Building community or slipping out quietly?!

I am surrounded by the ghosts of my family, but am raising my children in a place without family. It's a little exciting as it offers freedom to move anywhere in the world, but it's also hard: there's no one I can call at 2am. We are doing our best to establish a family-like neighborhood in the surrounding blocks, and truthfully it is a community like no other.

Last family photo. 2018.
It's weird, as I spent the last many years either raising a newborn or caring for a dying parent (or both -- not recommended). One of the things my mother apologized for on her deathbed was for not helping out as much as I needed when Graham was an infant. In his infancy, my mother and I had our biggest arguments: me begging for help, telling her how hopelessly depressed I was, and her telling me to "get over it" and that "life is hard," and me shouting back that "I'm 34, not 16, and you sh
ould be a grandmother and help me and hold this baby," and her saying essentially "you got yourself into this mess." Tears and shouts and arguments and eventual apologies (from both of us -- from me expecting the help, and her just not really being a baby person, which I totally get. She did a 180 when Angus was born and was the only person he'd go to sleep easily for.)

Anyway, we'd finally come to a sweet little grandmother-hangs-out-with-grandchildren beautiful arrangement when she got her stage 4 pancreatic diagnosis. Shit luck, eh?

Now I'm torn between throwing myself fiercely into the neighborhood by hosting sleepovers and potlucks and outdoor movie nights and serving on committees at Lakeside ... and the opposite: extracting myself completely. We could homeschool. We could travel and worldschool. We could liquidate and buy a forest in Scotland. We could buy an RV and start a new blog about traveling families. We could move to LA, like Graham is begging to do, and let him just audition all day long. We could move to the woods, and I could write romance novels.

But the community where we live, while only half a mile away, has so much more of a commune feel already that I don't really want to leave. There are so many kids, and they are all brilliant and kind. Last week a 5-year-old I didn't know knocked on the door (alone!) and asked of my boys could play. It made me smile so much and reminded me that this street is a really fun place to grow up. So maybe we'll stay?


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