The Make-Over: Tales From Far Away

Ever since my blogging identity crisis, I've felt the need, as I begin again to try blogging on a regular basis, to give the page a make-over.  Anyone who read my earliest posts when I first began writing them will have noticed that almost everything has changed: my background, blog title, self-intro blurb, and now my web address.  Some of those things will probably be subject to change on a semi-regular basis, but getting a new title and address felt like kind of an extreme, though merited change, so I decided to try to add some explanation.

The original blog title and web address were the products of boredom.  I was in a new home, relatively far from my family and friends, had applied for work and been hired, but had to wait for weeks for the background check to come through, and had no means of transportation to explore my new home town.  On top of that, I was still in the beginning of my pregnancy and was still feeling somewhat...shall we say newly pregnant?  Once, during a phone conversation to my mom, as I moaned and groaned about my lot in life, she said, "Why don't you start a blog?  That'll keep you busy."

So I did and I used the first name and web address that came into my head, unwittingly turning my last name into what sounded like a religion or philosophy.  When we were contemplating moving here, I settled on the name 'Tales from Far Away.'  In a way, that seems silly, since one of my best friends from high school is now living over a thousand miles further from home than I am.  Another is living across the Atlantic, and one of my best friends from college has been travelling across Europe on business.  What right have I, a measly 500 miles from every place I have ever lived, to claim the description 'far away?'

First, there is the fact that, among both my family and Ben's, we are the outlier, not counting his sister who is serving a mission in Taiwan, of course.  We communicate with the family via email, phone calls, and internet video chatting, but when it comes to family gatherings, ours are the faces that will almost always be absent.  We're out here having our own little adventures and doing our best not to focus on the ones we know we'd enjoy if Ben's job had kept us closer to home.

Then, there's the feeling I've had almost since we were married, and which has certainly grown stronger since then, that when we got married, in a lot of ways, we got up and left the world behind.  Most of our former associations with friends and acquaintances of single life faded away or disappeared altogether.

What's more, we've changed.

I used to imagine that, as a single girl, I was always standing at a crossroads.  I could go in any one of several directions, or in other words, I could develop and encourage any one of several inclinations, and each of them might be equally good.  In marrying Ben, however, I chose on of those roads to follow.  He did the same.  Where our inclinations matched, where our desires and tendencies harmonized, there we walked.  Had we married different people, we might each be different, to some extent.

I am, all the time, pleasantly surprised as I realize where our marriage, and now our family, has taken us.  I keep seeing things in Ben, in the way he treats me, or just in the way he thinks and acts, that I never thought to look for in a prospective spouse when I was dating.  They are things I didn't even realize I wanted.  It's funny how two distinct and separate people can also be, in so many ways, a single entity.

So I guess that's the truest reason I can think of for the blog's name.  Ben and I are far away in the same way that every marriage takes partners far away.  I'm hoping to give the people I love a few glimpses into our little world.