Practicing

We left Latvia with much less ceremony and much more baggage than what we’d arrived with years earlier. A huge container had been loaded up and brought to the Port of Riga ready to cross the Atlantic. It would arrive in New York in about a month's time and then trucked to Chicago a few weeks after that. We moved to Chicago early in January, 2000 with two kids, four suitcases, Sissy’s big German stroller, and a Pack & Play. So much for 100 pounds of home.

I remember sitting in a restaurant at Gatwick airport the day we “moved.” London was our layover and we had many hours to kill. I don’t think I’d slept in days, the kids were antsy and feeding off of my unsure nerves, and all this tension was coming to a head. Gatwick felt like purgatory.

Jims' Godmother, Aunt Lisa (now London Lisa), who had just months before moved from Riga to Chicago herself, met us at O'Hare after we had travelled about 24 hours and scooped us up. Lisa will tell you that she isn't the nurturing type, but she mothered me and the kids perfectly right then (my husband never needed mothering--just ask his mother). She was sympathetic as our comforting link of familiarity from our suddenly-vanished life in Latvia; she had long, tight arms especially for Jims who needed to be around someone happier than I was; and for me she had a sister's searing look of strength mixed with slight irritation that said, "Come on, Maren pull it together...!"

Everything had turned into a frenetic scramble inside me and I was all at once amazed and aggravated that the effects of what we were doing, what we uprooted, didn’t seem to bother my husband one way or another. It didn’t feel right to me, but then nothing did, so as any good designer should do, I began rearranging my black to balance out his pastels and florals. I was practicing, trying to turn my tension into something more interesting and hopefully practical.