Tug of War

Fifteen years ago I moved to the great Northwest with my second husband. He is long gone, but I have remained in the tiny little seaport town we discovered on the Olympic Peninsula. I love this place with all my heart. I look out on Puget Sound from my living and dining room windows, face a huge field from my kitchen that fronts a fort offering hiking trails as well as cultural events attended by people from all over the country, and find great peace from the beauty and quiet around me. When I visit Portland, where my younger daughter lives with her husband and two little boys, I feel accosted by the noise around me, even though as cities go, Portland is relatively small in size. I am grateful on a daily basis for the place I live in, and never tire of the view. I am four hours from Portland by car, and seven from Bend, where my other daughter lives, and therein lies the rub. Although I visit Portland every five or six weeks, and my older daughter often drives down to see me when I am there, I usually spend a teary half hour on my drive home. I long to live closer to both of my daughters and to my grandsons. My daughters and I like each other, which seems a miracle to me, and though we sometimes disagree, or even argue, the mutual respect is quite apparent. And the boys….I never dreamed the pleasure I would derive from having grandsons, playing with them, making cake side by side, flour all over the floor, laughing together and hearing their delighted little voices as I climb the stairs to the front door: Grandma! I don’t want to live in a city. I want to stay where I am. But I also want to live closer to them so the girls and I can have lunch together on a regular basis, and I can drop in on a soccer game or school activity. Of course I can’t do both: stay here and live just miles from both of my daughters. Place has never been as important to me as it has become in this last third of my life. The Peninsula affords me peace of mind, as well as the proximity of endless beauty which feeds my soul, important for a writer. Within months both daughters will probably live in Bend, though neither my partner nor I want to move there. I can fly to Bend, which may be easier in the long run than that one-way four-hour drive, but even as I write these words my stomach sinks as I think ‘seven hour drive–eight if I stop along the way to stretch and eat my lunch.’ As we age, do we choose to move closer to our kids, or do we accept the inevitable distance and Skype more often? I don’t have an answer for myself yet that satisfies. For now I feel a constant tug of war: here or there; my life separate or more joined together. And this doesn’t even take into account my partner’s daughters and his desire to be closer to them in California where they live. Tug of war indeed, with no easy answers.