Comment: Life Lag™

Moving can really throw you. Moving across the country can throw you further. Moving to another country? Yikes. I’m just across the country, and my head’s spinning. In theory, everything is set up: temporary accommodations, activities for the kids, grocery locations.

But the reality of actually doing it? Mind-boggling.

Theory is so much easier than practice.

I’m living in a city with streets that run every which way with no apparent order. The cashier in the grocery store today told me she’s lived here all her life and still gets lost. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

We’ve been here for four days and it’s all I can do to get the gumption to leave the building. All this change is exhausting.

Meanwhile, my online presence continues virtually uninterrupted, which gives me some solace. Hell, some people don’t even know that I moved, since our primary interactions are online.

I did miss a few days’ worth of blog posts, but otherwise, I could be anywhere and it virtually doesn’t matter.

I was wondering if there is a similar condition to jet lag that I call life lag ™. (I claim it in the name of both my homelands!) A sardonic friend of mine commented, upon hearing this newly-coined phrase, that motherhood is the ultimate life lag.™ She’s got a point. You start a new life by giving birth to a new life and your old life kind of floats behind you, vaguely discernable and growing more distant every day.

It’s the same thing with moving. I wake up in the morning and think I am in California. Or I think of what my friends are doing without me. Or how easy it was to get to Target from my old house (sob). My old life is lagging behind this new life. And, like jet lag, I just want to sleep this one off.

At some point, things will merge, and I will begin to feel like this is home. It’s just not happening quite yet.