Getting ready for the next step

We just found out we won’t be moving overseas at the end of this tour sometime early next summer. (Relieved, Mom? This means no cheap vacation for you.) Just as we suspected, the Navy won’t send a service member with more than 3 dependents OCONUS (outside the continental US, for nonmilitary types) without special dispensation. Although I think my husband is special, he’s not the only person who can do the jobs available in the places we requested: Hawaii, Sicily, and Guam.



I’m a little relieved myself actually. For a long time, I told my husband that I didn’t want to go abroad to live. It wasn’t the international living that I was hesitant about; it was staying overseas for 3 year orders. I didn’t want to be separated from my extended family that long. In retrospect, maybe we should have tried to get orders while the kids were little and little in number. Three years isn’t really that long. The kids have a hard time remembering events that occurred three years ago. For that matter, so do I. What would we have missed being gone?


We would have missed weddings and some funerals and a lot of birthdays, many of which we’ve missed anyway.


On the other hand, what would we have gained? Some unique family memories and awesome photograph opportunities? An opportunity to learn another language? To immerse ourselves in another culture? (To a certain extent, we’re doing that now…) A spirit of adventure?


I’m not a risk taker. I’ve never been one to argue that you have to experience life in order to feel like you’ve lived well and to understand others. That’s what books are for. An armload of writers – most? - never travelled very far from home but exhibit wisdom and empathy in their books. But my fear of the unknown has directed my life’s path a number of times – where to go to college, when I discouraged my husband from taking a job outside of the Navy that might have landed us in New York City right after 9/11 (accompanied by a loss in pay and job security and perhaps job satisfaction), and when I discouraged my husband from asking for an overseas tour years ago.


Now I would be just as happy to stay put here another couple years. I really do lack a spirit of adventure, I’m afraid. Can I excuse myself by pointing out how much I’ve come to love my little community here? I’d rather be surrounded by people whose company I enjoy than be surrounded by coral reefs or ancient history or whatever beauties would draw us someplace else.


But someplace else is where we’ll end up. And the truth is we’ve always found a community to belong to, usually among our fellow Catholics or military types or homeschoolers or people in the neighborhood. Multiple communities.


So I told my husband that I am not going to give any input on his next request list. Take me wherever. Where you go, I will follow, with our gaggle of children and all our kit and caboodle. Your people are mine.

The Book of Ruth and Naomi

Marge Piercy

When you pick up the Tanakh and read

the Book of Ruth, it is a shock

how little it resembles memory.

It's concerned with inheritance,

lands, men's names, how women

must wiggle and wobble to live.

 

Yet women have kept it dear

for the beloved elder who

cherished Ruth, more friend than

daughter. Daughters leave. Ruth
brought even the baby she made

with Boaz home as a gift.

 

Where you go, I will go too,

your people shall be my people,

I will be a Jew for you,

for what is yours I will love

as I love you, oh Naomi

my mother, my sister, my heart.

Show me a woman who does not dream

a double, heart's twin, a sister

of the mind in whose ear she can whisper,

whose hair she can braid as her life

twists its pleasure and pain and shame.

Show me a woman who does not hide

in the locket of bone that deep

eye beam of fiercely gentle love

she had once from mother, daughter,

sister; once like a warm moon

that radiance aligned the tides

of her blood into potent order.

At the season of first fruits, we recall

two travellers, co-conspirators, scavengers

making do with leftovers and mill ends,

whose friendship was stronger than fear,

stronger than hunger, who walked together,

the road of shards, hands joined.

from http://jhom.com/calendar/sivan/poem.htm