I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(52)

After wrestling through this dilemma, I wanted everyone to share my pride in it. Talk about naive . . . Telling people we were leaving was one of the hardest things about moving. I wanted to say, “I’m doing something you’re not going to like, but I love you, and it’s important to me that you cheer me on as I do it, if you possibly can.” I never verbalized that, though. Instead, I blurted it out.

“So, we’re going to do it. We’re going to take a trip up there and look for a house,” I told a dear friend.

“Couldn’t you just join a tennis team?” she asked, half joking.

My friend knew I needed a fresh start; she just wished it could be of a different kind. She knew I’d found something in Nashville life that I didn’t have in Atlanta. “I’m going away” is difficult for people to hear, because it sounds like “I’m going away from you.” It’s hard to sound happy for someone who is leaving you. When a beloved bookseller quit working at the store recently to go to grad school, we presented her with a cake that read FUCK YOU, LINDSAY in icing. Back when I worked in consulting, I once said “No!” to a coworker when she told me she was having a baby. I didn’t mean, “Oh no, your baby is terrible.” I meant, “Oh no, we won’t get to go to happy hour after work anymore.”



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People said other things, too.

“How could you do this to your kids?”

I got that one a couple of times, and it hit me in the gut. Of course I worried about how the move would affect our children. If all those moves during my own childhood had turned me into someone who needed a fresh start every few years, would moving my children now do the same thing to them? Would they ever forgive us for taking them away from their childhood home and friends?

Then again, I reminded myself, all we were doing was moving. It’s not that big a deal. We weren’t sending our kids to go live on the moon. We were going, all together, three and a half hours up the road to a perfectly civilized place—a wonderful place, really—where the children would be fed and clothed and educated, just as they always had been. They’d have to adjust to some change, yes. But they might even like Nashville better.

And one move during childhood—especially in the age of the internet, where it’s infinitely easier to keep up with people—probably wouldn’t have the same effect as half a dozen moves, would it?



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We also heard: “Ugh.”

It’s impossible to spell the actual sound I mean here—it’s more guttural than “ugh,” sort of a combination of “unh” and “yecch”—but you’d know it if you heard it. It’s hardly more than a forceful exhale, really. A verbal eye roll. It conveys sentiments like, “Oh come on, that’s stupid,” or, “Who do you think you are?” It’s dismissive, but there’s also an undertone of bitterness to it.

I understand this one, too. Social scientists call it “crab mentality.” Say there are a bunch of crabs at the bottom of a bucket, and one crab starts trying to crawl out. Instead of giving that crab a boost, the others grab at him with their pincers, pulling him back into the bucket. If they’re going to be in the bucket, they want everyone to be in the bucket.

I’d change the crabs-in-a-bucket analogy to make it a bit gentler, though. Some of the people who looked askance at our plans were dear to us. I can’t think of them as crabs. They were surprised and perhaps hurt and, maybe some of them, a little unsure about their own choices. It’s that confirmation bias thing again: People want to believe the choices they’ve made about where and how they live are right, and sometimes the easiest way to do that is by deciding that all other choices are wrong. If we were choosing to leave life in Atlanta behind, did that mean we thought everyone who stayed was making the wrong choice? No, but it’s typical for the human brain to react that way. So I’ve got to go with some analogy that’s a little more endearing than crabs. Let’s say sloths. I love sloths.

Sloths are slow-moving. Inertia is their jam. Often, in a tight group of human friends, an unspoken accord congeals over time, an agreement that not only are we all in this life together, but we must also do everything together. It can make a reasonable move look radical simply because it veers away from the group.

I’d amend the bucket part of the analogy, too. Our life in Atlanta wasn’t a bucket. We weren’t trapped. I felt trapped, but that was a function of my own mind—the way you can feel claustrophobic sitting in a wide-open room if you don’t want to be in it. I no longer wanted to be there. But I wasn’t being held anywhere against my will, and it was no less objectively lovely a place just because I wanted out. So let’s not say the sloths are in a bucket. Let’s say they’re on a waterbed. A big, comfortable waterbed that’s easy to sink into and hard to get up from. I remember climbing onto my friend Jen’s mom’s waterbed when we were ten years old. When we were ready to climb off, we couldn’t steady our hands and knees, and the waves rolling within the mattress kept knocking us back down. We snorted and giggled, but there was panic in our laughter, too.

I told myself my friendships were like snuggly sloths on a waterbed, and I was the weird sloth who wanted off, and all of this was normal.

It’s not easy to be a people-pleaser who chooses to do something that doesn’t please people, especially if you’ve got that little kid inside your head wanting to be praised and told she’s the best. But sometimes you have to do the thing you have to do, even if it makes people mad. Even if it makes you feel like you’ve lost the support of people you want in your corner. Even if it feels like some people are giving you a big fat F instead of an A+.