediately, a name was recommended by several people and this friend was enthusiastic and willing to meet us in the city and hang out with my kids, even though none of us had met in person. (I’m going to pause here because yes, this sounds weird. Bu this friend and I are connected through a group of women who have been sharing, supporting and encouraging each other online for something like four years. I would trust any of these ladies with my kids and my life, so this was not at all weird to me.)

I breathed a sigh of relief. We had the beginnings of a plan! With the first piece of the puzzle in place, more plans came together. We booked a hotel. We made a list of things we wanted to see. (It was too long.) Our friend helped us plan our sightseeing day, even figuring out what trains we might need to ride from one place to the next.

In the midst of this planning, my husband and I had an argument. Maybe it was more of a disagreement, and I’ll admit that it was primarily my anxiety and stress that caused it. I wanted to put a whole bunch of activities on our to-see list. He wanted us to walk around and take in the city. At the root of the disagreement was this feeling that maybe I wouldn’t like New York. I know tons of people who LOVE it, and I worried that I wouldn’t “get it.” I’m used to trips where we do things, like visit museums or historical sites or national parks. None of that was on our plan. (Actually, some of that was but we quickly realized we couldn’t accomplish all of it in one week, much less one day.)

As we took a realistic look at our time in the city, we whittled the list down to just a couple of sights to see, and as our trip approached, my excitement grew. Some of the stress transferred to Phil as he planned our food stops because the other thing we like to do when we visit a new place is eat local.

In my mind, it was all coming together beautifully.

Photo by Elena Koycheva on Unsplash

A few days before our trip, the friend who was going to meet us messaged me and said she hadn’t been feeling well. She wanted to let me know that it was possible she couldn’t meet us but that she was going to work to find us a backup among her friends. I still trusted that this was going to work out but my anxiety was increasing. The night before our trip, she was still not feeling well and still looking for a backup. I didn’t sleep much that night as I tried to work a solution. I had one more option, and as soon as I woke and it was a reasonable hour, I set to work finding a backup companion for our kids when I should have been packing and doing laundry.

Early in our planning, when I was trying to figure out what our kids would do in Times Square while we were at the show, I messaged my brother who travels a lot and has good recommendations for things to do/see/eat. Also, his wife’s family lives in New York City. During these discussions, his wife’s parents made an offer to help show us around New York while we were there. We weren’t sure we were ready to take it at that time, but when the Saturday morning of our trip arrived and we had a snag in our childcare plan, I knew exactly who to contact. My brother put me in touch with his mother-in-law and what ensued was a flurry of text messages over the next several hours.

I did not ask her directly to watch my kids on short notice. I only wondered if they would know of anyone who could.

So my first surprise of New York was an enthusiastic offer to hang out with my kids for a couple of hours from a woman I have only met once at a wedding celebration years ago but who loves my brother and considers us all family.

It was a relief in so many ways. We made a plan to meet later that night, and I set out to finish the packing and try to get the house in some sort of order.

Her generous offer would not be the only surprise New York had to offer.

To be continued …

The leaving and the staying

I started this blog post in early summer, but in reality, I was writing it months before that. I probably started it in late April when we got some news about our dearest friends. But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.

Sometimes when I write to process my feelings, that means I’ve dealt with my feelings, but when the anxiety put itself front and center last month, a friend gently suggested that maybe there was something I hadn’t dealt with yet. “Just wondering  if some of the struggle this summer is that you’re grieving … but maybe not acknowledging and grieving it well.”

First, let me say, that it is a gift to have friends who will say this kind of thing. Did it hurt a little to read? Yes, but only because there is truth to it. I have been grieving something all summer, but I haven’t let myself truly feel the weight of that grief.

—

In April, we learned that our dearest, closest friends–the ones who feel like family–were moving to Arizona. If you didn’t know, Arizona is thousands of miles away from Pennsylvania. My heart cracked right down the middle when I heard the news, even as I wanted to celebrate this next step in their family journey.

In May, we planned a get-together on Memorial Day. They came to our house. We ate. We drank. I cried. A lot. I almost couldn’t talk about the reason we were getting together. I could not acknowledge that this would be the last time we would gather in this way. Every time I looked at our friends, I burst into a fresh round of tears until I finally said, “Tell me why this is a good thing for you. Tell me what you’re looking forward to.” And that got my mind off of our loss and their gain.

I grieved as much for our kids as for myself. Our kids have grown up together. We have known these friends for three-quarters or more of our children’s lives. Our sons have been mistaken for twins or brothers on numerous occasions because their birthdays are only a month apart.

(Their fathers also have been mistaken for brothers.) And we have watched our daughters grow from little girls to young ladies.

That day at our house, the kids played together and tried to say goodbye as best they could. Our two gave small tokens of remembrance to each of their three children. And when it was time to say goodbye, well, I can hardly talk about it. We took a billion selfies outside under the dogwood tree, and we made promises of visits in the not-too-distant future. We hugged and cried and hugged some more and when they pulled out of our driveway, I felt like part of my heart had gone with them.

It would be another month before they left but summer being summer, we weren’t going to see them again.

On the day they started their cross-country trek, I could think of almost nothing else. Technology being what it is, we texted and I followed along with Facebook and Instagram posts.

It was really happening, and I could only watch from our place in Pennsylvania.

—

It took me a while to find words to describe what I was feeling. It was the leaving, yes, and the change to our friendship. (It is not a loss. We still communicate. Maybe more than we did when they lived here, but I miss their faces and their actual physical presence in our lives.) 

But it was also the staying.

Photo by Kristina Tripkovic on Unsplash

In 12 years of our married life, Phil and I have always been the leavers. After our honeymoon, we left our hometown for a central Illinois town offering us schooling and work. A year later, we left there for an even smaller town in Pennsylvania for further schooling. Our five years there was longer than I thought we’d stay, but we knew when we moved there that it wouldn’t be a permanent place for us. The next move brought us to where we are now, a farmhouse “apartment” our kids have outgrown, steady employment and rich relationships.

As much as we love Lancaster, I never thought we’d be the ones to stay while others we cared about left. Leaving is ourjob, I’ve thought, and I’ve spent lots of time wondering why I think that. I also realized that when we were the ones who were leaving, I didn’t think as much about the ones we left behind. Leaving is exciting even when there’s sadness. Leaving is also stressful but it feels like a good kind of stressful because there is hope and change and possibility in the future.

Staying sometimes feels like being stuck. As I watched our friends follow God’s leading, as they prayed for His provision for jobs and purpose, I was a bit envious. And then I was embarrassed by my jealousy. I hadn’t been asking God to do anything big or life-changing. I had stopped praying for anything resembling a purpose or that would take miraculous intervention. I was trusting in only what I could see, what I thought was manageable. 

Maybe we were stuck, I thought, because I was stuck in unbelief.

—

Sameness comes easy to me. If I don’t have to rock the boat, I won’t. I don’t rearrange the furniture on a whim or change my hairstyle to whatever is fashionable. I like schedules and routines but also choosing to sit in one place and read a book for hours.

I’m what inertia would look like if it was human. If I’m at rest, I’m staying at rest. If I’m moving, I’m going to stay moving. Until an outside force acts on me to change the resting or the moving. 

Our friends leaving for a new home on the other side of the country is one of those outside forces.

I know we can’t live in this house forever, but taking the steps to change that is daunting. We saw a place we were interested in this summer, got back in touch with our real estate agent and the bank, secured a letter telling us the amount of loan we could afford only to find out that we were a day late and the property we were interested in had gone under contract the weekend before we got all our ducks in a row.

The house search has been stagnant ever since, but I wonder if we’d have even bothered to take those other steps if we hadn’t seen the way God provided for our friends.

—

On my 40th birthday–almost a year-and-a-half ago now–these friends gave us a gift card to a local craft brewery near their house. “Bring the kiddos to us and enjoy a date night,” they said. For whatever reason, the gift card sat unused so we found ourselves more than a year after the gift driving the familiar roads toward our friends’ house after they’d already left for Arizona. My husband wondered if this would be too hard, driving so close to where they had lived, to the home that was always open and welcoming to our family. It was and it wasn’t. I almost felt like we should drive by the house just to prove to my eyes that they were gone, but seeing pictures on the Internet was enough to convince me.

I thought of them often as we ate and drank, even sending a text to show the number of sample glasses at our table while I tried to make up my mind about which beer to drink. 

Before they left, they had gifted us a bookshelf, and earlier that same day, we moved the bookshelf to its new place along a wall in our living room. We filled it with books, which felt like another fitting tribute to our friends. Between us, numerous books exchanged hands as well as countless book-related conversations. I think of them whenever I look at it.

Part of saying goodbye is mourning a loss but it’s also remembering the good times. I don’t believe the good times are over for our two families. We are planning a vacation out west to visit them next summer. I believe we will pick up where we left off. It might be different, but it will still be good.

—

At a writers retreat this summer, someone asked me if it was always the same, meaning was the content repetitive from year to year. The format of the retreat was the same and the location had been the same for years. It had been two years since I first attended, and what I noticed about the retreat was how different it was for me because I was different. At a different place in my writing. More confident in myself as a whole person. Others at the retreat voiced a similar sentiment. One of them noted that sometimes we need sameness to notice the differences in ourselves. 

It was a powerful observation, and I’m wondering what I would have missed about my own rebirth, my own unbecoming and renewal if my life hadn’t been steady with a measure of sameness these past few years.

In other words, staying doesn’t have to mean “stuck.” Maybe it just means “steady.”

—

I’m still processing my grief over our friends’ move.

And I’m seeing how much we relied on their friendship to sustain us. We are having to invest in other relationships as a family, not as a replacement for our friends but because we need people in proximity to us. It takes work to build friendships. Ours certainly didn’t happen overnight, although it sometimes feels like that. This summer, we experienced some deepening of friendships, and we know we will have to work to maintain those relationships.

—

I have no tidy ending for these thoughts because grief is not tidy. Nor does it have a time limit. Some days I miss our friends more than others. There’s always an empty space, a bit of an ache, but it doesn’t always hurt to the core.

I’m remembering these words from Glennon Doyle in her book Love Warrior: “Grief is love’s souvenir. It’s our proof that we once loved. Grief is the receipt we wave in the air that says to the world: Look! Love was once mine. I loved well. Here is my proof that I paid the price.”

I’m grateful that this friendship isn’t truly lost, and I know now that it’s okay to grieve the change in it.