Whew! I am glad yesterday is behind me. A day that taxed me mentally and emotionally. It's interesting how the brain kicks into to survival mode when you feel threatened. My brain ran through possibilities like a mouse in a maze. Forming plans, discarding them and searching again.
The brain can disconnect from emotion and just function- having grown up around firefighters I learned how one can detach and do the job at hand, without losing your compassion.
It's a skill I have used during the many years of the constant uprooting that my family endured as my ex worked his way up the corporate ladder. You learned to put down tentative roots, but not to get too attached. When we reached the two year mark, I would begin to mentally prepare myself for the inevitable phone call. And then like nomads, we would pull up stakes and move again.
I was explaining some of this to my daughter last evening. She came home to find a for sale sign on the lawn of her best friends' house. The family was staying close, not seeing friends or taking phone calls, kind of a circling of the wagons and my daughter was sad and confused.
My neighbor had clued me in the other night that they would be moving to the next county for a variety of reasons. The economy has forced them to take their kids out of private school and our zoned middle and high school choices are pretty bad. I knew this decision had not come easy, they love this neighborhood and the house and she was grieving.
Moving is incredibly stressful at the best of times, but it is traumatic when your heart isn't in it. I was forced to move five times in eight years during my first marriage. Once we had to move twice within a few months because we had to wait for the builders to finish. Three times I was told we were moving while in the third trimester of pregnancy. I used to joke that they find out we're having another child and then decide it's time to move them again.
The second move was the most difficult. We were in our first house and I had just given birth to our second child. We had painted his room just one week before they let us know we were being transferred to Gainesville. Our neighbors were our friends. I loved Jacksonville, and I hated Gainesville. I cried for weeks, fueled by postpartum depression and the stress of being left alone with a four year old and an infant. Left alone to endure real estate agents and strangers walking through the rooms of my house. To tie up all of the loose ends.
That became the pattern of the next seven years. The spouse would move to the new town, start looking at real estate and I would be left to keep the kids distracted, get the house sold, work with the details at both ends, and pack up. The worse part for me emotionally was not the packing up and driving away. it was the day the FOR SALE sign was placed in the yard. At that moment, this sanctuary, our home, became a house.
Perhaps that doesn't make sense to you, but I'll bet my neighbor was feeling the same way yesterday. It's a subtle shift, but it's there. You look at the rooms where you once saw kids sleeping, or the family gathered around to watch a movie or where the Christmas tree stood; where you cooked the Thanksgiving meal, or sat around eating ice cream at the table and suddenly it becomes just a room. A room that has a stain on the carpet from the time someone dropped salsa. The scuff on the wall where the kids played nerf basketball when you weren't home. The holes in the walls where all of their class pictures hung.
It's when the skill of detachment takes over. When you have to let go of your home and realize someone else will come in and criticize your color choices or small bedrooms. It's accepting that someone is going to move in and change everything, they will erase your presence.
As I told my daughter last night, in each house where we lived, I feel like I left a part of us behind. I left the memories of my children at the ages they were at the time. The memories of playing games, reading books in bed, running in the backyard, taking baths and wrestling on the floor. Each house became a home when we filled it up, not with our stuff, but with memories.
Memories are what makes a house a home.
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