our safe house

We're moving to Sydney in about five weeks.  Which means I can't poop right and my left eye is twitching.  Because, so far, all we have in Sydney is one brand new shiny job.  For my husband.  That's it.  No house.  No schools.  No neighborhood.  No car.  No brand new shiny jobs for me.  And Jesus' birthday is in five days.  Not a good time to have kids running around without teacher supervision or shoes and my Christmas cards not done.

This week we plan to pick a neighborhood in which to live in Sydney from our living room in which we live in Auckland.   I can’t order a pair of pants off of J. Crew.com and get it right but for some reason my ass thinks choosing a house overseas is going to be easier.

But we do have some frontrunners so that’s something.  We found areas in Sydney that we know little to nothing about but seem cool when you say them out loud.  Paddington.  Balmain.  Rozelle.  You've got to roll your "r" to make that last one work.  These little pockets of people are located near where my husband will work.  In the city.  Close proximity to his office so I don't have to be a mad single mom is one of the demands of our new home.  Also on the list:  a great public school system and a bathtub.  You really don't know how much you miss a bathtub until you live in a house with three bathrooms and zero bathtubs in a country where shoes are not a priority.  Showers don't clean dirty feet.  Bathtubs do.    

The good news is people have been very helpful here.  They say nothing but nice things about the areas we're thinking about.  Lots of families.  Lovely.  Really good schools.  That's what I'm talking about.  In the city.   Sounds like a bathtub must be involved.  But not as safe as New Zealand.  Come again?  

One frantic Google search later, I discover the bad news.  The NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research website.  It lists all the hotspots for crime in Sydney and classifies them by color.  Yellow for low density hotspots.  Orange for medium density hotspots.  Red for high density hotspots.   Which I read as yellow – oh, orange – my, red – GOD!  I plop in our areas as fast as one can plop in areas and for a second I think a blood vessel has burst in my retina.  Red is everywhere.  Paddington.  Balmain.  Rrrrr-ozelle.  I already feel violated and I haven’t even packed a box.

Which is good.  No boxes packed means no boxes to unpack because I suddenly decide I'm not moving.  I make high stakes decisions just like that.  But before I allow this thought to become words and these words to become a beautiful little breakdown, I see BOCSAR is kind enough to break their color-coded system down further by offense.  There are a lot of offenses.  Some really bad ones.  Breaking and entering and assault.   Bring in the paddy wagon.  And some not so bad.  Malicious damage to property and stealing from a motor vehicle.  Crimes that my four-year old perpetrates on me on a daily basis.  And I realize I’m not afraid.  Just like Eminem.  I need a box.

Side note:  I like Eminem.  

hello, car thieves!

The problem with living in the safest country in the world is you're living in the safest country in the world.  New Zealand.  It’s like a G movie over here where the cops have no guns and the kids don’t lock their bikes and streets are clean without ever having street cleaning day.  But, sadly, this is not reality.  Reality is the rest of the world.  And the rest of the world is rated R and they have guns and locks and really dirty streets.  There are 4.5 million people in all of New Zealand.  Take that same number of humans and pack them into one city -- Sydney -- and you are going to get a couple of dumdums doing dumb things.

So, to the future dumdum who is going to break into my car and steal my CD player, you are a dumdum.  And stealing is a dumb thing.  And you should really think twice about it.  And if you don't, please pop out my CD as there is a good chance it's Eminem and it's mine.  

a kangaroo named russell crowe?

You know those Lifetime movies where the husband lures his American wife to another country so he can kidnap their children -- but replace ‘their children’ with ‘her career’?  This is nothing like that.

That said, we’re moving.  Again.  But not back to Los Angeles or my career.  To someplace closer and far more stable.  Sydney, Australia.  Where they keep the kangaroos and Russell Crowe.  Come February you will be able to add us to that list.  My husband got another new job.  He seems to be printing them like flyers in the basement.  Even though we don’t have a basement.  Maybe in Australia we will. 

The job was offered last week while we were on vacation in Fiji (with my very generous in-laws who hand out holidays like handshakes) so we came home, unpacked and repacked our luggage, and flew to Sydney.  Like a bunch of jackasses.  If you’re in three beautiful vacation destinations – Fiji, Auckland, and Sydney – all in the same week and you are not in the Navy, that kind of makes you a jackass.  If not, saying that last jackass statement definitely does.  Either way, we were doing what we had to do.  Recon mission.

My husband has been to Sydney a couple of times but the kids and I haven't so we had to make sure we could live there.  Our hot Fijian tans were greeted with cold Australian rain.  My first impressions attacked me.  Sydney is so big and a city and there were buildings ev-ery-where.  Panic set in.  I can’t live in big and a city with buildings ev-ery-where.  Besides, we were supposed to move back home next.  I mean, what about my career… and our friends and family… and my career?!  We never seriously talked about moving from another country to another country. I wanted to go down to the basement and print flyers with pictures of my WGA card on it.  I wondered if the American consulate would help me with the reward money. 

And then I calmed the crazy lady down.  In the Lifetime movie version of this, I would’ve slapped myself.  My supportive best friend/lawyer played by Tracey Gold would’ve tried to stop me and told me to breathe.  So I breathed.  Because the next day came with clarity and sunshine and coffee.  Just what you need when you’re making big life decisions.  I went over everything I already knew.  I moved to New Zealand – NEW ZEALAND! – and most of my hair didn’t fall out of my head.  My husband found a great house and a great school in a great neighborhood.  I worked on three NZ television shows.  I finished a feature spec and it's way better than the one I didn't finish.  And my family was happy and intact and full of belly fluff.  In the end, the belly fluff was all that mattered.  Everything I already knew reminded me that moving to Auckland was the best decision I have ever made.  (The worst:  that asymmetrical haircut/bob in the late 80s.)  There was no reason why another leg of our once-in-a-lifetime adventure wouldn't be the same. 

So we're moving to Sydney.  And it's going to be great.  I just hope Russell Crowe is hiring.  And that he likes jackasses.

Fiji.

Auckland.

Sydney!

one year and some change

Air NZ lounge
and a Charlie-sized chair.

A little over a year ago we packed up our house and put endless boxes of whoknowswhat into storage and hugged our friends and family harder than we’d ever hugged them before and went to the airport.  And we got on an airplane and watched a thousand movies and flew over an ocean and fell asleep a little but not enough and then we were in New Zealand.  Living.  And as scary as the prospect was, the reality is amazing.  Even without Target.

My conclusion is this:  When you move to another country and half your crap is in a storage unit, you get a do-over.   At putting one foot in front of the other.  It’s like a having a near-death experience but without the light or the tunnel or the handy defibrillator.  Moving to another country, once you get through all the paperwork and forms and ‘why are you here?’ questions, makes you feel so much lighter, fresher, freer, and suddenly happier.  The act of shedding stuff and stress and the fact that we were now living in Kansas in the 50s were part of it.  But so were we.   

As it turns out, our family was bogged down with life back home in Los Angeles.  Everything just wore us down.  The house.  The street cleaning.  The 405.  The underworked me.  The overworked him.  Thinking of something to eat for dinner every single night over and over.  We got lost in the monotony of it all and misplaced our joy.  That’s not to say we weren’t happy.  We were happy.  But we were like a much loved but slightly abused stuffed animal.  Always smiling, never blinking, being dragged around on the ground by life as we were ever-so-slowly coming apart.  Bits of our belly fluff were everywhere and we had no clue.  

And now.  A year and an ocean and no Targets later.  It’s as if we’ve been sewn back together.  With unbreakable threads of meaning and joy and simplicity.  By the best stuffed animal seamstress in the world.  Our family is happier.  Our quality of life is better.  Our belly fluff is back where it belongs.  

We’re still smiling but now we remember why.  

Blink.

Our plane to happy land.