Re-entry anxiety: shopping

I started this post months ago, but was reminded to finish it after going to Wal-Mart with some friends of ours who recently moved back to the States from Nicaragua. I’ve updated it to more accurately describe my current feelings.

Having been back in the States for nearly a year now, I like to think the most intense emotions of reentry shock are behind us, but we still experience them from time to time—and likely will for years. Living in a different country inevitably changes you. Actually, I would go so far as to say that if living in another country has no effect on your perspectives or practices, you may be unhealthily inflexible. But I digress…

When we first got back to the States, we were running on empty—physically, mentally, and emotionally. As such, we quickly learned which things “cost” the most in terms of energy or anxiety:

•           interacting with people we did not know well
•           being in large public places
•           choosing between a large amount of seemingly equal options

Being overwhelmed all the time was a weird phenomenon for us, and you may not fully understand it if you haven’t experienced it personally. It’s like the emotional version of being sore in unexpected ways after a new kind of intense exercise, but in this case, “being sore” means having trouble making eye contact with people, being completely incapable of answering the question, “What would you like for dinner?” and having a lot of anxiety even thinking about leaving the house. Going to church on a regular basis almost seemed out of the question.

The more we talk with former missionaries or read their blogs, the more we learn that these are common experiences for those returning from out of the country. And there’s one thing especially that everyone like us agrees is the absolute worst: Wal-Mart.

on setting the microwave clock (and other unhelpful solutions)

We got back last week from a 10-day trip to Nicaragua. The microwave clock at our friends' house where we stayed was consistently off by several hours, which naturally bothered me a great deal. I fixed it once, and when a few days later it was again wrong by an unreasonable amount of time, it made me laugh rather than annoyed. Here's why:

For the first year that we lived in Nicaragua, we shared an apartment with my brother and his wife and the first of their three children. (They had been living in country for about a year and a half by that point.) In addition to the learning curve of sharing living space with others, there was a much more stressful learning curve of adjusting to culture and climate. Every difference between Nicaragua and the States stood out sharply, and if I’m honest, these differences seemed poorly planned, inefficient, and sweaty*. I always wanted to shake my head and say, "What a crazy, backwards country!"

to honk or not to honk (is not really the question)

Since getting back to the States five weeks ago, we’ve driven about 5000 miles, seeing family & friends and attending a couple of missions & nonprofit workshops. This adds up to 80-100 hours in the car so far, and I’m having trouble unlearning my honking habits learned in Nicaragua. Back in the tropics, it would be unusual to drive half an hour without honking at least twice. An American visitor rode with me once and told me that he hadn’t honked as much in the last 10 years as I had done in that single day. And I hadn’t been aware that I had honked much. It’s become a reflex.

Honking happens a lot more in Nicaragua because it has a wider range of communication, which I’ll generalize with these five phrases:

One of those days

Today was one of those days. The kind where one thing goes wrong and every other thing follows suit. It’s like all the things were getting together and ganging up on us, knowing if they tried hard enough, they would conquer us.

Tomorrow is our anniversary. Eight wonderful, difficult, amazing, challenging, blessed years. Full of ups and downs (mostly related to our circumstances, not our relationship). We were going to celebrate by going to dinner tonight. But then all the things happened.

We found out the car repair is going to cost at least ten times as much as we thought (yes – no exaggeration – ten!). Our neighborhood kids behaved terribly for us and our team who came to put on a really fun VBS for them this week. And then there is the heat. Which causes the sweat. Which never stops.  Which saps all the energy. And all the little spaces in the day that weren’t filled with sweating profusely, being overwhelmed about the car or frustrated by the kids who were running away as we tried to talk them into behaving and listening—shut up and listen to the message about God’s love!—all those moments were filled with smaller things made bigger by the weight of the rest of the day.

Ruth: a woman who loved well

This afternoon I learned the heartbreaking news that Ruth Graham passed away. Though we didn’t know each other incredibly well, Ruth has forever impacted my life. We met briefly before Chase and I moved to Nicaragua, but we really got to know her via e-mail when she and her 3-year-old son Ethan began to send us e-mails. First, we received this one.

6/22/2010

Dear Julie and Chase,

Hello to you from OK! My son and and I have only met you once briefly just before you left. (I graduated from JBU, if that helps!)  We read your emails together and talk about how you help the children in Nicaragua.

Ethan, 3, has a couple of questions for you!

Old stories: our first apartment (Spring 2007)

About a year ago, Julie and I decided that it could be really fun for us if we began writing down the stories of fun and/or significant memories in our lives. This is the only one we've done so far, and it was recently.

In the month or two leading up to our wedding, we shopped around town for an apartment that would be our first home together. I think we visited about six or seven places. Our standards were the following:

• Should cost around $450-$500 per month

• Should preferably be on the east side of town to be closer to all of our friends. (At the time it seemed that anything more than three miles away was rarely worth driving to since it took around 20 minutes to go through the 10 poorly-timed stoplights and painfully slow speed limits you would surely encounter along the way.)

• Should be free of any kind of notorious infestation. This ruled out even looking at Essex Square (bedbugs) and Sooner Crossing (roaches).

budgeting in two currencies: the perfectionist's nightmare

The fact that Julie and I are both detail-oriented people means that tracking our expenses is a relatively conflict-free part of our marriage–we both agree on the need for accuracy in maintaining a budget. The fact that I love Microsoft Excel makes record-keeping fairly uncomplicated*. But the fact that we both tend towards perfectionism makes budgeting in two different currencies really irritating. The constantly shifting exchange rate** between the Nicaraguan córdoba (C$) and the US dollar means that complete accuracy is virtually unattainable. Discerning the absolute value of money starts to feel like a philosophical question.

picking our battles with the ants

We live with ants. They're in the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom….actually, I can't think of a room they aren't in except the pantry, which is really quite nice of them.

There are two main classifications: little and big.

The little ants actually come in a wide variety, from "biting" to "non-biting," "see-through butts" to "all black," etc. Some people even classify them by what they eat, but what they all have in common is that they can set up shop anywhere, and they come after the food on your counters and your plates. We've found nests underneath tiles, inside power outlets, inside door frames, inside picture frames, in the small space between the table legs and the table top, inside our car door, and somewhere inside our car A/C system. Basically, if there's a gap of half a millimeter, little ants can build their home there.

One Year Kidney-versary!

Well, it’s been a year now since my life drastically changed – for the better, of course. Life is so “normal” now that it’s easy to forget that I ever had kidney problems to begin with. With the exception of continuing to take multiple pills daily and have regular lab work and doctor’s appointments, life looks very much like it did prior to January 2011 when my kidneys mutually decided their time was nearing an end.

Here are some of those drastic changes:

• I haven’t thrown up at all in the last year. For some, this is no major accomplishment. But I had spent the previous two years being nauseous more days than not. And more days than not, it didn’t stop there. The number of times I threw up was definitely in the hundreds during those two years. This probably goes unspoken, but I definitely don’t miss this.

what my stupid stairs taught me about life

Our house has two stories, which means it has stairs. Every time we're faced with the prospect of moving (which has been six times in nearly seven years of marriage), I declare that I would like to live in place with no stairs. Stairs make the moving in/out process far worse than it would be without stairs. In daily life, the term "all the way upstairs" or "all the way downstairs" translates to "not worth getting."

In the six places we've lived in our marriage, however, none of them have been stair-less. We've had bare concrete stairs, concrete stairs covered in tile, bare wooden stairs, and wooden stairs covered in carpet. Some have been creaky, some have been dangerously steep,  some claustrophobia-inducing, some "awkward," some cracked and falling apart. In other words, I don't tend to think kindly on stairs¹. The stairs in our current home are no exception. Let me walk you through a journey up them: