Dear Diary

I was thinking the other day, I should write more. Not just fun little craft tutorials either, but what I'm really thinking and feeling and what's really going on in my life. Because here I am one year after my last post, living in a different country. How did we get here? It's a long story.

I figure this is a safe place to write. I need to write. I need an outlet. I'm lonely and I hate it here.

Well, I don't HATE it. I am trying to like it. But dammit I miss my old life. I miss my job at Club Teasdale. For the first time in my life I was doing exactly what I wanted to do. I did something important. I built an after school program where there wasn't one before. I filled an empty abandoned rec building with craft supplies and playground equipment and I started a camp program there in the summer. For two years that building was mine to run. And then I had to leave. Someone I've never met took it over. Now I don't even know what to answer if someone asks, "So what do you do?" Not that anyone is asking.

I miss my house. God, I loved that house. Every day we lived there I felt lucky that it was ours. Maybe because I knew we wouldn't be there very long because that's our lot in life. Every few years we move. We lived in that house longer than we ever lived anywhere (5 years). If you had told me one year ago that next year we'd be living in Canada, I wouldn't believe it. I wasn't ready to leave. Yet here we are. In a house that's smaller and more expensive in a city we had never even been to before. Toronto.

We are here because my husband got an opportunity to do what he wants to do. His work is always the reason we move. He was never doing what he loved in Seattle but we built a nice life for ourselves while we were there, regardless. We could have stayed. I wish we had stayed. But an opportunity came up and we jumped on it. We packed up the kids and dog and cat and bunny and hamster and we drove across Canada and lived in a high rise hotel in downtown Toronto for 2 weeks while we looked for a place to live. Now, we're one month in. We have a house and all our stuff is nearly unpacked in it. There is no turning back. Erik goes off to work every weekday and I walk the kids to school and come home and sit on the couch and stare the walls and cry. I don't think I have the energy to reinvent myself again.