Three of my favorite people are moving away

Arriving to my sister’s apartment, I always knock on the door and then open it without waiting for an answer, and it is always unlocked.

My sister and her husband, having known I was on my way over, shout hello from wherever they are in the house.

But my one-year-old nephew, not knowing when any visitors might arrive, gets a little jolt of joy and shock when he sees me. When he looks up from playing on the living room floor to see who’s at the door, it’s like a little current of electricity runs through him and his face lights up in surprise: no one told me YOU were coming over!

He runs over and hugs my knees and then careens away to his bedroom. If I don’t follow, he comes back out, pointing and babbling for me to follow him into his room, where he always wants to show me the Duplos, as if I hadn’t seen them just yesterday.

After shouting hello back to the adults in the house, I follow him into his room and we start to build the usual tower. The Duplo tiger always goes right on top.

I’ve always been close to my family, but I think the experience of living far away from all of them for many years cemented the more urgent need for the closeness. That’s one reason I moved from Amman, Jordan to within a 6-minute walk of my sister’s house in the suburbs of Boston, MA.

When coming to the US last year, Raja and I wanted to move to Boston for several reasons, but one of them was proximity to my sister Emily, my brother-in-law Eric, and baby Otto.

It’s been comforting being close by this past year and a half, and getting to watch my very sunshiney nephew grow up, but (dun dun dun) in a few weeks they are moving away to Wisconsin – a long planned move.

Wisconsin is where Emily and I are from, and they’ve been planning for awhile to move there. And, as I keep telling the Coasties over and over again, because they never understand, “Milwaukee is actually a great city!”

So I get it and I’m also very sad.

After years of living overseas and months of having mega anxiety about living overseas, I feel lucky I was able to move back to the US and live close to at least some of my family. My job is fully remote, and Raja was job searching when we moved, so we could go anywhere, which felt like a luxurious amount of choice.

When we moved into our apartment around the corner from theirs, Otto was just four months old. We’d walk over to their house and snuggle him while he laid on his mat with mobiles and toys hanging above him. He didn’t do too much then, but even then he was smiley and had a little Mohawk, a single fine tuft of wispy hair on top of his head and nothing on the sides.

Last summer we watched him struggle to crawl, then crawl, then pull himself up on the couch in their apartment. We’d be chatting and watching him while Emily would be embroidering and Eric would almost always be baking cookies in the kitchen.

In the fall, Raja and I were lucky to have front row seats to see little Otto scoot along the living room carpet holding onto the couch, and eventually take his first steps.

A month ago I starting feeling the inevitable sense of dread about moving day, now just a few weeks away. I anticipated the wave of grief hitting me. I told my friend Rosi that it’s meant so much to me this last year to live so close to some of my family – and that Raja was willing to come here, too.

I told her, “I know I wouldn’t have thought about this in the same way if I had never lived overseas. But if I get locked out of my house, I can call them. If the car breaks down, I can call them. If we don’t have anything to eat for dinner, I can call them. Insert anything after the word ‘if’, and they’re there.”

Besides that, there were the countless evening talks, morning walks, shared dinners, and just-stopping-by-on-my-way-to’s. The endless handing back and forth of tupperwares and the “Butternut Boosts” – Eric’s term for when he and Otto would show up at our door with pastries from Butternut, our favorite bakery in town.

I just want to skip over the grief part and get to the part where I’ve adjusted to a new normal and am at peace with it. I don’t want to feel that sense of loss I’ve felt many times before.

When I left home and moved to another state for college, I left behind my family, close friends, and a long term boyfriend. (The breakup was inevitable, but it took two years of long distance before it finally happened.)

When I graduated from college and moved to another country, I left behind close friends – my chosen family – and a different long term relationship. (The breakup there was also inevitable, but that one was swift and abrupt.)

When living in Jordan, I grew close with so many expat friends only to have them leave for Beirut, or Turkey, or Switzerland, or back to the US.

Every time, I’d go to the going away parties and drink Carakales with them and anticipate the pang of loss I’d feel when they were gone.

I know what it’s like, loss: it’s no mystery to me. In that sense, I don’t fear it – it’s not an unknown – I just don’t want to deal with it. My main thought is can we just skip this please?

Through this past spring and summer, we watched Otto grow, if possible, even more cheerful than he had been to begin with. He’s very happy, this kid. He mostly wants to hand you each of his cars, trucks, and buses one at a time so you can roll them down the makeshift ramp in his room.

He wants you to chase him around the house pulling the little green crocodile on a string while he laugh-shrieks with terror. When he comes over to our place, he wants to stand on the window sill in the living room and watch the cars out the window go by.

Sometimes in a burst of energy he stuffs his food violently into his face and then smears it into his hair and ears. With aunt and uncle life, Raja and I are rather spoiled in that we get to enjoy his goofiness without having to shampoo the oats out of his hair afterwards.

So this is a bon voyage to my lovely clan.

We’ll be helping them pack up the U-Haul soon. I’ll probably cry. The funny thing is that Otto, at one and a half years old, will have no idea what’s going on. Not when we’re packing the U-Haul, not when his dad backs it out of the driveway and starts the two-day drive to Wisconsin, not when he boards the plane with his mom for the flight.

He’s never lived anywhere other than here, but now he’ll be a Wisconsin baby. Maybe they’ll take him to Lambeau field? Will he grow up loving the Badgers?

I’ll give them as many extra hugs as I can before they go. But don’t feel too sad for me: I already have plans to visit Milwaukee in November, December and February!