Trailing Spouse

I've had a short preview of the challenge of being the "trailing spouse," and the challenge is me. The other day, Lucinda and Arno played in our backyard in Seattle while I frenetically weeded and trimmed plants with an eye toward our departure in 2 weeks.

Then Lucinda told me she wanted to play "wedding" - she would be the bride and I would be the groom - and she kept asking me, every two minutes, while I zipped through the garden looking for things that didn't belong there. "Mama, when can we play wedding?," she kept saying. "Soon," I kept saying, "soon."

Then I heard her singing, to the tune of "Que Sera Sera": "When I was just a little girl, I asked my mother, "When will we play..." This, in a nutshell, is the challenge: I like being busy. I like writing my to-do lists and crossing things off from my to-do lists. And yet I will be mainly responsible for childcare (when the children are not in school) when we get to Tokyo. Which means that, yes, I will have to be more willing to "play" and not to "work," whether that work consists of freelance writing or unpacking or doing the laundry.