Dream: Marietta

I had a dream last night that Ben and I were still in our pre-kid phase. We had both gotten technology jobs in Atlanta and moved to an apartment complex in Marietta, GA. Somehow in my dream mind I knew that Marietta was a suburb of Atlanta, which I did not know in my conscious mind until I looked it up this morning.

In my dream I was unpacking our boxes in the new apartment, and still thinking of all of the things I would do the next time I came back to Tallahassee. I thought, maybe we can go back on the weekends. Maybe this is a temporary move. But throughout the course of the dream I came to know that this move was the next step in our lives, that we both had good opportunities there, and that I needed to start thinking of Marietta as my home. That I could keep my memories of Tallahassee but it was time to move on to a new way of thinking about my daily life.

As obsessed as I am with the idea of place/landscape and its effect on every aspect of life, I do not think this was a dream about place, in the physical sense. Yesterday I was thinking and praying about how I might get used to the new way of life (2 kids and all the attending challenges) and stop wishing for the way things used to be. When I just had C, I yearned for the freedom of my pre-kid life, until I adjusted and got used to the responsibilities of having a kid, and then it became No Big Deal. I am not to the No Big Deal phase of having 2 kids yet, though. If anything, I am taking steps backwards. I have stopped trying to go out with the kids -- there are just too many variables, and I almost always end up screaming at my poor son and then crying myself when I try to fit an outing into a day that is already full of responsibility.

So maybe this dream is a metaphor for me -- I didn't know I was moving to "Marietta" (a metaphor for "life with two kids," in that it represents progress, but it is still a difficult adjustment), but here I am, and it is time to stop looking backwards. Instead, it is time to look up some fun things to do here in this new place, and finish unpacking all my boxes and get comfortable.