Happy Family Birthday!

Our family celebrates the completion of 15 years today. This means bowling and birthday cake, but as it's Sunday, we did the bowling part yesterday.

We only go bowling once a year because it is expensive, and we tell ourselves it makes Family Birthday more special that way. I got the same score as Sophie. That would be 84. She had bumpers, though, so I'm going to hold onto that along with my dignity. Grandpa, however, was beaten by all children, including Ben, Sophie, Noah and the combined game of my 3YO niece Morgan and Lucy, who played alternately. Like me, he can hold onto that fact that they had bumpers.

We are here in lovely, white Utah, where even the angle of the sun and the way the trees move on a windy day like today is so familiar. Bountiful looks older and a little unkempt in places, and it's odd to drive up the east bench onto one of the the multi-million McMansion drives simply to overlook a desolate valley dominated by the refinery, but it is winter.

Do I want to come back? Yes, every time I do the bills. When that time of the month rolls around and it's time again to pay in rent 2-3x what people here pay for their mortgages, I do. When I dream of starting a real garden, one that would sustain canning and plenty of family togetherness in the form of work, then I do. When I see my kids playing with their cousins and enjoying their grandparents and the snow, when I chat with my cousin Kim and California expatriates the Mosses and the Oaks, and see what good friends I have here. There is a big part of me that feels like this is home, that feels more at ease and less tense here.

But there is another part of me, the me of today, which feels like East Pasadena is more my home, that feels like my ward family there is as much my family in some ways. Just living daily life is harder there (in CA) to some extent, but life has gotten harder here, too. Part of me wonders if the idea I have of the Bountiful I would come back to is mixed up with a Bountiful in the past that doesn't exist anymore. It's not like kids can just go out and play in the front yard here anymore than they can there--the world has changed that way.

There is something about being here in Utah that I can't put my finger on, but that I think wouldn't be ideal for our family. I don't know what it is. Like our friend Marlo said after being surprised to find David and I were both from Bountiful, "You guys just don't seem like Bountiful people."

But I love Bountiful people, and the house I grew up imagining I'd have is a Bountiful house. But I think that maybe there is more room for our weirdness outside in the wild. In Pasadena, we almost, almost seem normal, and I feel like that would be unattainable here. And I speculate that Ben's differences are probably better handled in a place where there is so much more difference in so many areas that even kids are more tolerant.

I tell myself I'm above peer pressure and feeling like I "should" be something, but I worry I'd lose myself a bit coming back. And maybe that's just it, maybe you just can't go back, like they say. It would feel a little bit like regressing, because I'm so different from the person that left here almost 12 years ago. In California, I can breathe (the smoggy air) and feel at ease among the other crazies like me (no offense to all my CA friends). And also, in my most focused, centered and spiritual moments, I feel like we are supposed to be there in Pasadena.

So I guess it comes down to feeling financially at ease or psychologically and spiritually at ease.

All of this is moot, of course, because however my husband humors my musings on the topic, when my meandering monologue is over, he gives a tired smile, breathes heavily and moves onto another topic as if I'd never spoken. As if to say "Here in your Hotel California, you can check out (mentally) anytime you want, but you can never leave."

CA is home.