There’s a stretch of photos on my phone that, until June, I hadn’t looked at for approximately three years. And it was a long stretch of photos, too—spanning from when we first started seriously considering moving to Chicago in late spring of 2019 through when we’d lived here for a few months. I am trying, not for the first time, to clean up the thousands and thousands of photos on my phone (send help). But I got up the nerve to look at these particular photos because some of our best Oakland friends left this summer and seemed so ready for that move while I am, frankly, still mourning ours. Looking back at my photos, I can tell where we started to get serious about moving, because the number of images of our everyday life shoots up—all of the places I loved, the views I knew I’d miss, little things around our apartment.
I truly don’t think I’ve looked at these photos once since I took them. I hadn’t deleted even one duplicate of the string of photos I’d taken of the most ordinary things, like my shelf of cookbooks next to the dining room table, one Saturday’s walk back from the farmers market, or the view of Lake Merritt from the stretch of path that sat at the bottom of our street. I took 10 photos of the corner of our dining room, I kid you not, and then clearly put my phone down and walked away. I think I knew, deep down, how much this whole thing was going to hurt.
Ironically, I took these photos to remember these everyday places that I was so afraid I’d forget, to make sure I could still feel the way that the Bay made me feel once I’d left, but I don’t need them for that. I thought it might all seem fuzzy in my mind, like a vacation you can’t quite believe you actually took. But it doesn’t. Looking at the photos doesn’t remind me of things as much as stir a place deep inside of me where all of these memories reside.
I can see in my photos the point at which we decided definitively to take the leap and I began systematically visiting every place that I loved in the Bay Area. There’s a set of photos from Chicago, when we came to find an apartment, and then the goodbye-to-the-Bay parade picks back up. The whole thing escalates after that, culminating in photos of friends at our backyard goodbye party, our boxed up apartment, and some selfies in which I know we’re crying behind our sunglasses.
Talking to my therapist recently, I found myself referring to our decision to move as not necessarily a right or wrong decision but just a decision. She stopped me, asking me what it felt like to call it that, as usually I am trying desperately to do it all “right.” It feels true, for one thing. I’ve wondered so many times whether it was wrong, but I have found that even on the most confusing, very worst days, I can’t answer that—really, who’s to say? If we were still there, I’m sure we’d be asking all of the same questions that we asked in those last couple of years. What would our current life feel like in that one-bedroom apartment? What about those Fridays during high Covid, when we both worked at home with a nanny and a baby? How many times would Theo have seen his grandparents? I’d still long for the warm nights of a hot Midwestern summer. I’d still wonder if Chicago could be a good fit for us. And I’d still feel torn, just in the old way rather than this new one.
I always say that the pro/con list I made about the move was right, and it’s true—all of the things I miss, all of the things we gained, I spelled them out right there in a list that told me a whole lot about what I valued and loved but nothing about what I should do. And yet, I also know that I miss things even more acutely than I ever loved them while I was there, though I loved them an awful lot—and isn’t this just the way it works?
Meanwhile, I am slowly coming to terms with the fact that a baby’s babyhood does, indeed, go by quickly. Sometimes I look at old photos of Theo, and I can barely believe it happened—something adjacent to that aforementioned vacation that feels more like a dream than reality. For a long time, this made me really, really sad. It still makes me a little sad. But I feel better when I recognize that this is just the way it is—the root of all of those actually-true cliches about the days being long and the years short. I read somewhere that an often unspoken aspect of parenthood is grief—that it’s baked right into normal parenthood, even in a life without big tragedies. Babies go from one age to the next and to the next, and as a new parent, in the sleep-deprived* moment, these so-called stages are nearly impossible to comprehend as distinct phases to someday be viewed in retrospect.
When I look at last summer’s photos of Theo, it’s just like the feeling I used to have when scrolling right past our Oakland-to-Chicago transition. It isn’t nostalgia but something sadder that wells up inside. Yet if I keep rewinding, I find the warmth of nostalgia just a little further back. Maybe it’s simply time that I need. Yet I have also come to believe that it is not a character flaw to be sad about the past. If we can miss the past while enjoying the present and looking forward to the future . . . well, that’s actually about the best we can hope for, isn’t it? Isn’t a full, rich life one in which the future feels promising and there’s a piece of us that is sad to have the past behind? It’s been one of those pesky adult surprises to find that even the very best moments of a very good life are most often tinged with grief or fear or longing. Life, I learn over and over again, is never one thing but many: the joys and sorrows and longings and anxieties and profound moments and plain ones, all mixed up together.
I still long for more right answers, for some dream of certainty that would make everything behind me devoid of ache and longing. But I think those “right” choices and those moments of great clarity about the past or the future are rarer than we like to think. Facing that reality helps, at least for me—acknowledging that with each big choice I’ve made, I’ve been spun off down a particular path, and other paths splinter off from that same decision, lives —maybe even really lovely ones—that I’ll never live. In one of my favorite Dear Sugar columns, Cheryl Strayed writes, “I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us.”
I am learning to spot the gray areas on the horizon of my life, the moments where another sister life is about to begin, before I’m smacked in the face with the realization that once again, there’s no one answer, no easy way about this whole thing. But I am coming to believe that these gray areas, the deciding when there’s no right decision to be made, the potential for loss that makes me so damn anxious, all of the longing and wondering . . . it’s the deepest stuff of life. Life is not the Candy Land map. If we had to draw it out, I think it would look a lot more like the Milky Way, vast and nebulous and unknown, everything swirling together, some parts we’ll someday understand and others that we simply will not, our lives and our sister lives, mixed up into a breathtaking starry mess. When I twist things around to try to make sense of every decision, opportunity, experience, heartbreak, confusion, and choice, I am never successful. But when I sit with the unknowns and the sadness, when I eke out a bit of space for magic and uncertainty in my Enneagram-1 heart, I find a little more of something we might call clarity, or maybe just a little more light.
*Speaking of sleep, the last post I wrote here, roughly 634 years ago, references Theo’s ability to roll over and fall right asleep, all on his own, and I’d just like to say HA HA HA because that lasted maybe a couple of weeks, if that. Just for the record. Just so that post doesn’t join the ranks of parenting lies about easy sleep.
