Join Me in Snarkville

You may not know this, but I have a little crush on someone. An amazing writer and a funny person and someone I’ll get to travel with soon enough. But anyway, she runs a little contest monthly called Blogging 4 Books, find the details here. This month the prize is from HER, the object of my little crush. So alas, I felt this overwhelming need to attempt to write something. So here it is. Back to your regularly scheduled snark tomorrow.

I’ve thought a lot about what it means to be between. There’s the obvious where you stand between two forces and hold them apart, much like the guy who attempts to break up a bar fight. He always gets punched, at least once, before the rest of the crowd can pull the two warring foes apart. There’s the protective between, when the Dutch boy stood between his town and held back the tide of the breaking dam with his fingers. There’s the gentle between, like when you as a child would snuggle up between your parents after a nightmare and you could just feel that there was no safer place on Earth. But there’s also the between that you can only experience in moments. The between that happens as you are on the cusp of something that will radically change your life and for a second, a mere breath, you are between. You are neither part of the old you nor wholly part of the new. You are just you, defined by neither things, and you are somehow part of them both. It is this kind of between that is the most elusive.

I could bore you with stories of this elusive kind of between. Like stepping off into my wedding day or those minutes before I saw Duke for the first time. Those are the ones that so many people have, while special and moving to me personally are not truly unique to call out here. My between is all about saying good-bye and hello in a single breath.
I closed the door. I left the keys on the counter with cash for the cleaning lady. I asked my husband to leave the back door unlocked there was nothing in the hosue left to protect and I wanted to know if I had forgotten anything I could still come back in. I cried. I didn’t cry when we signed the papers for this house. I didn’t cry when we moved in. I didn’t even cry when I brought my son home to our house. But closing the door to the first house I’d owned made me weep. There was a second, a moment, when I knew I was leaving what was most familar and heading off on another adventure. But for a minute, as I stood on the porch and looked at my neighbors’ houses, I thought, “I am homeless” and I was.

At that very moment I embarked on an adventure of a cross-country move, a complete career change, opening our business, I put my son in school, and I would no longer see the inside of a corporate office. But in the moment after I closed the door and before I took my first step on the journey, I was homeless and between. With the tear, I did find the strength to take the step, to begin down the road; but for a moment I stood there between two milestones in my life. One of the life I knew was ending and one of the life I was making was beginning.