The Shadow-gloom and Weight of the Sacred

Yesterday was one of the worst days since our return to the states. I just never felt like I was on top of things. The Queen Bee refused to obey anything I said and that just makes for a frustrating day. I'm normally pretty good at practicing patience--I've had my fair share of time working with philistines and neandrathals, so patience is a required attribute for surivival. My daughter, incidentally, is neither of those things. She's just a two year old girl trying to see how far she can stretch the boundaries.

But I don't really think it was the Queen Bee's less-than-admirable behavior that got to me. That's just going to happen from time to time; she is a kid after all and that's just going to happen. It's happened before yesterday and no doubt it will happen again. I think yesterday was such a miserable day because of a culmination of things that are becoming increasingly difficult to handle. We still don't have a home: we shift from living with my parent's for a little bit to living with Gretchen's parents for a little bit. We're in the process of buying a home, but it's a slow moving process. When you don't have a place that's really your own, it's really hard to find your own groove. I'm just really out of whack because of our living situation and, yes, the ongoing and ever-strengthening reversee culture stress does not help.

When you're living in someone else's home, there's really no place for you. You get a room, you get a place, but it's not your place. It's someone else's place that you're borrowing and trying not to mess up. At first, it was just exciting to be back with family. It was exciting to be home. But now I'm realizing that, even though I am with family and still enjoying that, I'm really not home. I'm in someone else's home.

Maybe I'm in someone else's city, too. Today I really found myself wanting to be back in Vienna. I imagined a marvelously cool Viennese morning in a coffeehouse, sipping way on a Wiener melange as I wrote away in my journal for hours (it's customary to spend three or so hours per visit in a Viennese coffeehouse). One of my favorite coffee houses was Cafe Falk (see the Vedunia section of this blog) because they knew me so well that I could sit down and order "Wie immer." (literally, "as alway" or, perhaps dynamically translated, "the usual").

Another time. Maybe it could have all worked out. For now, though, I just have to move forward with what I have and with what I have done.