moving forward

Going home

Sonja Leave a comment

I am still a bit nervous about jinxing it but tomorrow I get on a plane that will take me home. And if the universe is kind – when we get to KL we will be able to home quarantine.

The sad part is that I am making this trip so we can pack up our condo for another international move. In another twist in the Covid tail it makes sense for Nick to be relocated to Australia – this was always an option at this point (we have been in Malaysia for six years) but for me who hasn’t been back since December 2019 it feels like a story that was interrupted.

People have commented on my saying “I’m going home” and even I wonder a bit at myself after nine months living in our new house and eleven months into a permanent job (23 months altogether). But my youngest son probably put it best when he said a few weeks after we moved in “its not quite your’s yet is it – it doesn’t have your stuff” And he is right -because all the things I have used in his lifetime to make our place feel like home, the pictures, the cushions, the vases, even my folders of torn out recipes and favourite baking pans – are in another country,

I have a list of what will go into the moving boxes being shipped to Brisbane and hopefully a list of what can be in our air freight allowance that can come back to New Zealand. (Otherwise I will be paying for extra bags for the foreseeable when the borders open) So that will probably change soon as I dismantle the home we made and reassemble it into new ones. And in having these choices I never forget how much privledge is involved.

When we got the news that we couldn’t extend our lease beyond the 31 October and it seemed that we might have to have our condo packed remotely I remember saying that I think Covid had finally broken me. And then New Zealand went into lockdown due to Delta. Throughout lockdown the pieces got stitched together – my flights and MIQ had been booked since early June but I had fully expected to have to change or credit them again. Throughout lockdown my Facebook memories were full of other moves, and closing other doors – we seem to have a habit of moving in August :). On the eve of this journey I feel incredibly grateful that I get the chance to physically “shut the door” on our KL home.

Covid slices into our dreams – but it also helps us build new ones. I find myself reluctant to share this journey in the knowledge that so many people are struggling to get back (both to Aotearoa and Malaysia). The other thing lockdown reinforced for me was how blessed we are in our new house, which without Covid we probably would never have bought. And I also suspect the move back to Brisbane for Nick has been facilitated by the different ways of working we have adopted. On the other hand – all our children are sad as well – the many plans that have been cancelled over the last two years for shared experiences based in Malaysia have slipped away (although Nick and I occasionally comment that we could go back)

I still have a credit for another return flight to Malaysia – which may give me a chance to get back and say good-bye properly to a number of friends who I may not see this time around due to Malaysia’s restrictions and people being away. The story isn’t finished yet.

It may be just an IKEA chair but…

Sonja Leave a comment

When I arrived in Malaysia 30 months ago I was coming down from an extremely stressful 18 months. My dad, grandmother and mother-in-law had died at approximately 6 monthly intervals, we had put our home of 12 years on the market as after two years on a single income we were reaching the end of our ability to afford it, my job was on the line in a corporate re-structure due to a lack of pipeline work.  There hadn’t been a lot of energy left for me to look after me and my body was showing it.

I definitely had it on my mind to use some of my time to get lighter and fitter but then we survived two months of the haze which impacted on my asthma quite badly. By the time the holidays and new year got underway a new lot of stress was on the horizon with the decision for me to go back to New Zealand for Jon’s last year at school. I remember at one point thinking I wasn’t going to fight menopause weight gain until I was sure I was done.

Anyway around June or July I clicked on a link for a eating and exercise plan on Facebook. I really liked the approach – all the food was real, there wasn’t too much fake science for me to swallow, and the exercise was by and large a known quantity. By mid August I had decided that once I was back in KL I would give it a shot and I started late November. So what does this have to do with an IKEA chair?

The eating plan is focused on small meals five times a day – which is a struggle for me even though I know it works as a weight loss strategy. My normal eating pattern is maybe breakfast then 2-3 lattes, maybe lunch at 3 pm and then dinner. The big attraction of the plan was that I didn’t have to think to much about what to eat assuming I had done the shopping. I like healthy, fresh food and having the decisions made for me about what that could be was all I really needed to stick with it.

What surprised me though was how the almost total elimination of sugar, dairy and wheat made such a huge difference to my energy levels.  I decided even as I started that I would focus on food rather than exercise for the first eight week cycle and that as I had a lot to lose I wouldn’t be totally purist. I would still have a couple of glasses of wine on the weekend, still have my morning latte, still have my teaspoon of sugar in my coffee. Except 12 weeks later – I am down to a piccolo latte with no sugar 3-4 times a week, half a teaspoon of sugar in my first coffee of the morning and none after that. My daily water intake has at least tripled, and even Nick’s personal trainer is commenting on his improved performance from all the fresh vegetables he is eating.

This IKEA chair has been on my shopping list for some time, in fact since a few weeks after we arrived and I wanted a chair with a firm back and arm rests for knitting and other crafts. It was big enough that it needed to be delivered and somehow it just all felt too hard. By the time I walked through IKEA and did other things I would be just out of mental and emotional energy. Then not long after we got back from holiday this year I met some one in the shopping centre for coffee. I was five weeks into the programme and despite walking all over to show her things I still had energy to burn. After checking out how the pick and deliver service worked I went home, created an online shopping list, printed it and took it in on Thursday afternoon.

When this chair arrived this morning(along with several other things)  and I put it together, all I could think was how long it had taken for me to find the energy to follow through and buy it. I am immensely grateful that I made that decision to click on the link to Kim Beach No Excuses back in August and followed through in November.

ETA – since I started this post back in February I have now had three months to enjoy the chair which now Tash has checked out and agrees is a great knitting chair. I also have a great ottoman with knitting storage to go with it!

 

Back again

Sonja Leave a comment

I have been away both from writing and KL – the writing for a significantly longer time than I was away from KL.

When I arrived here in September I had it in my head that I would figure out how I was going to do the expat lifestyle after my eldest son’s wedding in the last weekend in February. There were good reasons for this – it have us two to three months to get settled into a new apartment and figure stuff out. There was a good ten weeks of my youngest son’s school holidays to navigate plus Christmas and the wedding itself.

Part of this plan was to take J back to New Zealand for the start of the school year,  go to my favourite tech conference, catch up with friends, and spend some time in Christchurch which included possibly exploring the option of doing some study. Of course nothing ever turns out quite as it is planned and while I did most of those things I did some other options which I hadn’t planned plus children being children – the coming year is already taking on a far different shape to how I anticipated it.

Despite my husband being concerned from the tone of my communications that I might not come back with him after the wedding, here I am sitting at the dining room table (which he had moved while I was away) looking over the KL skyline and beginning to plot and  plan. One of the plans is to get back to the discipline of writing.

You see – somewhere in that month in New Zealand a couple of almost contradictory ideas formed. The first was that I didn’t really feel at home in the sense of belonging. I enjoyed the break from the heat but I was more invested in figuring out how to live my life here than in New Zealand. The second was (and this has happened before) that it is not an all or nothing kind of deal. I can still spend quite a bit of this year in New Zealand if that is what we need to do to be available for our children as they navigate life transitions.

In the meantime I have to work out a way of getting things done I want to do while I am here and have the time to do it – an off hand comment by someone at a Webstock workshop shook me up a bit. I realised that I had been gifted with the time to be creative and exploratory and I needed to make the most of it. Having listened to Cindy Gallup talking about the value of micro-actions I’m taking that to heart and planning the micro-action I’ll take today to get started on some of the ideas.