Coming home

It’s been almost four years since I wrote my last blog post here. Amazing to believe, but true. So much has happened in that time and so much has changed, that I hardly know where to begin. For starters – I got married – the “mystery man” that my family was wondering about – Ali – in the picture from the last post in January 2012, became my husband. Then, earlier this year we had a baby, Lydia Dilara. In the last three years I started a new job, and moved to the (quieter) Asian side of Istanbul as well and suffice to say, life has changed in innumerable ways. And yet, much remains the same.

These days, most traveling is limited to Istanbul, or to our yearly trips home to the U.S. I no longer jet off to nearby countries for every vacation, part of which is a testament to the family I’ve built, but also to the inevitable re-ordering of priorities that came with it. If someone had asked me four years ago the most difficult thing about living in Istanbul, I would have said “loneliness.” If someone were to ask me now, I believe I might say “never being able to get any time alone.” A classic case of “you get what you ask for.”

Many things fell by the wayside along the way, especially when the baby came. As if every other element in the crucible was burned into a new element, I find I am not the same and I’m just now slowly beginning to re-plant the seeds of my former life. What fell off along the way – friendships that couldn’t weather marriage, a new baby, space and time… extra part-time jobs, singing with multiple choirs, writing poems, expensive vacations, heading to the bar any night of the week, and sadly, writing this blog.

And yet, the peace that I have gained through this purging is great. I no longer worry much what people think of me, or spend much thought on those who don’t treat me as well as I treat them. I can’t remember the last time I was lonely.

To have found this peace in the midst of a region in such chaos is the ultimate irony. Turkey is at the center of a whirlwind of violence, both domestically and in neighboring countries, and yet somehow we have carved out a space for ourselves and settled in and built a little family. I am aware that this happiness I feel is perhaps as tenuous as it is true, and that part of this is an inevitable part of growing older, and just not having the same amount of time to obsess over the unimportant details anymore.

Part of it is also having found a good person to become my partner. (Don’t tell him), but I have learned so much about the type of person I want to be through my marriage with Ali and through becoming parents together. These two relationships –wife and mother – are, at once, the hardest that I have encountered thus far, and yet the most rewarding. And now I find myself taking steps to revisit my former self and slowly re-build some version of who I was, at the same time tempered with who I want to be.

To be sure, life is not easy at the moment. We are time-rich and money-poor. We cannot go out for fancy dinners or jet off to exotic locales. We cannot afford a car or a huge house or new things. But in the time that we have now, with Lydia Dilara (our daughter), we are creating memories and love that, inshallah, will last a lifetime.

I was never afraid of death before I became a mother. In some way, I always felt that somehow, should death come, I would be ready and would feel that I had had a life well-lived. Now, I see that my life and my survival is about more than me – it’s necessary to make her life safe and happy – and this responsibility is at once wonderful and terrifying.

This may seem somewhat over-dramatic and, perhaps strangely, I actually understand my friends who decided not to have children better now than I did before I became a mother. Motherhood is all-encompassing. It’s amazing and wonderful, and it’s also terrifying and sometimes isolating and exhausting. I miss the time I used to have to construct myself carefully, and yet somehow I have come out on the other end with a more true version of myself than ever before. Braver, kinder, more patient and more empathetic. I accept myself and others more easily and some of the sharp corners that have always defined me have softened.

Seven years ago this January I left my life in the U.S. behind seeking adventure, new experiences and a different trajectory for my life. And yet, it was not moving that taught me the most, it was not going to new places or seeing amazing things, although the people I met along the way touched a spark in me. It has only been in the last few years, and especially since giving birth in February, through beginning to understand how to be still, that I have learned how to move into life more gracefully. I am imperfect, impatient, sometimes untethered and often unsure, but, whether we stay here in Istanbul a while longer or move back to the U.S. as we often discuss – I have come home.