Firstly in returning to my too-oft-neglected blog, I notice that the name should be "The Norwegian's Wife" -- as it is now, it makes it sound like I'm Norwegian and am a wife. But no, no, no! I am here in Norway, an American in voluntary exile. I've been here for seven months, so far - learning how to live in a completely new environment. New location, new people, new language, new family, new surroundings...... Its been, frankly, awful.
WOO!!
But I'm here still, plugging along. Its been about a year since I wrote (and published) a blog entry and I think that does a lot to convey the turmoil in my life and in my heart. How wonderfully, painfully bittersweet is it that my life takes every turn but the one I had planned? I suppose I'm meant to be learning a lesson about trying too hard to control all those things in life that can't be controlled, but I'm that wonderful combination of pig-headedly stubborn and dense as tule fog and I just won't learn this lesson.
We ended up re-homing our cats with a family local to my tiny Californian town where they live together with nearly 10 other cats and four or five dogs on a ranch just a few properties over from "The Home Ranch" where my maternal family has been born and raised for 150 years. Missing the cats, my first babies, has dulled from the diaphram-wrenching initial pain to a dull ache in the pit of my stomach. Largely, if I don't think about them and how integral they were to my life, I don't miss them too much.
This of course is largely due to my Christmas present this year - a 10 week-old miniature Dachshund/Yorkshire Terrier/Border Collie(!) mix named Alabama. Now about six months old, Bama is a medium-haired, nine-pound, short-legged black-and-tan dog with a silver head and an improbably long tail. She is overly friendly, immensely inquisitive, and a primary bright spot in my life. Currently, she is occupying my lap and forcing me to find other accommodations for the laptop.
But sweet and beautiful puppy aside, my reasons for moving to Norway have not come to fruition or have not remained strong enough to offset the emotional pain the move has caused.
Nobly, I wanted to allow My Husband, The Viking to reunite with his family. We do see his maternal grandparents at least once a week and they are kind, warm, welcoming and loving people who I have come to love dearly. But we rarely see his uncles, who live scant miles away, nor his mother who lives on the other side of the country. Of course, living back in Santa Barbara we would see nobody's family, but we still wouldn't be on even footing - I would be a paltry six hours drive from my home and family while he would be 20 hours and $1300 away from his. If we were to have a child who started to date someone from another country, I would warn them strongly about the pain and complication that would likely result. The idea that one or the other of us must be on the other side of the world from their families and childhood friends, missing birthdays and graduations, births and deaths is staggering, overwhelming, and depressing.
But speaking of that hypothetical child and my hypothetical advice leads me to my next reason for coming to Norway - conceiving and giving birth to a child in the healthcare paradise that is Norway. But although I've lived here for seven months, I still do not have a visa - an extremely rare occurrence, I am given to understand. No visa means that medical care, instead of being very cheap or likely free, is as expensive as having no insurance in the states - if not more so. In addition, an American friend who has lived here for awhile and is also dealing with trouble conceiving has informed me that merely to gain an appointment with a specialist can take up to eight months, with diagnostic testing to take a further six months and each round of treatment taking...... well you get the idea. Even if my visa were approved tomorrow, it could still be easily two years before I deliver a child - and that's presuming only two rounds of treatment. Furthermore, the process of adoption is narrow and prolonged, here. There is a mandatory three-year probation period between applying and being matched with a child. Social services monitors your life and finances in that period, taking a microscopic and detailed look at you and your partner's eligibility to be parents. While I commend their determination which undoubtedly results in impeccable placement and placement success, I tear my hair out that after two years of trying, we are at minimum another two years away from having a child.
The best-laid plans, right?
No visa also means no legal work, so I am at home for the majority of my day and the majority of my days - trying not to think of my friends and family in California, trying not to think about my apparent infertility, trying not to think about how lonely, bored, and restless I am here.
So there is my massively "down" blog - probably riddled with errors of grammar or punctuation and certainly riddled with a pervasive air or trauma and drama.
Sorry 'bout that.
