Well this is it. Today is the day we have been waiting for for months. We’ve packed up, weighed in, taped together, distributed and redistrubuted, and said our last good-byes. We’ve stood in line, ridden on trains, boarded planes. We are on our way, on our way to Spain.
If only I’d be jumping high in the sky like I thought I would be when I imagined this day a year ago, ten years ago, fifteen years ago… instead I am filled with apprehension, so much that it burns my belly a bit more like dread. I want this to be an amazing experience, one in which my children will become fluent in Spanish and taste a culture that is uniquely amazing, so different from their own that they might be different human beings when we return. Is that too much to ask of a six, eight, and nine-year-old?
Not only has the program been cancelled and my position cut to a salary that’s barely a livable wage for one person, but we are also entering a country whose level of unemployment equals the Great Depression. Times are tough, way tougher than anyone in the United States right now could possibly imagine. This will be a year full of challenge and turmoil, poverty and financial choices my husband and I are not accustomed to making. All the same… will we not come out on the other side, penniless and jobless, with a greater appreciation for what we have in this life?
After two and a half hours of restless sleep and airports that will haunt my dreams, I feel I am living in a surrealistic version of reality. Like I am taking a vacation, one in which we will return in a few weeks. How much difference is there, in the grand scheme of life, between a few weeks and a year?
Now we sit in the Toronto airport, our passports freshly stamped with our first port of entry, and my girls’ concerns of the day have moved from wanting breakfast to saying goodbye to family and friends to intense interest in the mostly-unfamiliar plane-riding experience to… wanting to watch Grease on the iPad and pausing at “the butt part.” I listen to them giggle on the gray carpeted floor while Bruce sleeps, oblivious to the bustling of planes, trains, buses, and people, and it all seems so simple: live just one moment at a time. First be grateful that you got the breakfast you wanted, then cry a little bit when you say goodbye, then jump up and down when you board the plane, then find yourself thrilled by the land “where mini people live,” then beg and plead for a dinner you’re so appreciative of when it’s on your plate, and move right on along to the next moment, finding joy in a movie you’ve seen a hundred times.
You never know… the world would be so much simpler, easy to go along with… easy to enjoy. And isn’t that what going to Spain is all about? Enjoying this short life, sucking the marrow out of it until it gives us all we want, all we ask that it offer us, while in the same moment offering up ourselves?
