Homesick?

When you're sick, as Jack was last week - again - and I am this week - also again - you tend to get kind of philosophical. Maybe it's all that lying around watching bad TV that you can't change the channel on because the remote is slightly out of reach. Gives you more time for thinking.

Anyway. Emily and I and Jack and Charlie were pretty much going stir crazy this past weekend, starting on Thursday, because Jack was too sick to go anywhere and when he can't go anywhere, we don't. Around the time he started feeling better, maybe late Saturday or Sunday, I started feeling worse. And suddenly the challenge of taking care of Jack and Charlie - who really needs to burn off energy in a decent daily walk or two - gets shifted entirely to Emily, plus she has to find a way to keep me from moaning too loudly with my flu/sore throat/body ache/whatever.

Those philosophical thoughts, coupled with just the difficulty of doing ANYTHING when you feel like death warmed over, let alone keeping your son from crawling up and down the back stairs every few minutes, help crystallize some uncertainty you've been having anyway: Man, wouldn't it be nice to live closer to family? To have someone who's not sick around to entertain your son and walk your dog, so you can just sleep. And we have friends, but whatever the reason, we don't feel comfortable asking them to come save us, either because we're not close enough or because we fear they'd say no or because we sense that we wouldn't do it for them. I don't know. It's a discussion we've had before and will likely have again, but Emily and I can be independent to a fault, not being closer to people sometimes because we're afraid to let anyone in.

My Mom used to say that home is the place where when you have to go there, they have to take you in. I don't think she meant it as negatively as it sounds, and of course my parents had to take me in several times - after a cross-country trip, and after a cross-country move, and after a variety of jobs and addresses I moved on from for one reason or another.

And then on top of needing or wanting help - and this is just with one child, mind you - we want Jack to know his family, all of it. His cousin and aunt and uncle in New York, his grandparents in New York and Vermont, his family in Ireland - a far more reasonable trip from the East Coast than from Colorado.

This is the other discussion we've had frequently in the past year or two, and we don't have an answer for that either. We like our lives here. But we do miss our families there.

I think as long as we're here in Colorado we believe we'll be moving back East eventually. We just don't know when. And being brain-addled and confused by flu medication and groggy from poor sleep is no time to make a decision. Not for us, and not for Jack. It is, however, apparently a time to think about it. I think I'll go sleep on it.