In the Circus of the Transplanted, don’t Look Down – or Back

About nine years ago, it seemed like my family and the extended family of my husband wished to run away and join the circus.

So, in honor of my mother-in-law’s 60th birthday, we booked a family getaway to Club Med Sandpiper in Florida.

Fearless flyers that they are, my WHOLE family, with the exception of my then-pregnant sister-in-law and my husband’s 80something grandmother, had no qualms of climbing a narrow, straight-up ladder nearly 50 feet to the trapeze platform.

It was a slow week there – the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas – so my flipping and catching in-laws had ample opportunities to perfect their trapeze swinging, hanging from their knees, and even getting caught by the muscular trapeze artist who effortless swung from a trapeze on the other side of the net.

Then, at last buckling to the pressure to suck it up and get over my fear of heights, it was my turn.

At 15 feet up, and unharnessed (adults didn’t get a harness until we stood above on the trapeze platform), I just lost it. And started to cry. But a Sandpiper staff member wouldn’t let me give up.

From the opposite side, she nimbly climbed the ladder until she was eye level with me.

“You’ve got this. Just hand over hand. And don’t ever look down.”

I made it to the top. I swung. It was all captured in this very unflattering picture of me.  The look on my face shows I would have been MUCH happier if I just stayed on the ground watching the rest of my circus-crazed family.

This has been a surreal summer. Summer usually offers a welcome change of pace, even though it can be lonely at times when friends all scatter and go off on vacation.

But  when the shortening days of August arrive, they serve as a signal that it’s almost time to go back.

Back to routine.

Back to the friends, neighbors, faces and places that are so familiar.

Back to school.

Back to normal.

In the life of being a multiple-city transplant, there exists three rings.

There is the ring of your own upbringing and the family and friends you’ve left behind in your hometown.

There is the second ring of the surrogate “family” you’ve just left behind in the town you made into your new hometown but was truly your children’s hometown. The only place they’ve ever called home in their memory.

Now, I stand in the third ring of the new city. At the edge of a new school year in a school district that is completely unknown and strange,

it is easy to get sucked into all those memories and thinking about all those familiar places and people with whom you usually reconnect at summer’s end. But right now, thinking of old friends and places I’ve left behind in Rochester, thinking about how hard it will be for daughter to say those last good-byes to her friends as they board one bus and she boards another, is just too hard. It’s too sad right now to look back.

Years later, I’m taking the advice from the circus lady: don’t look down.

When my kids get off the bus from camp tomorrow and step into their new life, into their new home they have not yet seen and into three separate school buildings, this time, I will play the role of the seasoned circus pro, telling her kids from the other side of the ladder not to look back and down, but only, if only for the next few months, up and forward.