Before I became a parent I had a wonderful life that was all about me. I sought out fun and oh, the fun I had! I played board games, LOTS of video games, I drank beverages that actually had alcohol content, I danced around pagan fires in the dead of winter, and I had a habit of seeing live music. I read books! I planted flower gardens! I organized events! I had friends and we read each other’s tarot cards, we made herbal teas, and we traveled to fun places! I didn’t have a blog, I didn’t email much, and I certainly would not have had a use for Twitter, had it been around back then.

See, I even had time to color my hair and wear jewelry!

But that’s not my life anymore. Now I wake up early each day and I get my kids dressed. I try to feed them balanced meals throughout the day; we play with peg boards and make puzzles, we read stories, we dance in circles as we sing nursery rhymes, we paint, we color, we cook, we drive places, we do housework! It’s a much different life than I had before, but it’s an awesome life that I wouldn’t change.  I cherish every moment with my kids. In fact, I often get dreary eyed as I think about how empty my lap will feel when there are no kids to fill it, and how empty my home will be when there are no laughing voices filling its space. My friend Bryan shared something with me that his grampa told him before he passed away years ago: “I’d rather be up all night long hearing the voices of children than sitting alone in an empty, clean home.” I share that philosophy completely. 

Being a mommy is a crazy kind of fun!

I am trying to integrate some of my past hobbies into my new “adult” life as I search for balance as a mother and a regular humanoid. But what I keep finding is a lack of commonality between myself and others around me. I’ll find a super cool geek that doesn’t have kids, or find someone that has kids but the similarities end there. 

Of course I have grown in many ways since those days have come and gone. I’m not sure I’d get as much pleasure now from spending 100 hours of my time leveling up an Amazon in Diablo II. But there are more simple and similar pleasures like playing geeky board games and learning Ruby. Adam and I like to play Munchkin, Carcassonne, and Settlers of Catan pretty regularly. But those games are tough to play without more players. Our evenings together usually consist of programming on the couch together, listening to DJ Tiesto, or sitting out on the back porch on summer nights staring up at the stars above us, dreaming about life. 

Renae rocking out at Catan

We used to have a couple of friends with pretty common interests that we hung out with regularly. But now that I’m a parent and we’re in the middle of Maine, I can’t seem to find many friends in our area that enjoy gaming and geeking out. There’s more to me than coding and gaming, of course; I love watching independent films, Japanese films, anime, and laughing at the horrible videos on break.com. I like listening to different types of music. I care about sustainability and where my food and products come from. And I love coffee! Tell that to anyone in Maine and you’ll get this response “OMG, I LOVE coffee too!!! I go to Dunkin Donuts three times a day!”; to which I respond, “Ahhh….”; next topic. Being a pagan means I’m pretty drawn to the earth and her cycles, and I love celebrating the seasons and the natural rhythms of the earth. 

So, it’s pretty hard for me to find friends with common interests. Which is why most of my free time is spent in my dining room learning Ruby after the kids are in bed or reading Twitter! Adam asked me last week, “Why are you so addicted to Twitter?” Well, as a stay at home mommy without many local friends, it’s my only source of social interaction with people that are professionals, geeks, and parents. Today, I’ve been able to read about @MikeG1 griping about date parsing, @gilesgoatboy wishing he had more video games to play, and saw a picture of @SummerTulip’s piggie pancakes she made for her son. It’s this great eclectic mix of humans that I love to spy on because they are each like myself in some small way. It makes me feel connected to something that is like myself. The sum of twitter’s parts add up to a nice online friend. It sounds sad, but it can be hard to connect to anything in Auburn, Maine without getting the_hiv.

I know that my Twitter addiction needs to end someday. I spy an intervention sooner or later. But for now I’ll keep enjoying reading about the experiences of my twitter-folk friends and sharing my experiences with them. Twitter fills a niche in my life right now, and I’m thankful to be able to draw on a hand-selected community for wisdom, giggles, and inspiration!

I wrote my first little app in Ruby tonight. Well, that’s a lie. I’ve been writing cute little inapplicable apps for the last month but they’ve just been exercises out of Chris Pine’s “Learn to Program” book. Tonight I actually decided to write a very basic time tracking app armed only with the knowledge I’ve cultivated thus far and it came out swell. I know it’s quite basic and lame, so please laugh. I am laughing at it right now. But I’m learning as quickly as I can with only 2 hours of time a night available for learning Ruby. 

I did end up having to use a hack to display my time (from seconds) to a pretty-formatted date/time string. But I hope to come back to this problem later and come up with my own solution. It doesn’t store the data to a file yet but I’ll be adding that tomorrow evening. I know it will only take 5 minutes but the kids do wake up around 5am and I’d sure like to sleep now

Here’s the nuby code:

There is a war raging within me. The context of the war is location. The enemy is myself.

For the past couple of years I’ve been playing mediator to these two distinctly separate sides of myself that are fighting over where I should sit my butt down for awhile. I am in an incredibly unique position; I can live absolutely anywhere. And I do mean anywhere. My husband is a software architect for a thriving company, Intridea, in DC. They have no real office and all of their employees work from home 100% of the time. They are very generous to all of their employees and they encourage them to live where they will be happiest. Their employees are spread out all over the country, from California, Atlanta, Virginia, to Maine. 

Adam’s initial interest in this company was based upon this particular perk. At the time he interviewed with them we were living outside DC in Ashburn, VA — a beautiful town (albeit very stepford-wife-ish) constructed almost entirely of pre-planned communities. The location offered an abundance of parks for children of all ages, shopping, museums, and was only about 30 minutes away from all that DC had to offer. I was part of a mommy group that did lots of play-dates and my one year old daughter was close with a few of the children in the group.

I was pregnant with our son, Sébastien and he was due in January of 2008. We decided that we wanted Adam to have the ability to work from his home office so that we could go back to Maine to be close to my family and our old friends for support. In November of 2007 we packed everything and made the trek back to Maine. We didn’t anticipate not feeling so good about that decision. 

It was only a couple of months into the winter when Adam and I both started having awkward realizations about the state we had called home for so many years. We began to realize the meaning of the phrase, “You can never go home.” We felt as though we were strangers in a familiar land, mere ghosts drifting through the now dulled landscape of what used to be our home. We saw the same old roads, same restaurants, same street signs, same buildings. We saw family, we saw friends. Although my family has been a great support system for us since we moved back, the friendships that we hoped we were coming back to were not what we thought. Our friends now had kids of their own, lives that were based on different schedules, and had formed common ties with other people in our absence. Friends seemed more competitive and less open and loving. It wasn’t as we remembered. 

Unarguably, Maine is one of the most beautiful spots. Its dense, lush forests abundant with wild creatures, its long craggy coastline, historical lighthouses, quaint coastal towns, charming mill towns, and its gorgeous mountains and lakes make this state a definite contender for the “great place to raise a family” category!

But aside from what a tourist might see, there are some pitfalls to this great state as well. Aside from the small city of Portland (where the cost of living is incredibly over-priced based on the economic situation there), Maine lacks any real enriching, cultural opportunities. Rural towns are alarmingly white and I would consider most Mainer’s attitudes and values to be aligned with those living in red states, despite Maine’s long history of being a blue state. And don’t get me started on red states, you probably won’t like what I have to say :) 

Also, Maine is quite cold. It certainly hardens us, makes us rugged and weathered. I could chop wood in the dead of winter and not complain too much, or shovel a driveway after a storm dropped 16 inches of snow on us. But being hardy isn’t the single, ultimate life skill I want my children to have when they are ready to go out into that beautiful world someday.

I’d rather that my children are open-minded, well-traveled, philosophic, inventive, and that they know to question authority. I want them to walk the streets of great cities and feel the excitement that comes from possibility. I want them to understand humanity for all of its failures and successes. I want them to be compassionate, and fierce. However, I would also want them to know how tend the land so that it yields life sustaining food for their bodies, and how to navigate through forests, identify mushrooms, climb mountains, paddle down rivers, ride horses, and how to feel at home upon Gaia herself. 

So what landscape do I choose to raise them upon? The fertile, peaceful earth in Maine, where they will have the opportunity to create a lifelong relationship with their extended family, as well as enjoy the simple and beautiful gifts of nature? Or do I separate them from this state and our family in order to raise them in a location that offers the possibility of a more enriching and cultural life? Are there places that could offer all of these things? If so, would it be worth taking them away from my family, whom now plays a very active and loving role in their lives?

When we left Maine the first time, I was 9 months pregnant with my first child. My parents were devastated. But atleast at that time we could claim that we had no choice; Adam was offered a great job, top-notch salary, and a new career doing what he loved. It was obviously a great benefit to us as a growing family. We had to follow that path and seek out our destiny through that opportunity. We could excuse ourselves based on that. But this time if we were to move somewhere we would have no one to blame but ourselves. Were we to uproot our kids and leave my family we would have to take full responsibility for doing so. And that will be incredibly hard to do. 

Every day my mind wages this location war upon itself. I’ve always been an adventurer. I don’t like to stay in one spot for very long. I thrive on new settings, new people, and the unknown. So I have to ask myself as I ponder the idea of staying or leaving, am I just thinking about leaving because this is a behavior pattern for me? Certainly, my spontaneity and love for discovering places unseen is part of all this. However, I do seem to have an internal checks and balance system now that I have children, whereas before I could have decided to leave everything I knew behind me at a moment’s notice. 

For now I am just stuck in the mud, so to speak. I’m not quite happy where I am, I’m wondering whether I might be happier somewhere else, I’m wondering where that somewhere else might be, and I’m wondering if it would be worth it in the end anyways, all things considered. It’s a tiring battle because no side ever wins. One day the “move!” side gains ground, but the next day (or even sometimes moments later) the “stay!” side catches up. I’m so torn that I feel paralyzed most of the time. It hurts to think about the future because I haven’t made up my mind about the present.

I don’t go out of my way to either frequent or avoid cemeteries, but today I find myself sitting in one. The kids are in sweet slumber in the backseat of the car and I needed a place to pull over and browse the web. This cemetery just happened to be the most convenient spot for that. At least it was until I pulled in, parked and then realized I didn’t have any service out here!

quiet cemetery on a rainy day

So rather than wasting time scouring craigslist for a new home I’m sitting here amongst the dead. Which is odd for me considering my absolute fear of death. I wonder if the spirits that once animated the decaying bones beneath this fertile earth have gone on to be reborn in new bodies; or are they clutching ferociously to a memory of their precious lives past, unwilling to accept their mortality?

I think that my spirit would certainly be clutching onto something, were I beneath this beautiful grass, hearing echoes of life only a few taunting feet above me. I look at my sweet little girl in the backseat and attempt to accept that there will be a day that she will not be in this world anymore. There will come a day when I am not here to watch her and embrace her. My mind realizes this fact and the now quiet shells of once living humans that lie buried in this cemetery confirms it, but neither my heart nor my spirit could ever accept it.

I’ll try not to spend too much more time in cemeteries.