I Really Hate This Part

I’m sitting at my desk here in Port Vila, looking out the giant French doors that grace our bedroom. From here I can see out over the pool, down the lagoon, and out to sea. The sun is shining after two days of rain. The water is turquoise—a color that Vanuatu will forever “own” for me now—and even the broad leaves of the palms and the frangipani trees outside my window are glistening green, reflecting the light. It is quite likely the most spectacular office view I will ever have, and it’s mine for only four more days.

I really hate this part. You might think that having uprooted myself from one country and replanted myself in another more than a dozen times now, I’d be good at it. You might think it’s something you get better at with practice.

Logistically, maybe, it is. Mike and I are on this. We’ve been working towards this move for more than six months now. We have divided and conquered. We have sifted and sorted and culled. We have made and executed to-do lists.

So. Many. Lists.

Logistically, I’m confident things are under control (or, at least camping out in the region of “going to be OK”). Emotionally, however, I hate this part, and I think I’m getting worse at it with every move. I’d love to be able to pin the emotional process down on a to-do list and move through it at my own pace (or, better yet, skip some parts entirely) but there doesn’t seem to be any way to sidestep the bittersweet intensity that infuses these last days or shake the melancholy that shadows every “this is the last time” moment. There is no way to escape feeling buffeted by so many goodbyes—to places, and to so many relationships that just seem to be graduating from the shallows. And the worst part of it all, now, is seeing my kids similarly buffeted.

Because the boys love it here. And there are so many things about being here that have been good for them.

They spent the day out at Cynthia and Harry’s village yesterday. We dropped them off at 8am, and were supposed to pick them up at 2, but Cynthia kept letting us know by text that they wanted to stay later, and later. When I finally collected them at 4pm, Dominic was hiding from me in a stand of bamboo and he was very reluctant to get in the car.

They were covered in mud, and on the way home they told me about feeding the pigs, and playing a new game with Cynthia’s kids that involved marbles in the dirt, and harvesting bananas, and making a fire to cook manioc and simboro—which Dominic then devoured.

“It sounds like you guys had a really good day,” I said. “It looks like you had a lot of fun.”

“It does sound like that,” Dominic said with great satisfaction. “It did look like that. And it did happen EXACTLY like that.”

Vanuatu has gifted my children with a colorful childhood—the best kind of colorful. A childhood with warm turquoise water kissing soft sandy beaches. Of electric blue starfish and giant purple clams. Of double rainbows arching over lagoons and living rainbows darting around underwater, weaving in and out of the coral. Of fire flashing against a starry night sky. Of brown dirt wedged underneath their fingernails and smeared across their skin.

My kids have lived for four years now in a house full of doors thrown wide-open, more outside than inside. And they have deeply loved people here—people whose lives look very different from ours, and who have loved them deeply and well in return.

It hurts to see the kids needing to say goodbye to these things. It hurts knowing they don’t really understand what these goodbyes will mean for three months from now, six months, nine months, next year. It hurts knowing that Mike and I are the ones who have made the choices that will teach them those lessons.

There are a number of reasons why we decided to make this move. Those reasons are good and true and I still think we have made the right decision. I am so grateful for that, because without that knowledge I might literally be losing my mind.

Instead, I am just being buffeted—swinging wildly between being soul-thrilled by all the glorious colors of these last moment in Vanuatu, and feeling like I just want to hide in bed in an air-conditioned room and cry. Because even though I am very grateful for all the gifts that this kaleidoscope life has granted me… I still really hate this part.