the montreal story

i can't remember any moments of hesitations in previous moves about the globe. that is, i've always been adventurous, eager to connect to landscapes, countries, people. but the move to montreal was an odd one. i had, at some point in my last of seven or so years living away from my childhood town and traveling, become an adult. a certain self-awareness and confidence had filled me and lent itself to my surroundings, which at the time was the town of victoria, bc. before this i had been game to go just about anywhere and try anything i felt worthwhile. suddenly, i found myself holding out for what i believe in above roaming, whether it be physical or spiritual. to me that's what being an adult meant at that point in my life: the foresight to hold out and the courage to face what needed to be faced in the name of progress. something about my physical surroundings encouraged that. i had, after years of working to self-heal, finally found balance and it was manifested in my life in that place.
but a year or so before leaving for montreal i had, with little foresight, shook on montreal with alex. although that optimistic, carefree residue from past adventures drove me to enthusiasm for the prospect of montreal, even then a reluctance lingered. i ignored it until about a month before we were due to leave. but every time i talked about montreal to friends i would hear myself saying, "i don't really want to go." not a single person ever said, "why?" or "why are you going then?" usually people would automatically say, "oh but you'll love montreal." i can't blame them; it took me a long time to listen to myself, too. i think we were due to leave in april, after my contract for the bc government ended. sometime in march i was standing in a friend's kitchen after a dinner party and i said once again, absentmindedly, "i don't really want to go to montreal" and suddenly an acquaintance said something like, "yah, it's a huge move. i wouldn't want to go either." just with that, i felt a rush of relief and we ended up talking for a long time about it. for the first time i realized that that part of me which loves a challenge, loves a new landscape was game, but this fresher part of me had found some honesty in the life i was living and i wanted to see where it could take me. that night i told alex on our walk along beacon hill park back to our fairfield apartment that i wasn't ready to leave. it took courage and i'm glad i did it, but we still packed up four and a half months later. i did it out of a sense of loyalty, but mostly because i was afraid to stand up for what i wanted and risk losing alex. after all, two years earlier i had left him for utterly selfish, albeit critical, reasons. i guess i knew if i did it again in some shape or form his patience would be dry.
i don't think i'll ever forget the day we left. we were walking along east hastings on the downtown east side of vancouver with some bags. we were headed to my cousin ian's apartment to say goodbye before our bus left. the tension was taught. i did not want to leave, but i felt i had to. i also knew that alex was going to ask me to marry him before the summer was done. i stopped on the sidewalk and told him i couldn't marry him, i didn't want to be asked, i needed an indefinite amount of time to process the huge mistake i was about to make for the sake of our relationship and because of that i basically had to put our relationship on hold. i found out later he had spent the day alone trying to track down this first nations artist who was going to make my engagement ring. before we hit the rockies i considered turning back on the bus. by the time we were pulling into his home town ottawa i had been crying for a day straight and wasn't sitting with or talking to him. it was rough.
the end of the summer, the fall, the beginning of winter. there were some fun times. i knew i had made a big mistake in shoving my true ambitions down, but also still couldn't imagine a way to reprimand it. i wanted to stay with alex as much as i wanted to leave and reclaim what i had set down back there on the west coast. the winter knocked it out of me. i got the pandemic flu, had a delirious fever for days and days and when i came to, the winter had arrived.
in early december when i knew i was pregnant, things became both simpler and more complicated. there was no question as to alex and i's devotion to bringing a baby into the world together; we had been preparing for this in abstract ways for two years. the question of separating for the winter as i had previously suggested was done (i wanted to go to the states, roam the desert, the red dust, the canyons for a while) and with a few weeks i was so ill and exhausted from the pregnancy i could hardly make it to mile end for lunch without ducking into alleyways to vomit or collapsing on tabletops, let alone traversing around north america. so, it was simple. i needed to stay, and we needed to be in montreal for simplicities sake, at least until the baby was born. but it was also more complicated because i couldn't shut my spirit off. i wanted to be by the ocean, in the forest, with my family and my friends. i wanted an entirely organic pregnancy full of rich, hearty days. but instead i found myself in a city. a huge, foreign, grey, politically-charged city. i navigated the heated metro tunnels, the underground systems to get to work each day. my job in human resources was high-stress, competitive and exhausting. i was alone most of the time as alex had an opposite work schedule to me and i wasn't interested in making friends beyond the couple people i had managed to connect with. it was a miserable time. i tried to make it better and i also didn't try. i had never lost the will to pick myself up for as long as i did that year.
i'm not sure what changed. we started planning our wedding as the spring set in and alex got a new job closer to home and with a better schedule. my friend aja came to visit. the week before she came to montreal she was sitting on a plane to ireland when right before take-off she panicked and scrambled off. she wasn't sure why, and instead came to montreal and for that i was so grateful. as my belly grew and the baby moved around more and more, and those blissful pregnancy hormones kicked it up a notch, i relaxed and forgave the misery and misunderstandings of the last year. accepting that montreal had been a mistake in many ways, we had planned return to bc a few months after the baby was born. then, in a fit of generosity and foresight, i told alex i would stay a few extra seasons to be fair to him, to his family who awaited the grandchild. 
there are times when i deeply regret that time-lapse. mostly i am sad that i've missed so much of this experience with my parents and close friends. i've been increasingly resentful of my in-laws because i feel like i sacrificed my own parents' experience for their sake. at our wedding dinner, my mother-in-law stood up and said she had always wanted a daughter and when she had three boys she thought, "i hope one of my daughter-in-laws is an orphan." she went on to imply that my parents' lack of involvement in the wedding planning and baby-showering had fulfilled some of that wish. i knew she meant it with love, but i was hurt and as i looked at my mum i knew she was, too. had we not been thousands of kilometres apart throughout these events, they would have been graciously involved as intimately as my in-laws. that was a turning point for me. i knew i had to get home and reclaim something, as intangible as it may be.
there are days when i feel anxious about our move in a few months. it's the time that i have been waiting for. i tried not to wait, and in many ways i lived my life fully, but my soul has been waiting and i haven't been able to stop it. i feel anxious for many reasons. i worry that we'll fail out west and it will be my selfishness that drove us there. i'm worried that alex will feel resentful of the move, even though he's accepting of it now. mostly these days i wonder if it's best for the family. if it were just alex and i it might be easier to justify this division of sacrificial moves, but now we're a family, we're three. what i always wanted for my children was for them to be in nature, to really know nature inside and out the way i grew up. i wanted them to spend most of their days outside, and not just "outside the apartment" but really in the outdoors, away from concrete and streetlamps and garbage. i wanted them to eat from the garden, swim in clean water, listen to trees, and mostly have enormous imaginations. i don't know why i feel this is so important but i do. i guess i feel that within their lifetime the concept of nature will be perverted somehow, and i want them to know of the purity. i want them to highly value life outside the human species because in that we learn so much more than we could ever think. i know it's overly-romantic to assume we need to be on the west coast or in a small town to have this experience in essence. i know if we really wanted we could give them an amazing childhood anywhere and they could grow up respectful, curious, utterly natural children.
my dreams and my rational being battle it out these days. i know we will go back to the west coast; what i don't know is if it will benefit us, really benefit us. but i will never know until we do it, and i do know that i have been truncated since arriving in montreal and that i want to get a certain rhythm back, want to flow back into my whole being instead of just a portion and i want to share that miraculous sensation with my family in whatever ways i can. tonight i am making a conscious decision not to doubt my instincts to go headfast to that beautiful place, and to accept the consequences straight-on.