It’s not you. It’s me. It’s a 6
Road trip!! No sooner had the words rolled off my tongue, tumbling out of my mouth like building blocks in the hands of a toddler, when all 4 of my kids barked, chirped and otherwise laughed like a pack of hysterical hyenas.
All the “w” questions asked in unison; my stressometer was activated and pegged at max within 60 seconds of announcing we were going to Wyoming, in 6 weeks….because….and then reality slid into home.
Daryl Cooper, outdoors-loving thrill seeker (to my couch potato channel surfer) high school sweetheart of a husband o’mine had been offered the job of Petroleum Engineer with the Dept. of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management office in, doesitreallygetthatcoldinthewinter, Cheyenne, Wyoming, effective – as soon as you can get there!
….Listen kids, I haltingly began, this isn’t a typical family road trip… you know, when we go on vacation for a couple of weeks in the summertime. My voice softened, veering off already imagined snow covered mountainside roads as my mind, still reeling from the news, tried to determine the best way to tell the kids we were moving to Wyoming, to the mountains and long winters and no ocean, leaving friends and family far behind.
When I’d finished telling them we’d be packing up all of our stuff and starting a new life in a brand new place, a place we’d never been, they seemed genuinely excited, which wasn’t the reaction I was expecting and then, like lightening to a metal rod, the thought occurred to me that perhaps I was projecting onto them, my trepidation and fears of the unknown and unfamiliar, of change.
