The importance of having an 'out'

I realized as I was washing dishes just now, how important it is to always have an "out." Kind of like the first year of my marriage. I think K and I joked about divorce pretty much every week or so. It wasn't that we were unhappy, it was just that we needed to know we could still return to our single lives even if that wasn't really the case.

The last 9 months have been weird. We sold off our possessions, rented out our house, committed to a new life and, for my husband, a new job. When things have been at their worst, we have joked that we can kick out our tenants and K could get a new job back in the U.S. The truth is, we have so deeply entrenched ourselves here, that it seems highly unlikely that we'd do that now. How deeply, you ask? Gee, we now have two Japanese mortgages, one of which is for my in-laws who live next door. My kids are so bonded with their grandparents that my mother-in-law doesn't want to go away next week because she'd miss her youngest grandson too much. Mind you, she's only going away for 5 days to Fukuoka which is less than 3 hours away. I have two aunts-in-law who have no grandkids of their own and view my kids as their own grandkids. For mother's day, I bought 3 presents, and my mother isn't even alive.

So, for my mental health, I believe that I could pick up and move on at any moment. It's the escape valve of my ego-driven, angst-ridden pressure cooker of a mind. And while I'm plotting all of my life scenarios in my pink rubber gloves, I realize that all I really want these days is a dishwasher. And maybe now I should go get the littlest one from Grandma's condo, since I let him fall asleep there tonight.