Making Peace with Distance

October 14, 2011 By michaboyett 4 Comments

I’ve been far away for a long time.

I used to think of Distance as being the space from here to home. But then “home” changed. It became separate places, so far from one another that my finite body could never be fully home. I was always absent from somewhere.

Even when I was with my family in Amarillo, I was far from Chris’ family in Philadelphia and Connecticut. I was far from our community of friends in Syracuse and Pennsylvania. And now, I’m far from the people we love in San Francisco.

Distance can really make me ache. Lately, I’ve been driving the long highways from play date or preschool to home and I feel an overwhelming urge to undo this move. My heart says: Just end it! Go back! Don’t make this place your home. It hurts to live here.

Then, my mind reminds the rest of me that there’s nowhere else to go. This is where our house is, this is where our work is: this is our new home.

I’m pretty good at adjusting, at finding a place to belong, a purpose. I’m good at being busy. Wednesday night we threw a dinner party. Last night 15 UT freshmen girls spent the night on our living room floor! But, all of these relationships are new and I can’t help longing for something old.

Wednesday as I drove home after lunch with new friends, the two boys in my back seat, begging August not to fall asleep in the car, I felt the weight of this Distance. That feeling, though, was immediately followed by a thought of the East coast friends we saw this past weekend. The grateful replaced the ache.

I thought about how much I love those friends, how comfortable we are with each other, how much I still feel like they’re among our dearest, how long it’s been since we lived our lives together, and how, somehow, I’m at peace with that.

I think I’m making peace with Distance. See for a long time Distance has been a monster who steals people from me, who tempts me with promises of phone calls and emails but who really knows what life is like. It’s hard to stay in touch.

Distance has seemed to me like one of Death’s little babies. Sneaky and delicate and attached to the monster whose job is to eventually take every one away. Distance says: “Hey! There are always airplanes and Facebook and Christmas cards.” But, really, it’s sneaking through my loves, erasing faces from my mind, erasing friends’ names from my boy’s memory.

But this weekend, I sat with Barb, Casey, Maarten and Andrea and laughed. We ate breakfast together, rolled our eyes at each other’s sarcasm, and knew exactly how to react to Chris and Casey when the Phillies lost in the playoffs. The great thing about being an adult is that three years doesn’t change that much of us. We still get each other…all those years of formative friendship don’t get thrown out, even when phone calls are hard to come by.

I wish for a day when I sit with all the people I love in one place and eat dinner and drink wine and laugh and dance to music and tell big, beautiful stories and lean back in our chairs and feel the breeze and the warm night. And do you know why I long for that? Why every soul longs for that? Because it’s coming. The sweet banquet God is preparing is coming for us, when God will make everything sad come untrue, every distance will be undone, every death will be made life, every broken promise will be fixed into truth. And I will listen to my friends laugh and I will never cry for them again.

Until then, Distance, I forgive you.

Peace,

Micha

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This Way to Austin…

August 3, 2011 By Micha Boyett Hohorst Leave a Comment

I know, I know. How clichéd is that picture? But I took it myself. I passed that sign twice every Tuesday on Franklin Street in SF, on my way to drop off and pick up August from his school. I never noticed it, of course, until Chris’ interview for the job in Austin. After that, traffic always stopped me in front of it:

“Austin! One Way!” it would exclaim to me from outside my car window. I’d laugh because, if it was God shouting at me, we both knew it was a cheesy way to do it. But still…I needed it. Austin: One Way. Okay, okay.

My mom’s car is packed. She’s driving the boys and me across this fair and large state tomorrow for our new home. Just like that. We left San Francisco five and a half weeks ago. And now we finally aim toward our home.

What is home?  I was wondering that today while I sat with my legs in the water at the community pool I grew up going to. It’s still basically the same, full of faces I vaguely recognize but don’t really have to say hello to. I watched my boy, floaties gripping his skinny arms, flinging himself through the shallow water, playing “dragon slayer” (his term) with his older boy cousins. I watched the light on the water’s surface, circles of shimmerings across their boy-legs. I love being in my hometown, remembering what childhood was like here: the prickly feeling of a thunderstorm making its way into town, the depth of the night sky, the ease of dry air in a hot summer.

My friend Kim sent me a Tim Keller quote today that said: “Home is not primarily a place, it’s a relationship.”

Place confuses me. I can’t seem to stay in one place long enough to ever feel about it how I feel about my hometown. I love many people in many different places. And my insides are all jittery about this new change. Will I be able to get used to driving everywhere again? What will I do without Trader Joes? (Really, what will I do?!) What if we never find a church we love? What if we don’t fall in love with new friends and just sit around aching for the ones far away?

But then, home is a relationship. It’s comfort, right? My 3-year-old needs some comfort: a bed to call his own, a expectation of what every day will be like, some time with his daddy. Home is family. And soon, the four of us will have each other again.

I’m moving to Austin tomorrow. See you when I get there…

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Why I wish I lived in a commune.

July 7, 2011 By michaboyett 6 Comments

 In honor of this little vacation I’m on with some of my favorites, this post from January 6, 2011 seems appropriate.

 

I just rode home in the back seat of a Volkswagen with two seventeen year old girls manning the front seats, singing at the top of their lungs to Taylor Swift.  There are few things I love more in the world that singing to cheesy pop songs in the car with teenage girls.  Ahhhhh. Being home in Philadelphia is good.

I’m only here for a couple more days and will finally be back to real life and an actual schedule (which I’m craving!) and a home that I have the pleasure of caring for. (As much as it’s wonderful to be in all my parents’ homes, it will be nice to have my own kitchen.) But there are sweet, sweet things about being in the Philly-world, among so many dear people who love us and whom we always want to be in our lives. Today I had two of my dearest friends over for lunch. They each have two kids. When we last shared our lives together (a year and a half ago), they were moms of one kid. And these sweet babies don’t know me from any other stranger in their lives. That’s one of the most difficult things about moving: what might be a short time away (3 years?) is eternity for a little person. For August, San Francisco is the only home he’s ever known, no matter how many people loved him through his first year of life here on the East coast.

I keep thinking about that. What does it mean to live in community? There’s no way that I will ever be able to live my life among all the people I love. If I were in charge, I’d bring all my lovelies to some beautiful farm and build all our houses in a big a circle where we’d shoo our kids into their shared acre of play yard, and where I’d garden (I don’t even know how to garden) with all my besties in the warm sunshine everyday. It’s always our joke when we’re with our friends here that one day we’ll move back and start our commune, where all our friends will each use their specific skill sets. (My husband really thinks he could learn wood carving and make amazingly awesome wooden sunglasses.) We’d grow our own food and live together and watch each others’ kids and have an idealic community of support and joy and spiritual care. We laugh about it, but the truth is that we all really long for it.

One of the strange things about coming back to the suburbs from our life in the city is getting used to how long it takes to drive everywhere. People live so far away. When I lived here, I drove thirty minutes to friends’ houses on a regular basis. It was just how life was. Now I have no tolerance for my time in the car. And I can’t help but stare out my window at each of these houses separated from one another by yards and wonder if our society has it all wrong, if we were meant for something much richer than enclosing our families into our boxes of  3 bedroom/2 baths while longing for authentic relationships outside of those enclosures. I’m not just talking about the suburbs. The city may be closer together in space, but we’re just as individualized as the rest of our culture.

What’s the answer? I don’t know. But our houses seem lonely to me and I know that the longing I have for a friend-commune is coming from an authentic place. I long for my kids to be raised among people who love them and who aren’t just their parents. I long for them to have simple lives of playing outside and exploring and building friendships. And I wish we owned goats from which we could make amazing cheese(!). I know that I’m drawn to the monastic life because in some way, they are living the kind of simplicity I’ve always longed to live: communal living, working with their hands, praying and serving together, quietness, ritual. These are all things our culture is missing.

So what does it mean for us to pursue those ideals and still live in our homes, raising kids and going to Trader Joes? I don’t know. But I’d love your thoughts…

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slow, idle, brave

July 6, 2011 By michaboyett Leave a Comment

This week, while I’m on vacation, I’ll be re-posting some thoughts from back in the day (also known as last year). This was first published on July 8, 2010…

 

Today, while zooming through a profile piece on an artist and mother in the New York Times, I came across a new parental catch phrase that seems to ring true with my husband’s notion of “idle parenting,” as he defined it in Wednesday’s post.

That notion was artist Karen Kimmel’s reference to “slow parenting.” She described it as “the idea of making time to be a parent. We so undervalue our time, say yes to too many things and have been programmed to think it’s never enough. Profound things happen when you slow down.”

The interview veers off in the direction of her new venture — Kimmel Kids — an educational line of “tools and toys aimed at getting children and their parents involved in making art.” But what stuck with me in that article was her brief mention of slow parenting. I googled it.

I found this and several other links describing what is called the “Slow Movement,” (taking its name from Carl Honoré’s first book In Praise of Slowness). In the interview I read with Honoré, he speaks to our culture’s perfect swirly storm of opportunity and competition. Our society’s reaction to those two things? We give our children the best of everything, every opportunity, while we long to achieve the perfect family that raises the perfect children.

I know the children who are rising out of this cultural mess. I worked among them in posh suburban Philadelphia. These high school students were gifted immensely and forced by their well meaning parents (whom they did not question) to spend all their free time developing, sharpening, and succeeding in their individual “goals.” Those kids were broken, aimless, and often unable to articulate how they could have so much and feel so lost.

Listen to Honoré’s idea of reprogramming our families toward slowness:

“To me, Slow parenting is about bringing balance into the home. Children need to strive and struggle and stretch themselves, but that does not mean childhood should be a race. Slow parents give their children plenty of time and space to explore the world on their own terms. They keep the family schedule under control so that everyone has enough downtime to rest, reflect and just hang out together…Slow parents understand that childrearing should not be a cross between a competitive sport and product-development. It is not a project; it’s a journey.”

Maybe my experiences with high school kids have forever tainted me toward the idea of the intense development of our children. (A mom at the park casually mentioned the other day that her “hobby” is researching preschools for her near two-year-old son. I’ve been asked often enough if I have August in any language immersion courses. Mandarin, anyone? And since when was a toddler’s “consistent schedule” the most important physiological determiner of his success? I’m sorry…I’m ranting.)

Perhaps I long for slowness for my son for more reasons than the hurting teenagers I’ve known and loved. I own the memory of my childhood: living in my swimsuit all summer, reading whatever books I most loved, running around the neighborhood with my brothers all afternoon. Eating popsicles on the couch.

Perhaps parenting slow is the bravest choice we can make in our success warped shiny society. Perhaps I should thank you, Mom and Dad, for being brave. Thank you that you did not force me into summer learning courses, but you encouraged me to sign up for the public library reading contest. Thank you that you did not ship me off to softball camp in hopes that I would impress your friends with my super important scholarship to Amazingly Fancy College. Instead you played wiffleball with us on late summer evenings in the front yard.

It’s because of you that I did not get that scholarship. I did not get into that college. Instead I learned what I loved. Jesus and words. And I learned that slowly: At home. With my family and with books.

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