Adiós...y hola

I'M moving to Guatemala. I'm MOVING to Guatemala. I'm moving TO Guatemala. I'm moving to GUATEMALA.

I feel that the repetition of this phrase and with different emphasis each time will drive home the point that I seem to be struggling with: I'M MOVING TO GUATEMALA.

Holy crap.

Our daughter, Madelena will turn one in June, and it's my intention to be there while the smoke from that single candle still hangs in the air. I will be there to watch those dimpled fists crush the cake, smear the icing on her round little chin and hear her shriek with the newfound joy of sugary icing. To be there, I am abandoning my home, my job, my crazy dog that is sure to be "accidentally" lost in my absence, my Sunday nights of HBO debauchery, the simplicity of picking up the phone and dialing no more than 10 numbers to reach anyone that I love, Target, dry cleaning, Peet's coffee, the babysitting co-op, a washer and dryer a few steps from where the dirty clothes accumulate. I am giving up my husband's warm back in the middle of the night, cool Oakland evenings, baseball games with $7 hot dogs and the New York Times on Sunday. Trader Joe's will be but a dream, every shopping trip to be a marathon run on cobblestone streets with two small children attached to my body like mollusks.

For some unknown period of my life, thanks to the meanderings and capriciousness of government in Guatemala, I will be living in an apartment with rationed electricity, looking out on the thunderstorms that promise to arrive each and every afternoon during the hot, wet Antigua summer.

But while there, I will have my delicious, golden daughter and my equally perfect and soul-matched son. I will be able to tell my children that we all lived in the country that gave them to me, that we spent lazy mornings in bed reading board books about monitos y más, that their father waited patiently for all of us to return and would at any point trade his remote control and 500 channels for a moment in that same warm bed with us. That we spent those weeks or months learning about each other and about the land that their birth families had lived in for hundreds and hundreds of years, how I memorized the curve of my daughter's plump brown foot and the shine of my son's black-as-coal hair in the Guatemalan sun.

As I think about those mornings, the emphasis of those once scary words has changed: I'm moving to Guatemala.

These words now form a powerful and heartfelt mantra, no longer about where I am going but about the journey that I will have while there.