limbo

I'm in a strange limbo. I have another three months of fellowship, but I've finished all my major requirements. I go to clinic a few times a week, study for my boards (which aren't until November), work on a manuscript, and try to muster the courage to ask all those "dumb questions" during this last period before my professional training wheels come off.

I have my nights and weekends off. I pick the kids up early most afternoons and on hot days we go to the pool for a few hours before dinner so that my husband (who works at home) won't be disturbed. I've been baking, which is something I hardly ever do, and we (husband sans children) just finished a two week binge of Breaking Bad. I'm also moonlighting to mitigate some of the financial damage I've done with so much free time.

It's a sweet time, but it's also a strange time. I've wasted too many of my unstructured hours perseverating on the looming change to come. The Move. The Job. I can feel this change near me like the warm heavy breathing of a sleeping animal that's soon to wake up. I'm not scared of it, just aware of it being there.

Perhaps that's a little melodramatic. We've moved a lot in the last fourteen years, got married, had a few kids. Most people I know have undergone at least one, if not a few, major changes during the same time period and more often that change included a cross country or international move. We aren't moving that far and someone else is going to do the actual move for us.

But, for the first time time since I left for college, that move is home, rather than to a city I (correctly) anticipated to be a 3 or 4 year pit stop along the way to... well.. somewhere else I guess.  

While I wouldn't call it a regression, "going home" has, until just recently, entailed a component of just that. I stay with my parents in the house where I grew up. My mom cooks. My dad and I watch reruns of Law & Order with huge bowls of ice cream. We talk about the neighbors, high school sports, and the weather. I don't usually venture far from where they live, which is fairly suburban and removed from the "hipster-chic" elements that have birthed stereotypes of the city- unrecognizable to me- in the time since I've left.

I am unsettled by the idea of living as an adult in a city I've only known as a kid, especially as now, at the completion of my training, when I am expected to act more independently than I have at any previous time in my life, professional or otherwise. I wonder if I will ever feel grown up in a place that reminds me of being 17.

Moving home. More complicate than I had anticipated.