It's good to be home
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Sunday, February 11, 2007 | 
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Web only:On Feb. 3, I rocked my baby to sleep. It was one of life's sweetest moments. How did I ever live for five whole months without a rocking chair?
I returned earlier than expected to my home in Utah at the very end of January during one of its notorious inversions. Folks everywhere were complaining about the pollution. To me, the air seemed like balm to my tired lungs in comparison to the horrendous pollution we had been breathing in Tianjin.
A lump came to my throat when I drove up and down the streets, looking over at the snow-covered mountains and marveling at the sheer beauty of my home. It's a magical landscape that most folks in Tianjin will only get to see in pictures or their dreams.
I took Sophie to her first day of kindergarten and she came home ecstatic. It was a much better experience than picking her up, crestfallen and crying, after her first day of school in Tianjin.
The burden of going to Chinese kindergarten as a blond-haired foreigner was too heavy. After one week, we resorted to home school. Unfortunately, I didn't have great resources for such an undertaking while living in a foreign land.
After a few days of kindergarten back in the states, I hugged Sophie and asked, "Which do you like better, kindergarten in China or kindergarten in America?"
Without skipping a beat, my 5-year-old daughter smiled and said, "'Woh shur Maegwaren." That is Chinese for, "I am an American."
"I am an American." I can't think of a more appropriate answer to my question.
As I spent more and more time in China, I began to think, "'I am an American and I like America and the way we do things there."
I suppose that all people who leave their land to live somewhere new feel this sentiment to some degree. We like what we know and what is familiar.
I traded the familiar for an adventure for a while. And, I will never regret the experience. But, after five months, it became clear that it was time to come home.
Giving up the adventure was one of the hardest things that Brian and I have ever done. Living in China was hard, but leaving early was even harder. If it had been just the two of us, we would have stayed.
But, we are no longer two. We are five. And, we have more than ourselves to consider when making choices that might compromise our health and safety. We had so many things to weigh on both sides of the scale, it almost seemed equal, but something tipped us toward coming home earlier than we had planned.
As a young, single college gal, I couldn't get enough of overseas adventure. I was always on top of the world when my travels began, and crying my eyes out when they ended.
I hoped that these experiences would continue after I married, but life has a way of going on while you are making your plans. As it was, by the time we left for China, we had laid down some serious roots in Ogden and added three kids to the equation.
While we were still in China, I had to make a last-minute shopping trip to Beijing a few days before Christmas. After plans to go with friends fell through several times, I took a train to Beijing by myself.
This felt like a daring leap. I could barely speak the language, and when my train pulled into the Beijing station, I discovered that my cell phone didn't work outside of Tianjin. No desperate calls for help allowed.
Adrenaline flowed through my veins as I navigated my way solo through the foreign train station and the huge city. But, in that moment, I realized that my appetite for adventure was now overshadowed by maternal instinct.
The thrill of the experience was dulled by the sick, worried feeling in the pit of my stomach over leaving my three small kids with a Chinese-speaking nanny in a fourth-floor apartment with unsecured windows.
Our experience in Weihai, with a bad Chinese hotel, had dampened our desires to go on spontaneous trips throughout the mainland. We were told by friends that it wasn't really safe to travel on our own in the interior of China. We couldn't, in good conscience, take the kids, but we had no one with whom we felt comfortable leaving them.
And, even if we stayed put, there were dangers lurking everywhere. One day, my 4-year-old threw a couch cushion in the air, hitting a panel of glass from a light fixture, which shattered and sent a spray of shards through the entire apartment.
When I cleaned up the mess, I found 3-inch-long points of glass piercing almost all the way through a 1/2-inch foam playmat covering the living room floor. What if that glass had landed on one of the kids?
I realized in that moment that I was not equipped to deal with rushing a seriously injured child to the hospital in China with the aid of a taxi and my limited speaking skills.
I also heard horror stories from two moms who have lived with their large families in Tianjin, each of them for over a decade. One had almost lost a child to croup after he was flown to Hong Kong to be treated. The other had rushed a child to a hospital in Beijing after he began having seizures from severe dehydration.
After hearing their experiences, I realized that I wasn't up to dealing with a severely ill child in China, either.
Beside these grim worries, there were so many other reasons to go. The effects of the pollution on our health was another big consideration. There was a whole set of different reasons to stay. In all, there were more issues that we weighed on both sides of the scale than I could even begin to list here.
Deciding to leave China early felt like the most difficult decision we have made in our eight years of married life together.
On Jan. 24, exactly five months after we flew out of LAX and landed in China, we finished packing up our mountain of suitcases and headed to the airport in Beijing.
Our adventure ended much as it had begun, figuring out how to haul three little ones and more than 600 pounds of luggage across an ocean.
After a 12-hour flight, we arrived in Los Angeles four hours before we had left Beijing.
Brian's parents met us at the curb in their 12-passenger van. This time, two rows of seats had been removed to accommodate our apparent inability to pack lightly.
After driving for a few hours, we dined at an In-N-Out Burger, where Sophie rediscovered the joy of public restrooms with a Western flair.
"I thought it was going to be a squatter!" she exclaimed when she returned to her food. And, Brian and I rediscovered the pain of heartburn after months of eating unprocessed food.
Our children were awestruck by the number of stars in the sky.
We broke up the 12-hour drive home by staying the night at a hotel.
I bathed the kids in the bathtub, a luxury our apartment in Tianjin did not include, and they enjoyed the forgotten experience.
Sophie was intrigued by how her hair felt floating in the water when she lay down, and Ian couldn't get over the little tornado of water around the drain when we let the water out. Isaac just sat in the huge tub and splashed until his fingers and toes turned to prunes.
The next morning, at the continental breakfast, the kids were thrilled to find single-size servings of cold cereal, and Brian and I were surprised when Sophie was able to put away one of each kind -- five bowlfuls in all.
There were so many more adventures in China that I was not able to share here, and others that I will not get to experience. But, these treasured moments welcomed us home. It sure feels good to be back in the USA.
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