“Look!” I said to my husband, pointing out the window. “A lightning bug!”
I ran down the hall, pulled my kids out of bed, and rushed them outside of my uncle’s house near Kansas City, where we were visiting. The sun had just set. The grass felt wet between our toes, the air finally a bit cooler. And those fireflies? They always seemed to fly just out of our reach, in a most exciting way.
After 14 years abroad, I’d completely forgotten about fireflies.
“Try to figure out where they’re going,” I told my kids, suddenly remembering how this worked, and feeling proud that I used to be—and could still be—an expert at something. “Gently sweep your arm through the air and close your hand when you think you’re near. If you feel a tickling in your hands that means you’ve got one.”
We chased and grabbed at light and muddied our feet. The night darkened around us as the lights grew in number. And soon our hands brightened with their glow.
For their entire lives, my own kids have lived in continuous summer—in equatorial Indonesia. We wore flip flops every day. We lost track of the dates and months because of the constant green and nonstop heat. We used wadded up socks as “snowballs” for fights under coconut trees at Christmas time. But our eternal summer there never once included the iconic lightning bug. And since all three of our kids were born in Asia, their childhood has been, while full of adventures and beauty, completely devoid of the magic of bugs that light up on summer nights in America.
But lightning bugs were part of my childhood summers during visits to my grandparents’ farm in rural Missouri. Which meant they were also part of the other thing that filled most of my summers growing up as an Army kid—transitions.
On the official “transition chart” given to us by the nonprofit organization that employed us for 15 years, my husband and I and our own kids left “settled” in March 2019 when we started packing up our things to move from Indonesia to the States. We entered “confusion” in April when we started that 24-hour plane journey to the other side of the world. But for all of last summer, we were in “chaos.” We didn’t have a home of our own yet. We didn’t know yet about schools for the kids. We waited to send the crates.
Some transitions are part of a forward motion of choices we make. They feel like a graduation to the next good thing, or an airplane landing in someplace new after a long journey.
Some, though, are unexpected, painful, maybe even tied to tragedy. They feel like a death or a divorce. Or, as a friend who has adopted two boys with histories of trauma, said, some people’s transitions start in the negative. For them, a new beginning must come with time to simply get up to zero.
Whatever type of transition, our reality can feel turned upside down and we wonder if life will ever be normal again. And the reality is, the “normal” that eventually comes is never yesterday’s normal. It’s a progression toward gradual integration with the new reality, or so the experts say. And usually, it’s not just our circumstances that have changed. We often change, too.
In all last summer’s loss of normality, the rhythms of transition are so familiar to me. From my moves as a kid, I know all about summers of goodbyes and packing things into trucks and learning new addresses. Fireflies, I may have forgotten about during my years overseas. But loss? Let’s just say I never throw away all my moving boxes.
A dear friend recently sent our family a care package filled with crafts to help kids with transition. We painted rubber ducks (“yuck ducks” and “yay ducks”) and drew pictures and built bridges—all to give us language for the changes.
The new words I learned? Liminal space.
Michael Pollock, a lifelong expat and transition coach, wrote in the book, “Arriving Well,” that liminal space is “that place between solid platforms…hoping that a trapeze bar will appear in one’s hands, that the grip will be true and that another platform, solid and dependable will be waiting on the other side.”
“You burn a ton of energy on takeoff and you’re hardly moving,” said Brad, my pilot husband about transition. “It costs a ton in fuel. But you have to just keep going and then, soon enough, you’re on your way.”
Brad was speaking another language of my youth. Not only did I marry a pilot, I grew up with one—my Army helicopter pilot dad. I’ve spent my whole life with my eyes turned up to the sky.
In many ways, our disorienting re-entry to America, after 14 years of living in Indonesia, felt like a crash landing. And with so many decisions to make, we had to quickly pick up the pieces to be able to launch again. Though I’ve spent a lifetime moving, this one left me feeling stuck between worlds. Both the past and the future seemed just out of reach, as I couldn’t seem to make sense yet about all that happened, and wasn’t sure yet where we were headed. And in that space—that disorienting liminal space—I sometimes felt emptied of purpose, of vision, of feeling, of direction.
I recently re-watched the 2000 film, “Castaway,” in which Tom Hanks’ character spends years as a castaway alone on a deserted island after a plane he was on crashed in the ocean. Somehow in the midst of the shock of the trauma, he had to spend enormous amount of energy doing the simplest things to eat and drink and sleep. It’s a great example of the work of entering a new place with new rules and challenges. (Spoiler alert), Tom Hanks’ character eventually makes his way off the island, is rescued by a freight ship, and then does the work and ease of readjusting to modern life. He regains some possibilities for his future, but has to face the huge loss of his fiancée who, thinking he died, married someone else.
After an emotional goodbye to his fiancée, the final scene shows him on a road trip. Tom Hanks stands at a dusty, deserted intersection in Texas, inspecting his map. A woman in a pick-up truck pulls up to him and says, “You look lost.”
“I do?” he says.
“Where ya headed?” she asks.
“Well, I was just about to figure that out.”
Sometimes transitions make me feel lost. But am I?
I can relate to “Castaway’s” crossroads imagery, but the grieving of the losses and healing from the hurt also seem like a circle. I see a picture of that red-and-white airplane in beautiful Indonesia on someone’s Facebook feed. I read a certain name. I slip on the flip flops that I wore everyday there and remember having to walk away. It all rushes back. The progress I make one month just rounds back around to the beginning the next moment.
I recently started chronicling sunsets with my camera. I want so much for it to be true—that there can be beauty in endings. Or maybe I just want to see transitions that happen quickly, vibrantly hurrying its way toward a brief night then rising to a new day.
But “it’s OK to call a loss a loss,” a friend recently told me.
At her permission, I let out my breath, feeling the relief of not having to feel OK about it all when all of it wasn’t OK.
The fireflies make it look easy, taking off in an instant, brightening the sky with magic and nostalgia and adventure. But I recently saw a still picture of their flight patterns. And their angle of launch looked less like an airplane’s straight trajectory and more like swirls that curl up, up, up. Processing grief and moving through transitions are often like this, too, a friend promised me, more helix that coils up than circle that rounds back.
I imagine I’ll one day look back at this transition and notice that it’s part helix, part energy-consuming take-off, part gaping liminal space, part dusty crossroads. I hope I remember the tools that helped—books, movies, ducks, permissions, friends, lightning bugs. For this summer, though, I hope for another chance to look up, reach my hands for things just out of reach and soon enough, catch life through the darkness.
