Moving

Until recently, I’ve moved a lot. Every couple of years, or every year. But always local, between towns, into DC and back out, 3 miles down the same road into the house we’re in now. It’s insane to say, we’ve owned the house we’re in now for over 7 years. It’s the longest my partner has ever lived in one place. But we’re moving for real. From one end of the country to the other. And while we are scheduled through the nose with appointments and estimates and tasks I know that being this overscheduled with things to keep track of is helping to shift my thoughts away from the big feelings I have about all of it. I’m not avoiding them. I process them in chunks. These massive changes. And they’re all such amazing things, but at the same time, it’s so much changing. Our plans to stay here, escape to WV while we both continued working, we got an unexpected escape hatch so much earlier. So our somewhat “faraway” plans to move to the PNW were suddenly not faraway, and more imminent.  We own a house there. 

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I wrote the stuff above weeks (months ago?) but we’re now less than 24 hrs out from the moving truck arriving. I am surrounded by a fortress of boxes. I am still grappling in waves with big feelings. My Mom has moved in to a new house. For nearly everyone in that situation it’s nothing but happy feelings. The new house is twice the size, with beautiful outdoor space, room for everyone to spread out, closer to my older nephew’s core friends, nothing but positive changes. For my older brother it’s a bit more emotional, he’s finally, at 35 being “put out of the nest” so to speak, leaving his childhood home and the safety (and codependence) of having my Mom or someone around all the time to handle all the things that a house entails.

That’s changing for him, for good I hope. The worry that it’s going to have some unintended bad consequences does keep me awake at night sometimes, but growth and change have some pain involved most of the time. He’s also going to be managing that on his own for a couple of months until his girlfriend moves in and hopefully doesn’t immediately step into the role of “mother figure” doing things for him that he needs to learn how to do himself. Again, not my problem to solve but the logic of those feelings doesn’t negate my constant worry.

Spending last week helping pack up things at my Mom’s and making sure it was organized for the movers when they arrived shoved me back into an old state of heightened empathy, reminding me of when I lived there and the constant push and pull of anxiety around taking care of everyone. A big part of why I moved out was the desperate need for some separation from that because living within the reminders day-to-day wore me out. The combination of my “problem-solving” personality, along with an overactive need to “fix/protect/help/” rapidly blows up into fighting off a constant low grade panic about making sure everyone is happy/safe/cared for/supported. It’s all well and good that “it’s not my job to worry about that, they’re adults, etc…” is lovely advice but fucking useless in the face of the emotional response thnx.

Tomorrow the truck will come to haul away the majority of our belongings and drive them across the country to our new house in Seattle. I am excited but I’m also sad. Friday we’ll fly out and no longer officially live here. And the close proximity to my immediate family that’s been part of my entire life will stop. It’s a thing that we’ve all obviously taken for granted and at times weeks and weeks go by with regular life preventing us from any real time spent together.

But there have also been times, like the longest year of the pandemic, that I’m sure I would have gone completely batshit insane without having them nearby.

I will miss being able to drive over in less than half an hour. And I will have to remind myself that the times I do spend here will be a lot more meaningful. I’m grateful we’re headed back in less than a month for our annual family beach vacation and we have plans throughout the rest of the year to be back and forth.

I think the biggest transition will be next year, when the work on the new house is fully complete and we’re scaling back our visits to longer stretches in between. I’ve been considering starting an instagram account just to share things with family, but ugh, I was so glad to disconnect from the site and I really don’t want to feed any of my photos or data into any Meta platform. I guess my family will just have to endure aggressive group chat photo bombing and rambling. 

I am happy and excited and sad and anxious and all the things. I needed to put it somewhere  - otherwise my brain is like a person scrambling to pick up thousands of grains of rice to put them in a bag full of holes. That’s a shit metaphor, whatever.