Muraho!

Saying hello and saying goodbye are part of the naturally occurring nuances in life. Some are more memorable than others. When I think of these customary greetings, I think of how a guest leaves your house: you follow them to the door, say goodbye, wave and then the door is shut. This is not profound, yet when I think of a guest coming into your home, you have to open the door before you can say hello. When I look out at 2024 from my proverbial cliff, I look at all that it has to offer and realize that I have a choice. I can keep the door shut, retreat into the sorrows of the previous year, become pond-water stagnant and never utter a greeting. Or I can choose to open the door, spread my arms wide and say Muraho! embracing all that is before me, believing that I will be stronger through it all. 

Here is the story:

Muraho, is how they say hello in Kinyarwanda, the language of Rwanda, Africa. Muraho is what I will be saying more frequently when my family packs up our entire house and moves to another continent in the middle of 2024. Yet can I first say Murabeho (goodbye) to 2023? A year with surprises, grief, and destruction?

In the first few months of 2023, I was qualified to receive vocational assistance services from the Bureau of Services for Blind Persons. It hasn't even been a year since they told me I shouldn't be driving and now I am sort of re-inventing myself and navigating the new hurdles in my life. How was I to be the ideal functional mom when I couldn't even drive?

In March, driving (riding) home from work with my husband, he tells me: "God is telling me to put our house on the market and to move our family to Africa." So many questions flood my space and my heart rate goes up every time I think of a new challenge and unknown about this foreign-to-me continent. Naturally, soon after that announcement, we discover we are pregnant with our 3rd baby- surprise! Children are a blessing and God's timing is interesting. 

In May, I say goodbye to my dear, sweet mother. After years of mental decline to dementia, she transitions from this Earth and I didn't expect this to hit me as hard as it did. Heavy shadows cloud my mind and my heart as I continue on in the day-to-day, simultaneously trying to piece together a mental picture of how it would be to possibly move my entire family to a continent across the ocean, thousands of miles away. I also realize (my father having passed in 2021) I no longer feel compelled to stay.

Like clockwork, summer comes and with it a freak hailstorm that destroys our crops, damages our roof and totals one of our cars. It is devastating and ruins any business venture we had planned for. My boys and I raise Monarch butterflies and hatch more chickens for the homestead. We celebrate at the African World Festival, go blueberry picking, visit our neighbor's Alpaca farm and the boys go kayaking for the first time- in which we successfully embark upon without any boats capsizing- despite my 5-year-old's many attempts to jump out and catch one of the dragonflies hovering over the water. 

In the colorful fall of leaves turning red, orange, and yellow, we pack my Mother-in-law's home of 23+ years into a shipping container (really it was two shipping containers) and moved her into our house. We celebrated my bonus daughter's 13th birthday and her straight-A semester; there was sushi, shopping, 1st time facials, and round after round of Uno. 

Finally, during the unusually warm winter, after much waiting, I went into labor on December 25th and the next day, our sweet baby boy was born 6 days after his due date. 

It's not difficult for me to say, Murabeho, 2023. It is with much gratitude I bid adieu to a season of growth in marriage, in family and in faith. 

Can I- will I- say Muraho, 2024? So many hellos.... 

Hello to a new business venture, hello to a new culture, hello to new foods, hello to a new language, hello to new friends and neighbors.

Hello to financial risks, hello to being a mom- a person- with low vision & low hearing in an unfamiliar environment, hello to helping my kids adjust to a new world, hello to the inevitable stress that will either strengthen or weaken my marriage, hello to many, many unknowns. 

I'm staring at the door and something inside me pulls. Curiosity and wonder are getting the better of me and I reach for the knob. I take a breath, twist the door handle and feel the release as the door swings open, seamlessly on it's hinges- and that's when I feel it. It's a tingle that feels oddly familiar. It begins to grow as I look out the open door into 2024 and I am surprised as I realize what the tingle is. I thought it had long since died inside of me. It's a miracle, I think. It's undeniably there; perhaps re-kindled.

"It's hope," I say. 

With a growing smile and a lightness in my heart, I call out:

"Muraho!"

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This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Hello".