Coming and Going

There's an awful lot of coming and going in this world in which we're living at the moment. The dedicated few who call themselves Foreign Service Officers seem always to be on the move. The typical overseas assignment is three years, which is just long enough to get connected to folks that you'll have to say goodbye to eventually. Perhaps it's no different than the highly mobile world in which we all live, but somehow, as I watch folks leave post this summer, and see the new arrivals, I wonder what it must be like to always be living in what you know is a temporary situation.

For those of us afflicted by wanderlust, I suppose it's a match made in heaven. Given our track record, I suspect that Eli and I would have fit right in with the on-the-move lifestyle of foreign service officers; as I look back at the nearly 15 years that we've been married, I realize that we've lived in two countries, three states, four cities, 8 houses (including the debacle we had with a "vacation" cottage in NY state a few years ago), and our kids have attended countless schools and and had multiple groups of friends, etc.

I'm rambling, I know, but all of this brings me to something that I've been avoiding writing about on the blog: we're leaving Serbia in one month. Despite the fact that this departure date is consistent with our original plan to return in time for the 2010-2011 school year, once we arrived here, we started flirting around with the idea of staying for an additional year beyond this summer. Had Eli not gotten a great job offer back in Nashville that we frankly felt was too good to pass up, we would have stayed until next summer. Given the job, however, we've decided to return, and are filled with all kinds of mixed emotions (panic, excitement, depression, denial, sadness, joy and more) about our impending departure.

I'm sure that I'll be waxing sentimental about all of this in future posts, but suffice it to say that this has been an incredible, wonderful, irreplaceable experience for our entire family. I truly believe that it will shape, to a very large extent, who our children end up becoming. And I know that it will provide us with many happy memories as we go through the rest of our lives. Despite our regrets about not being able to spend more time here, we are blessed, indeed, to be able to return to Nashville, where we have family and many friends we haven't seen in nearly 18 months.

So, now it's out there, and let me apologize in advance if I obsess on the subject over the next few weeks, but perhaps writing about it will help me come to terms with the fact that we are facing the end of yet another era in our family's life.