"Stop Me If You Think That You've Heard This One Before"

Please accept my apologies for the previous post’s serious nature. It won’t happen again. Anyway, I’m still figuring out my place here—although so is Connor, apparently.

No longer content to toe the line and accept everything we say as the unmitigated truth, he’s developed—gasp!—his own opinions and is turning into quite the defiant little man, perhaps in response to having been uprooted more often in his first four years of life than a loose-lipped felon in the Witness Protection Program.

(As a consequence of our travels hither and yon, Gypsy life is suddenly starting to look less nomadic than the existence we’ve carved out recently.)

More people in America can probably describe the practice of reverse psychology than can find Iraq (or Canada) on a map, but just because the practice is known far and wide doesn’t mean it doesn’t work on three-year-olds.

And how.

“Whatever you do, don’t wash your hands before dinner,” we’ll say with eyes beaded and brows furrowed. Sure enough, within seconds the water is running, soap is squirting and germs are dispatched.

“Please don’t eat all of your dinner,” we’ll suggest, with a slight waft of desperation. In moments, we’ve got a chipmunk-cheeked kid seated across the table gasping for air because his face is packed.

“Stop spitting on the floor,” we’ll implore, momentarily forgetting that we’re supposed to ask him to do the opposite of whatever it was we wanted him to do... or stop doing.

Sure enough, there will soon be a glob of spit resting at his feet, a string of which will still be stuck to the corner of his mouth.

To say that Connor is obstinate would be an understatement on par with NASA’s immediately-regretted-as-soon-as-it-was-uttered phrase, “Obviously a major malfunction,” when the Challenger blew up in ’86.

But for all his hard-headedness, when he closes his eyes at the end of the day, turns off his mind and melts into the bed—exhausted from a day’s-worth of disobedience and just deserts—it’s hard to remember the obtuse little boy who spits on the floor.

"...But Home Is Nowhere"

I’ve found it odd how little energy I have left when I get home from work each day. True, I don’t spend my days swinging a sledgehammer or smelting steel, but for whatever reason, I’m having trouble staying awake past 10 p.m. without feeling beaten down the next morning. Maybe it has something to do with the continual busy-ness of my job—manual labor though it definitely is not.

When I get home from work, one of the last things on my mind is sitting back down in front of a computer for a protracted amount of time (except to watch online MMA fights)—hence the neglect manifested here.

As we’ve been in transition after transition these past several years, I’ve often envied the stability that “normal” people seem to find in returning to a steady job every day (and one that pays well enough to actually buy groceries and the occasional movie ticket) and the subsequent semblance of normalcy that surely follows. Now that I’ve arrived at what promises to be the filler of the next who-knows-how-many-years of my life—though definitely still acclimating to the new job, town, state and climate—I’m wondering what the draw was.

When I was filling in the gaps, so to speak, while Stacey worked full-time—staying home with Connor during the day and writing/editing/odd jobbing for whomever would have me—we were definitely scraping bottom financially, and we were far from stable (one of my editing jobs routinely kept me out until the wee hours), but I’m starting to feel all sentimental-like for the more trying times, although we’re definitely not out of the woods yet (no pun intended for anyone who remembers that when I started this blog, we were actually living in the woods).

Fittingly, some of my best memories of my entire life were probably gleaned during these last few years when we were semi-homeless and broke and when I frittered away my days alongside my little boy.

I’ve been missing the goliath of a playground in South Carolina where Connor and I would feed the ducks, run our brains out and gallop back and forth across the rope bridge so many times I’d wonder how it didn’t catch fire from the friction caused by obsessive overuse and tiny tennis shoes. I’ve been missing being back amongst our families and friends in Atlanta, not to mention the numerous (and increasing number of) skateparks that the city offers. I’ve even caught myself looking at Google’s satellite images of places where we’ve lived and played in recent years. These fuzzy images, taken from Pluto with a point-and-shoot camera, somehow make me nostalgic for living in the midst of what certainly had to be a clan of white separatists in South Carolina, although logic (and my actual feelings at the time) should tell me to be glad I got out alive and with all my teeth.

But back to the present day, I may have a job that pays decently in a town with the potential to be someplace really great, but as long as 1/4 of our stuff is still in storage and the memories of repeated relocations are fresh, I’ll probably never feel settled.

It’s often said that “there’s no place like home.” I’m still not sure where that is.