Last winter, Lance and I discovered this restaurant called the Original Pancake House out in Falls Church. We went there for the first time on our way to buy a Christmas tree one Saturday and gorged ourselves on hash browns with melty cheese, eggs, bacon, and impossibly delicious pancakes. Once we were delightfully, albeit painfully full, we went to a nursery nearby and picked over blue spruces. Finding the perfect Christmas tree is like trying on the perfect wedding dress… you look and look and look but you know you’ve found it when you can imagine lights and ornaments all sparkly hanging on it and, perfectly balanced after your sap-covered, splintered-handed husband has adjusted it to your meticulous instructions (“ok a bit to the left, no not that much, a bit more, to the right…now go back, WAIT! forward…”), you have pushed it in its little tree stand to sit squarely in front of your front window for your cat to climb and destroy. But I love this entire process, as I have mentioned before.
A couple of (reclaimed, carefree, and slightly guilt-ridden) Saturdays ago, having no worship practice as we are no longer on the worship team, Lance and I went to the Original Pancake House for brunch. He opened the door. The bell tinkled over my head. And suddenly it was last winter, and we were about to shop for our Christmas tree, and I was filled with a nostalgia so poignant that we had barely sat down and ordered coffees when Lance looked across at me and realized I was crying.
I know pregnancy is a delicate state for most women, and I’ve read and heard hilarious and horrifying stories of women who find themselves inexplicably throwing remote controls and gallons of milk at their husbands’ stupid, stupid faces. Then later, when she finds him putting his water glass in the dishwasher, she is so touched that she tears up, silently thanks the Lord for her sensitive husband, and quickly become so turned on that she rips the clothing off his glorious, sinewy back and bangs him right there on the kitchen floor.
I think that I have yet to be this insane, although remember you’re hearing this story from me and not my weary husband. Anyway, back to the pancake place. I had a complete and total pregnant woman breakdown right there at the table, tears dripping into my creamy coffee cup, and Lance is all alarmed and concerned and like “Babe, what’s wrong?” and I’m all “I don’t know!” and he’s at a loss and so am I, and he just looks so sad and worried about me that I try to put words to my feelings. And it goes something like this:
Me: “Remember before when we were in here and we were about to buy a Christmas tree?”
Lance: “Yes.” (waiting for the part where that matters)
Me: “Well that’s why I’m sad. I think… I think I miss Christmas.”
Lance: (weighing the costs of having me committed or going to the bathroom and sneaking out the window) “Ok.”
Me: “I think I need help. I really think I might be… you know… crazy.”
This was the point, dear reader, when I decided that I really must be crazy. Who cries because they miss Christmas?! Even as I said it, even as I felt it, I realized it must be true, which made me feel a little bit better because I thought “crazy people don’t know they’re crazy… right??” and simultaneously I felt a little bit worse because one doesn’t like to realize that one is crazy. So all this internalizing only made me cry harder, and it was one of those awful things where I was trying really hard to stop because I wanted to order some scrambled eggs without the waitress thinking I was being abused or I had forgotten my medication or something, but I couldn’t stop because I was just so sad that it wasn’t Christmas, and I was also angry that I was sad about it not being Christmas.
And then Lance said this: “You’re not crazy… you miss Christmas because you miss what it represents. You miss your family, and your friends, because it’s the only time when you get to see them for a long interval and you don’t have to worry about work or responsibilities.” (You can see why I married him.) It got me thinking about this insatiable, nagging homesickness that I have carried at the back of my heart for the last two and a half years. It’s hard to explain this, but it’s always there. Even when I’m not lonely, I’m never not lonely.
And in five months I’m having a baby. And I don’t want this baby to know this pain, or to see it in me. So that’s why…
#5) We’re moving back to the south. This is simultaneously A) making me more excited than if you offered me free Sarah Mac tickets for the rest of my life and B) making me more nervous and stressed out than if I was forced to audition for the revival of Hair on Broadway. Naked.
We’re moving in t-minus two weeks. If you’re looking for me, I’ll be neurotically packing my house and labelling each box in clear, big letters. I will not be A) wondering where we’re going to live when we get there, B) wondering where the pets are going to live or how stressed out this is going to make them right before we introduce a huge change like a baby into their furry little lives, C) wondering where we’ll get the money for all this insanity, or D) wondering how the hell one skinny guy and one pregnant woman are going to move all our shit in one day from our two-level apartment to a moving truck, then out of the moving truck and into a storage room in Nashville. I will simply be packing, and remembering that THIS IS RIGHT because I walked into a pancake house and missed Christmas and no one should have to feel this crazy and lonely all the time.
MUSIC CITY!
