I've been dying to write over the last couple of weeks and just can't (or don't) make the time. Our family just wrapped up our big move from Fitchburg to Littleton, MA. So many emotions are flooding me on a daily basis and I know the best way I handle those is when I write it all down.
Our new home is amazing! I walk through it every day and make a point to express thanks to God and all our angels who watch over us when we make huge decisions like these. This is exactly where I wanted to land. In a home that feels like a place we will stay for a long, long time. You expected me to say "a home that feels like home" right? Well, right now it doesn't feel like home. I feel like I'm on an extended vacation or a house-sitting job. I feel like this is temporary despite my hanging pictures and arranging furniture to mimic our old place. Like in a few weeks we'll say "well, that was fun. Time to go home!" I fall asleep at night staring at foreign walls and thinking about what we just left behind. The home we were married in. The home we had both of boys in. Birthday parties and first steps and big fights and the best memories I have....were all had in that house. I keep teetering on the brink of panic when I think that, somehow, I left all of those memories there. That they didn't carry over. When I walk through the now empty rooms of the old house I am overwhelmed with a sadness that my time there is really over. And I come "home" to my new home hoping to feel relief when I walk through the door and I don't get it yet. The rooms here feel just as empty as the ones in the old house. Despite the furniture and boxes, the rooms in the new house don't elicit nostalgia yet. I don't walk into bedrooms and know what it feels like to rock a baby to sleep in them. I don't feel at ease in our bedroom. My kitchen has cooked nothing other than ziti and Prego or stored take-out for 2 whole weeks. My living room hasn't housed a Christmas tree in it yet and my yard hasn't had all 30-something members of our family eating and drinking and celebrating a birthday on it. I'm grieving the old memories of all these things, that I can picture so clearly in the old house, like they're gone. To be bought by a new family and moved over to make their own. I feel desperate to make a giant, awesome memory here. Like right now! So I feel attached. And then, I think, all of my other memories will move from Fitchburg to Littleton. I know that time and patience will provide me the memories and milestones I need to attach to this house. I'll get one rather quickly when my almost-four-year-old starts preschool this Fall.
When I finally arrived at a place of peace with my decision to leave work and be a stay-at-home-mom, I realized that almost three years of Declan's and one year of Liam's life had gone by. I realized that in just a year from then Declan would start preschool and so would begin my process of letting him go, slowly, but every year into the care of others to begin educating and acquainting himself with the world outside of my tiny, safe little home. This summer, we moved away from that home where I had the bulk of my 4 years to have him all to myself, we transition to this new home in a new community and I hand him over in just about a month to someone else and I finally have to learn to trust others to take care of him, guide him, be gentle and kind to him....and I'm feelin' it! Like all moms do, I know. But more than the "off to school jitters" I feel the guilt still. That I spent that time wondering way too often if staying home was the right thing to do. If I was good at it at all....if it was "worth it." Over. Done. My time, truly FULL time, with him is all but done. And I spent three years of it in a state of doubt and turmoil. How can he be almost four? I'm not ready! I want to start over! I could do it better now! But there's no going back and doing it better from the start. There's only starting here and doing it better from now on. And now I'm in a new and unfamiliar home and part of this is liberating and the other part of it feels like a lot of pressure.
It's time to move on and begin savoring the memories we are already making here. There are big things coming for us and I need to be ready! It's time for us to un-stick the memories from the walls of the house in Fitchburg and transplant them here. I think that's easier for the kids than it is for me. I remember in our home search how much the kids loved to see an empty house. They could run and run and run and not have to worry about breaking anything or being scolded for touching something. We walked into the new house the day we closed and let them run through the empty rooms. We walk through the old house every now and again too whenever we check on it while we patiently wait for a sale and they run and run there too. Something about an empty room implies space to be free for a kid. And for us parents, empty rooms equal a responsibility to fill it up....with comfort and love and memories that make it feel real and enduring.
