A week ago, a minute ago, a minute from now.

I wrote this a week ago, and it seems like my circumstances are changing moment by moment, along with my feelings about them. Maybe I need to write, get some distance on it, and then put it out there. Here it is.

10 December 2013 I can't even count how many times I've heard the suggestion: make sure to blog while you're in New Zealand!

I could have spent nearly as much time writing as I did experiencing the things worth writing about, both good and bad (or should I say, those things which made me happy and those things that didn't) and there's one good reason why it took so long. Another would be that I found myself at loose ends for more than four months, and found it hard to live my life, never mind record it, during that time. Even though the next month is going to be unfathomably busy again, the fact that I have a flat to move into on Saturday, finally!, frees up the mental space for me to say something, really say it, about the time I've had here so far (at least, to share it-- I've been writing, but only for myself).

But the biggest, buggiest reason by far is, it's been hard.

Being here has been hard. I didn't realize how hard it would be, before I left, which is probably for the best since it was also unbelievably hard to set my life up to leave, which seems so strange to me now because all that has floated into the cloud cover of distant memory and I don't even remember the kind of hectic that my regular life, the past six years of day-to-day, was for me, never mind how hard it was to wrap of six years of life, parenthood of three pets most importantly, and finances, and medical management for multiple chronic conditions plus catching the fly balls of three joint injuries and their related physical therapy in under two years, including surgery for one the month before I was originally slated to leave for here... OK, the cloud cover is starting to part for a moment and I'm remembering, and I don't particularly want to. That stress can stay in the past. I have current stress that needs juggling in the here and now, so no use for recalling all that.

I wanted to leave.

There, I said it. And you're thinking, especially if you know me, of course you wanted to leave, it was all you could talk about and you jumped through a number of hoops to leave. And all that's true.

But no, I mean something else. I mean, I wanted to leave HERE. New Zealand. The place that, for more than a decade, I told people was my favorite place I'd ever been. My personal mecca, my Gold Mountain. For a couple months there, I wanted out. I wanted home.

This shocked me. I am not the sort to get homesick, though it's not unprecedented. I am sure as shit not the sort to get homesick when I'm in a place that I had for years hoped someday to make my home, even if I couldn't articulate it every moment of that decade in between visiting and moving. Sure, I arrived in Auckland and saw the Long White Cloud Cafe just outside the international terminal and I thought to myself, yesssss. Even the cheesily named airport cafe makes me yearn and stretch toward the two islands to my south. I've just clipped a day off my life and spent 12 hours in a flying tin can to do it, but Aotearoa, girl, you are mine. And that feeling honestly lasted a while. A couple months, at least.

Until youth hostels started to wear on my sanity. Until everything was dirty and smelled funny and I missed my kids (furry kids, all of them, but mine, all of them) to a depth I hadn't imagined, even knowing that they were all safe and spoiled by my parents.

Speaking of my parents: a treasured and unexpected side advantage of this trip was the incredible repair of the relationship between us by giving us the space to see each other in a real and unfettered way. I have never loved them, each of them individually, the way I do now. I had never understood how incredible they are as people and as the people who made me than I have since I left. Six years spent too close into their faces had given me both a deeper appreciation and a deeper resentment, but the mileage and the equator have evaporated the resentment and just given them, in whole, back to me. I will never lie or brush over the hard parts, the sharp corners, of our history together, but their response to my departure, and the deep love they express to me every day in uncountable and unquantifiable ways, not least of which is caring for my charges, brings tears to my eyes and lumps to my throat in ways I couldn't have imagined. The threads that bind me to my real and true home place shine brighter for me now than they did when I couldn't get a little distance, a little sunshine, a little International Date Line, on them.

All the sentiments of the last four months had seemed short and straightforward in my head, despite my knowing better, and now, writing them down, I'm forced to confront the mess, the downright stickiness, of my feelings about my time here. My personal relationships, the face-to-face ones anyway, are delicate, tentative, like kitten steps up my chest (a lot of kittens walk on me, so that was the first metaphor to come to mind). I'm clinging to new friendships tighter than usual. I'm wanting to fall in love, and resisting falling in love, and wanting to settle in, and reminding myself that everything is temporary. But that's always been my way. Wanting to feel the embrace of home, as a concept perhaps if not a place, but fearing the commitment. What will New Zealand, or the experience of being in it at least, teach me about embracing or resisting my tethers?