We're back

Ok, so the majority of my blog readers are people I am lucky enough to now see or at least talk to every day. But still they ask me, where is my blog? Tell us how you're feeling about being back, they say, even though I've just answered that question while sitting across from them, on the kitchen floor, drinking a glass of wine, ignoring the children. I guess everything is just more real in writing.

I feel fine.

Seriously, I feel very good. We aren't home yet - our house if full of renters so we're staying at a friend's house across the park. Most people tell me we must be feeling so lost and strange to not be in our own home, but it's quite the opposite. The vacation still isn't over but this time, we aren't millions of miles away from our people. And it's spring in Minneapolis. Our people are happy.

In one of these blogs, way back when, I wrote that it had taken me six months in Brazil to finally feel comfortable with the fact that I am a mother. There has been this part of me, since before I even got pregnant, that missed the partying, the politicking, the hanging out at all hours and flirting and getting passionately involved in this or that issue, going to conferences, feeling important in the specific way that parentless adults feel important. I still miss it, but finally after six months in Brazil, I don't grieve it. That's how I feel about being back. It is lovely to be in the mist of this sloppy mass of children and adults when the kids are acting like idiots with each other followed by real sweetness, their semi-sibling status rubbing up against them the hard and right ways. I am so happy to be parenting in community, so proud of Luca and how she is handling this newest change, so proud of the way that the other children have just opened up the Luca space in their lives again.

But I'm not back all the way yet. So I'm not changing the heading on this blog. Brazil is still informing our days, even while we're collapsing back into Minneapolis. Maybe I'll be all the way back when Luca's english is all the way back, or when our tans have faded or when we look at each other across the hungriness of our crazy days, and wish again for quiet by the beach.