Going into limp mode

I got my knickers in a knot.

About everything.

We had moved to Zambia, and somewhere between the excitement of a new country and the reality of actually living here, I had reached the point where I was wondering, quite seriously: What the hell have we done?

It felt like all we had accomplished since arriving was making repeated pilgrimages to the ports and the customs authorities. We would go, we would wait, we would produce documents, we would explain things, we would be sent somewhere else, we would return and then we would wait some more. And somehow, despite all the activity, absolutely nothing seemed to be getting done.

Then there were the children. I was becoming increasingly horrified by the near impossibility of getting them into reliable, recurring swimming lessons. Weekly. At the same time. With a coach who would actually show up. This seemed like an entirely reasonable expectation until we tried to make it happen. The boys are only 3½ and 2½, so objectively they have plenty of time to learn to swim, but my brain had decided that if they didn't have swimming lessons every Tuesday at 4pm for the foreseeable future, they would somehow never learn to swim and would spend the rest of their lives bobbing helplessly around a swimming pool.

Then there was food. I found myself driving all over Lusaka looking for specialist ingredients so that I could make meals that vaguely resembled the things I had previously been able to whip up without giving them a second thought. Things that had once been a five-minute Woolworths shopping trip had become a minor logistical operation. And, because apparently I wasn't already stressed enough, I was trying to make our rented house into the perfect home.

I wanted the right blinds, the right rugs, the right everything. I was particularly furious that I couldn't just walk into Hertex and solve all my window-treatment and rug-related problems in an afternoon. I wanted everything to feel finished, settled and normal. I wanted the house to look like we'd always lived there, even though we'd barely worked out where the nearest decent supermarket was.

I was running almost entirely on cortisol, caffeine and boxes of biscuits, grabbing whatever biscuit happened to be within arm's reach in the vague hope that it might somehow squash the gnawing feeling that sat underneath everything. What have we done? Why do we live here? Have we made a terrible mistake? I was trying to outrun the feeling, filling my days with things to do, problems to solve and errands to run. Meanwhile, the anxiety hamster was running at full speed on its treadmill of what ifs, and I was doing absolutely nothing to slow it down.

Then our temporary import on the last car started approaching its expiry date. By this point, my feelings towards the Zambia Revenue Authority had become less than charitable. The thought of paying anything more to ZRA was enough to make my blood pressure rise several points, so naturally we came up with a plan. We would drive the car back to South Africa, get it serviced and then import it properly.

Simple.

Except it was 1,600 kilometres.

And there is something about setting off on a long road trip through multiple borders in a country you're still learning to navigate that gives the anxiety hamster an entirely new treadmill. How long will the border take? How many times will the police stop us? What happens if something goes wrong with the car? Who would we even call? Would we have cell reception? Would the paperwork be right? Would the border officials agree that the paperwork was right?

You know. Relaxing thoughts.

Thankfully, some common sense prevailed. I flew with the boys, while Andrew drove the 1,800km back on his own. And, for all intents and purposes, it was actually a pretty smooth journey. The border was navigated, the TIPs were cancelled, the inspections were done and the car was making respectable progress towards Johannesburg.

Until Andrew reached the Botswana border.

The home stretch.

And the car decided, much like the rest of us, that it was done.

It went into restricted performance mode.

Normally, this wasn't necessarily a disaster. Stop. Switch the car off. Take a breath. Restart. And carry on. Which, in retrospect, was basically the exact strategy we had been using since we moved to Zambia. Smash it as hard as we could, take what appeared to be a "break", ignore the warning signs, put our foot down again and repeat.

Except this time, the Discovery had had enough. It didn't restart and magically recover. Instead, the supposed four-hour final leg to Johannesburg became an agonising eight-hour crawl at around 60km per hour. And sometime well into the night, Andrew and the Discovery finally limped into my parents' driveway.

And I remember thinking: Well. There it is.

If there was ever a sign that we needed to slow down, this was it.

The move had caught up with us. The stress, the logistics, the endless admin, the pressure we had put on ourselves to make everything work, and the constant feeling that we should be doing more, sorting more, fixing more, settling more. We were in limp mode too.

And perhaps it was time to stop trying to override the warning lights.

I think this was the part I had been struggling with most. I had started to confuse hard with wrong.

Things weren't easy. The move was hard. The admin was hard. Settling the kids was hard. Finding our feet was hard. Building a home from scratch was hard. And because it was hard, I had started to wonder whether that meant we had made the wrong decision.

But perhaps those aren't the same thing.

Perhaps something can be incredibly hard and still be exactly where you're supposed to be.

Perhaps the problem wasn't Zambia. Perhaps the problem was that I was trying to make a completely new life feel normal at exactly the same speed as our old one.