Tourbillon

There is a hurricaine sweeping over the Pacific with my name on it. For real. It is one of those rare ironies that hide precious meaning. It tells me that perhaps it is time to look at my life and ponder why it has become such chaos lately. Perhaps it's no coincidence that "my" hurricaine comes by just when I feel like I am being swept away and pulled at from every different direction. I haven't written for two months now. The reason is that I haven't had a chance to be by myself in those entire two months. It should come as no surprise then that I haven't had a chance to listen to myself or really take care of my soul for a little while.

After two years of living abroad, I have now settled in my old home town again. I use the term "settled" loosely as I am living in my husband's old room at my father-in-law's huge dark house. The bedroom is all him (before me): walls covered with books and law treatises, Beethoveen's plaster head hanging above the bed, shaving accessories, and all sorts of cute nerd paraphernalia. My suitcases are still packed. I love being pampered by the housekeepers and being fed fresh tropical fruit at whim, but I'm beginning to miss a space to call my own. The job search is going slow but steady (as steady as can be in this lousy economy) and we will move to our own (hopefully lovely) flat once either of us gets the first paycheck.

The most daunting challenge has been dealing with the crazy winds of family. It seems like every day there is a new conflict or issue that is affecting the people I love. I'm not even involved in most of these thunderstorms, but I get angry or sad whenever I find out that someone in my family is hurting. I am finding it incredibly difficult to detach myself from the whirlwind happening around me. My father-in-law has begun dating again, and although it's been a year since my mother-in-law passed, I still feel strange and weirdly territorial about him. My grandfather continues to behave like a backward Roman patriarch and humiliating my father at every opportunity. My grandmother threatens to beat unwelcome members of the family with her wooden cane. My mother gets herself into more trouble than she can handle. My husband thinks I'm losing my marbles and thereby begins to lose his. Am I going crazy here?

Of course it was easy to be stable and positive when we were living in our quaint English university town. My biggest stress trigger was school work and I was in a system with no strict deadlines or cutthroat competition. My toughest decision was what new recipe to try out from Gourmet Magazine. I hate to think of it in terms of coming back to the "real world", but that's what it feels like right about now.

As the hurricaine of my life unravels, I find myself wondering how I got here. Sure, the answer seems quite obvious: I have to take care of myself and give myself time away from the madness. I want to work on writing my article and my book project, exercise, spend more time with my husband (just us), be more enthousiastic about the job hunt, and generally enjoy life more. My mother-in-law always said that you can't control what happens around you (a friggin' hurracaine named after me... really?), but you can decide how to face things. I can't control the fact that I don't have job or a penny to my name, or that I temporarily have no closet and no kitchen to play in. I can't control my mother's meddling or my father-in-law's love life. I can, however, decide to stop wobbling around and stand still for a moment. I can try to find my center again and not be pulled into the twister of other people's lives. Perhaps when this hurricaine passes (you know, the actual hurricaine named after me), I will find that the hurricaine of my life has also passed. It has left me standing... a bit shaken up, but enjoying the calm after the storm with both feet firmly on the ground.