Toni Nealie - The Miles Between Me

ADVANCE PRAISE

These essays travel farfrom New Zealand to Chicago to Indiacharting, all the way, tangled origins, colonial legacies, the intricate shadings of truth and mythology. With warmth, curiosity, and lyrical intelligence, Toni Nealie keenly parses out the very human reverberations of dispersal, rupture, unraveling, and arrival.

PEGGY SHINNER,

AUTHOR OF YOU FEEL SO MORTAL

[Toni Nealie] takes her reader through lush landscapes, gives us glimpses into life in New Zealand, and brings us directly into her home, into her garden. Her writing is evocative and meditative, asking the reader to question the world she lives in, we live in, right alongside her as she questions it.

MARGINALIA

Nealie is both profound and poetic; a brilliant thinker. Reflecting on her own experience stepping from one country to another, one life to another, she writes: Books cant really tell you how to chart your emotional terrain, how to circumnavigate the currents of loss and longing. For me, The Miles Between Me did just that. It challenges us to examine our very own heart.

MEGAN STIELSTRA,

AUTHOR OF ONCE I WAS COOL

These lovely essays of exile and home explore the inner lifewhat the author calls our internal night music. Each piece unfolds slowly and moves to unexpected terrain, like life itself often does. This is a moving meditation on womanhood, motherhood, sisterhood, and how the self and the other depend on who is looking, and from which direction.

AVIYA KUSHNER,

AUTHOR OF THE GRAMMAR OF GOD

CURBSIDE SPLENDOR PUBLISHING

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of short passages quoted in reviews.

Published by Curbside Splendor Publishing, Inc., Chicago, Illinois in 2016.

First Edition

Copyright 2016 by Toni Nealie

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015948129

ISBN 978-1940430812

Cover images Toni Nealie

Author photo Bruce Sheridan

Design by Alban Fischer

Edited by Naomi Huffman and Catherine Eves

WWW.CURBSIDESPLENDOR.COM

FOR MY FAMILY

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

We possess nothing in the worlda mere chance can strip us of everythingexcept the power to say I

SIMONE WEIL

I LIKE TO fly. Space and time dissipate with the vapor trail. Bubble-wrapped solitude, headphones, and a book. Deliciously detached. One weekend I flew from Chicago to London to celebrate a family wedding. Eight hours without commitment. The weightlessness of traveling in silvery air, floating without my mother-wife carapace.

The pilot announced our flight path across to London. Ive always thought of going up to London, after flying so many times there from my native land, Aotearoa, New Zealand. Why do we still call the South Pacific down and Europe up? On a globe, a mapmaker positions north and south, but Earths spin renders arbitrary these irrefutable points. Ancients knew better than to settle into the simplicity of up and down: the Roman goddess Fortuna, she who revolves around the year, rattled mortals on her wheel of providence. Knowing that todays luck could be tomorrows fall kept humans aware of lifes mutability.

My own life flipped topsy-turvy when I moved from the Southern Hemisphere to America in 2001. My personal coordinates seemed knocked off-kilter, the solid self I thought I possessed became unformed. For a while I cleaved to London as kind of a nest. My eldest sister and her family lived there, my only family in this hemisphere. Id spent three years living there in my twenties and had visited many times since. Londons muted pigeon-gray light, its drizzle, and pink brick became familiar beauty. So it became across, a half-way house, until slowly, imperceptibly, incrementally, Chicago became home, and I transferred my allegiance to wide pavements, big blue skies, yellow and red brick.

On the plane, as it creaked and swayed up through the cumuli, a loud voice sliced through my thoughts. Hey, Im Lisa. A willowy woman in yoga pants folded herself into an improbable lotus position on the seat next to me. She thrust out a hand. Are you on business or pleasure? Taking her hand, I removed my headphones. Lisas husband had a job in London and wanted to explore Europe for a few years. She was joining him for a two-week reconnoiter of the city. Should she move there? The blue skies of Colorado versus grey clouds. Giving up her jobs: child psychologist and yoga teacher. All those years of educationfor what? Uncertainty, an unfamiliar culture. What should she do?

It posed a dilemma for her, as it had for me. As it still does for me, years later. I dont know who coined the term trailing spouse, as if one were a piece of loose yarn, waiting to be snipped from a carpet. Around two hundred million people wind about the world for workhighly educated expatriates seeking advancement or shelter from economic storms. One half of a couple chases a job or a promotion and the other halfusually a womantrails. Negotiations between partners are delicate. Careers get juggled, re-balanced, dismantled, broken. There are other issues to consider: childrens educations and friendships, aging parents in need of care, property to look after. Its complicated. The winners and losers on Fortunas Wheel cannot be predicted.

I FIRST FLEW into Chicago during February of 2001. An arctic blast was blowing off Lake Michigan. My heart felt sluggish, pumping icy blood so slowly that I feared my feet and hands would never thaw. The city was bleak, monochromenot a blade of grass or a leaf to be seen, no break in the clouds, no relief from the slicing wind in my face as I bowed my head and struggled up Wabash Avenue. My husband was interviewing for a position leading a cinema school, a rare job suited to his industry and academic inclinations. Handing over our sons, ages one and seven, to a nanny for their first overnight without us, we left a Southern Hemisphere summer, balmy Auckland, my job and an office view of the Waitemata sparkling waters. I thought there was no wayno waythat I would move if he got an offer.

A remote chance, really.

We didnt write a pro and cons list, negotiate, or think of scenarios in the future. It happened in a shimmer, between me working as a public relations executive, organizing a dump truck-themed second birthday party for my younger boy, and taking my older boy to swimming lessons and rugby practice. Sometimes life seems to happen around you, and like looking into a wobbly mirror, you cant be sure of what you see.

GETTING SUCKED INTO my husbands orbit was a possibility that worried me. He made television shows and films, music videos and plays, played the guitar and read five books a week. I advised clients in a media and communications agency and wrote magazine features on the side. He drove our youngest child to daycare. I led the older sons walking bus to elementary school. At seven oclock, wed careen back into our bungalow to share the routine of dinner-bath-bed.

Our blooming existed partly because I was not financially dependent on my husband. New Zealand is, or was then, a social democracy with taxpayer-funded support for mothers and babies, subsidized early childhood education, and generous vacation and sick leave, which enabled me to work and have children with relative ease. Work gave me an intellectual higha friction of deadlines, ideas, and power. It also provided a six-figure salary.