Restless

I never have a problem falling asleep.  Once (at band camp) in Niaje Zimbabwe I was falling asleep in a hut when I realized what I thought was flickering firelight was actually hundreds of cockroaches crawling on the walls.  I slept.  Since I've been back from the hospital I have been up until 2 or 3 every night.  It's partly because I have only 2 episodes of the first season of Homeland left, but it's also because I feel so restless.

Jeremy and I refer to the new house as the "Grown Up House".  It's bigger, we have room for kids to grow, for visitors to come, for lives to be lived without someone yelling at someone else to turn down the tv/music/themselves.  My kids are growing up, I am getting older, and this may well be the last time we move while Hayden and Zeni are living at home.  It's entirely likely that they will back out of this new driveway and drive away for the first time after they get their licenses.  Prom pictures in the front yard?  Huge parties while parents are out of town?  All possible if not probable.  "Moving in" feels less like a rush and more like a slow ooze.  We have the rest of our lives, why hurry to unpack boxes and make decisions about paint colors or furniture (well, aside from the fact that we will have no money because we just bought a Grown Up House...).

All this, for someone who is used to being relatively untethered, is making me restless.  And not because I don't want it - I do.  I want to feel settled and rooted.  I want my kids to feel that way.  I want to spend six months abroad knowing we will come back to this white brick house with the sloping front.  But I still can't fall asleep.

My surgery is over, the weight is coming off, things are going exactly as they are supposed to.  Exciting.  And anxiety provoking.  I spend the day asking myself if I feel hungry, which I don't, wondering if I should weight myself and see if the day has worn off a few more ounces, thinking about the next step in my diet when I get to eat real honest to goodness solid (well, pureed, but that is much more solid than anything I've had lately) food.

Last night Jeremy and I lay in bed and rehashed our days, neither of us able to fall asleep, both with various aches and complaints.  Kids asleep upstairs, dog snoring at the foot of the bed, lights off, house silent.  I felt so safe, and so loved, and so comfortable in every material sense of the word.  And yet... restless.  Him too.

I know you don't have to be moving to a new country, taking a new job, moving on to a new school to be making changes, doing good work, raising good (define as you will) kids, but I don't know any other way to do those things.  So restless I am, a restless heart in a comfortable and settled soul.