Today we leave Norway, to return Summer 2010 for our next visit. Departures are always a little stressful. My partner B. will be sad, and so will her parents. There’s a bittersweet quality to leaving, especially this time, because in many ways B. would like to stay.
B. and I have ongoing discussions about moving to Bergen. When we made the move to Vancouver in 2005, after I completed my PhD and she finished her masters, we had a five-year plan (which did not involve constructing factories or farms, or killing anyone) to stay in Vancouver and then (potentially) try out living in Norway. Actually the plan was to re-assess after about four years in Vancouver, and decide whether we want to move to Bergen after the fifth year.
Well, this coming summer will be our four-year anniversary of living in Vancouver. And it is already clear how this assessment is shaping up: B. wants to move to Norway. I don’t.
Don’t get me wrong: it is beautiful here, B.’s family is very loving and accepting (and very excited about our potential move here), the quality of life in most respects is amazing. A minimum of five weeks vacation per year, mandated by the government. Good salaries. Bergen is said to be one of the prettiest cities in the world. People get to do lots of the things they love, like fishing, sailing, kayaking, hiking in the mountains.B.’s parents live right on a fjord. I mean, right on the fjord. Like, it is in their backyard.
B. standing behind her parents' house looking out to the fjord.
But it is hard for me to visualize myself here. Actually, I don’t want to. I grew up moving internationally, and I know what that’s about, and that isn’t what I want for my adult life. I don’t want to derail my career as an educational developer working on diversity and inclusion issues in the university classroom. I don’t really want to live life in a foreign language–though I’m not afraid to learn Norwegian. I don’t want to live in a city that doesn’t have neighborhoods with distinct character. I don’t want to live in a place that doesn’t have a visible and thriving counterculture of social justice and environmental activists and artists (and maybe Bergen does, but I haven’t found much evidence yet, though I know the music scene is alive here, and not just Norwegian death metal, either). I don’t want to make my life in a place where hardly anyone seems to have thought about race and racism, where I have hardly met anyone who has ongoing self-awareness of their own privilege (or if they do, they don’t talk about it). I don’t want to live in a city that doesn’t have literary events on a regular basis, even in a language not my own. I don’t want to live in a country where no one knows what to do with a vegetarian; even the Chinese restaurant had only three items without meat in them (one was called “Vegetarian” with no other description).
It’s funny; one aspect of my book is about how children are affected when they are exposed to a diversity of lifestyle and political values that differ from their own family’s values. For example, a peace activist, Democrat-voting family living in a small conservative town in Michigan, or an evangelical Christian libertarian-leaning family in Seattle. A book I read in 2008, Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort, is about how the United States is being gradually sorted into lifestyle value-based microcommunities that lack ideological diversity. In my book, I explore how that affects kids. But in my own life, I want the opportunity to stay snug in a leftie, alternative, activist, creative sort of microcosm. I want to live amongst people ‘not like me’ in terms of what they look like, where they come from and how they think about the world, but ‘like me’ in terms of what is important to them, and what kinds of liveliness they want around them. I’m aware of the acute contradiction there.
As a writer, I don’t want to live somewhere where a language barrier will prevent me from creating community with other writers. Even once I learn the langauge, I’m not going to write in Norwegian. I’m not going to be able to offer meaningful feedback on language use to other writers writing in Norwegian, not for many years. And because I won’t have the capacity to reciprocate, I won’t have other writers around me to offer me meaningful input on my work. The internet is great, but it really isn’t the same as being surrounded by living breathing community.
So, there it is. And what does it mean for my relationship with B.?
We don’t know. For now we’re just going to follow our plan of looking toward 2010/2011 as a moving time. I want to place my first book with a publisher before I move anywhere, and my goal is to make that happen in 2010, so 2011 is a more realistic time for a move. And then?
My greatest fear is that I will move here with B. and that I will be miserable (no job, no friends, no life) and she will thrive, and after two years–our ‘trial period’–I will not want to stay, and she will not want to lose me, but be unwilling to leave. And I will have to start my life over again, by myself this time, the world wide open to me with no plan and no safety net and no home base. At this point that is distinctly unappealing. Actually, terrifying.
Maybe I’ll feel differently about the idea of moving to Norway by the time 2011 rolls around. If I don’t, maybe I’ll move farther east, to Toronto or Boston, and B. will go to Bergen, and we’ll see how that flies. I really have no idea.
