I don’t know where to start, so I didn’t bury the lede. It’s right there in the title, and I have lots of feelings about it.
In three months we’ll be packing up our house and hauling all our earthly belongings to a new adventure on the East Coast. I was born in Oregon, but have lived the vast majority of my life in Colorado, so this is uncharted territory!
Over the last five years1 we have talked, and talked, and talked some more about where we might land. We have weighed options, and researched obscure cities. I could tell you more about the geography of tiny rural towns in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana than you want to know, and Zillow still sends me listing from a staggering amount of zip codes, despite my best efforts to eliminate all the email alerts. This has been a long time coming, and feels like a surprise at the same time. We’ve moved houses a lot in our ten years of marriage, but many of those moves have been within the bounds of the same community. It’s still hard to pack up a house, figure out where to put the furniture and hang up pictures, but when your grocery store stays the same it makes things a little easier. When you don’t have to find a new church, is it really a move?2
Even so I find that it’s hard to know how to talk about this, because I think my brain is still catching up to the idea. We made the decision a month ago, but I’m still metabolizing it. In my daily life, not much has changed, except for that now when I stalk around the house at 4 pm, perturbed by the way the dust is illuminated, I am also giving the evil eye to every piece of clutter and furniture, because I know I have to do something with it soon.
The frequent movers among you know this feeling — the way you set up storage solutions so that nothing sprawls too deeply into the cupboards, the way you think about packing it up before purchasing something, the way you wrestle with whether to decorate or plant a garden, or do any of the other things, because what if you just leave? I wonder often, “Is there something wrong with us that we haven’t stayed longer?” And yet I know we’ve done the best we could in all of these scenarios. For the last decade we’ve been taking incremental steps that have prepared us to take bigger ones, and sure, they’ve felt totally backwards at times, but maybe that’s just how life is.
Growing up is hard. We got married when I was 22 and he was 23. We were babies. We’ve lived in cinder block student housing and a rental that streaked nicotine down the walls when we cleaned it3. We’ve bought and sold two houses, been reluctant landlords, and lived on painted plywood floors when it turned out we needed to renovate our life instead of our house. We adventured to Wyoming and learned we could do hard things. We came home again, bringing a blue eyed baby and the confidence to start a business. And now three years later, it’s time for something else.
The thing about doing hard things, is that I know we’ll make it through them, but I also know how much they might cost. So I’m excited, but I’m tired too.
On my best days I envision cousins running for hours in unrestricted open space, climbing trees and building forts. I’m hopeful for the help of being neighbors with family4, the idea of having someone next door, for a smaller town where there’s not as many grocery stores and you see the same people more often. I’m excited for my husband to have a business partner and to live ten minutes away from the ocean.
But late at night I fall down the rabbit hole, googling hurricane statistics against my better judgment, wondering if I can handle a new sort of storm. I know how to do snow, ice and cold. I know how to get through the spring with sand blowing between my teeth. One of our children was born an hour away from the hospital in mid-February, in between a week of -20 temperatures and 80 mph winds5. I drove two hours on an ice slick over a mountain pass to get the dog antibiotics6 I can do hard things. But I don’t know how to do wet, heat, humidity, bugs, and hurricanes. I don’t even own a swimsuit that fits!
It’s not the size of the storm that scares me so much as how unfamiliar it is. There’s a comfort to be found in the familiar, even if it’s miserable. So sure, the actual hurricanes keep me up at night7, but all the other non-weather storms are unfamiliar too. I’m primed to look for threat, but working hard to see opportunity.
God in his kindness, has been working these details out for a long time. For years now, I’ve been saying I could, “never live in the south”, and I observed after a trip out there last fall that,
I couldn’t help feeling claustrophobic with all the trees, even as I marveled at the amount of things that GROW.
And yet, we’ve laid out all the facts over and over, been through a few clarifying crises, and realized that sometimes our best idea of what we want is not quite the same as what the Lord places before us. I got this text from our cousin’s wife while I was sitting in the doctor’s waiting room, a week out from my husband’s health scare.
We had already ruled North Carolina out… it wasn’t going to happen. Then a month later the conversations kept coming, things kept unwinding, the fuzzy details started to get clearer. A bunch of little details lined up. And, as these things so often happen, it was almost like we heard an audible click and snap. All that moving the pieces around, feeling like we were running into brick walls, despairing that they’d ever fit together, and then we had made a decision.
I don’t mean to romanticize this. I’m still going to mourn the loss of mountain views, but I haven’t tried living near the ocean yet. I might love it. As a friend8 reminded me, “Just because you’ve jumped off a 100 foot cliff and survived, doesn’t mean you’re not scared to jump off the 20 foot one.” It’s a whole big sludgy mess of details and stressors, and have you tried to register for next year’s co-op in a place you don’t currently live? Everything will be new and different, and I sometimes wake up thinking, “Ticks! Lyme disease9!” yet the details keep slotting into place and as unlikely as the whole thing has seemed, it also makes perfect sense.
So I guess that’s the big news. I’m sure more details will filter through in the coming weeks. Practically, I’m really tired, and my brain is full, so I’m trying to figure out what that means for writing. I think what it means is that I need to slow my pace a bit. As much as I love writing every week, I’m approaching this feeling:
I want to be able to attend to things well, and adding
has thrown a few of my rhythms off. So, I think for the next few months at least, you can expect to hear from me in this space every other week. I might pop in more frequently, but if the last few weeks are any indication (not to mention past experience), holding all my small people’s big feelings about life changes is basically a full time job. I want to make space for the people and relationships I’ll miss here, without worrying about letting anyone down. And honestly? If you’re anything like me, you’re having trouble keeping up with all the good writing anyway. It might be a relief to have one less thing in your inbox. I find that these big changes don’t meant I write less, but they change the sort of writing I’m doing. There’s a lot more raw journaling, and a little less polished musing.So there you go, that’s the big life update. That’s what my brain space is holding when it’s not occupied by everything else. If you’re the praying sort, we’d appreciate your prayers for our family as we make this transition. Life being life, there’s always unforeseen circumstances, things that come up and plenty of preparation and planning. I suppose the good news is that I have a definitive answer about whether I need to plant my garden this year ;) At least until we get there. Then all bets are off.
Thank you so much to all of the new subscribers that have joined me this week! If you’d like to know a bit more about this newsletter, you can visit my “About” page. If you’d like to get a taste of past writing, this Year in Review is a good place to start.
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Recently:
Disbelieving: I’ll have a one year old this week. That’s just not possible, right?! She’s such a delight. She’s also showing us a well developed stubborn streak. The transition from baby parenting to toddler parenting always throws me for a loop. There is something so simple about babies — you feed them, you carry them, Mommy makes everything better. You do whatever you need to do to get them to stop crying, because they’re a baby. And then they turn this corner into a new stage of awareness and you have to begin the slow process of teaching about things like boundaries and the word, “no” and they come face to face with heartbreaking realities like not being able to eat out of the trash can. They’re so much fun, because their brains are just exploding with new information, but now sometimes you’re the one making them cry, because the reason for a toddler to cry crocodile tears are infinite. The 12-18 month stage is like parenting a pinball. They just bounce off of things and you hope for the best.
Listening: I’ve been having a hard time listening to podcasts, I think because my own brain is pretty noisy right now10, but this one from Sarah Mackenzie was really good. She asks the question, “Are you focused on the getting done, or the doing?” It’s got my wheels spinning about which one I do more of. It’s a good affirmation that teaching our children to love good things is not the same thing as finishing all the curriculum. I think underlying this idea is also the question of whether we are growing in virtue. If we want to grow in virtue, it’s going to be formed by our habits, which requires a focus on the time we spend doing things, and how we do the things, not merely that we do them. (Also, this one about maintaining our children’s joy in reading).
Reading: I started Digital Minimalism this week — it’s been on hold from the library forever and finally got delivered to Libby. Are you allowed to read a book about Digital Minimalism on your phone? I suppose the goal is minimalism, not nothing, ha! I thought the section on solitude was interesting — particularly the connection between writing and solitude. If solitude is defined by having time to think without external inputs, then journaling is one of the best ways to practice it. I already know I’m a healthier person when I’m regularly journaling, but it’s always good to have more reasons to stick with it.
I was going to finish the Outsourced Self, but I can’t find it anywhere… I’m sure it’ll surface sometime in the next three months.
Laughing:
Kid 1: You know that kid that sits in the front row at church? With the red hair?
Kid 2: Griff?
Kid 1: His name is Griffin. He’s not a real griffin though.
then later I was answering questions about Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. They wanted to know if it was like Redwall.
Kid 1 to Kid 2: The rats are anthropomorphic, so that’s a good sign!
Apparently animals acting like humans is the mark of quality literature. Who knew?
Who am I kidding, this has been a conversation since we got married. My willingness to engage the conversation has been more recent ;)
I do count moving all my earthly belongings as a move. It’s still really disruptive. But “literally everything is new” is a different level of disruption than, “where do we put the couch in this house?”
I have these very vivid memories of moving into this house while 11 weeks pregnant and extremely nauseous. Our group of friends from the college group (we were babies!) came over and we scrubbed and scrubbed all the smoke residue. The previous tenant had burned trash in the wood-burning stove, so we had to clean chicken bones out of it. The weekend we moved it was -20 or so. I remember having nightmares about the smell when we went home at Christmas, hoping and praying that it would be better when we got back. After all of that, we had some good times in that little house — it’s where I brought my first baby home.
My husband’s cousin and his family
For what it’s worth, I would not recommend this. It was a very stressful experience.
Given my history of traumatic mastitis experiences, I almost thought it was a joke when our DOG got mastitis. It had just snowed two feet and I had to drive what would have been an hour and a half drive on a good road, on an ice slick, with three little kids, to get her antibiotics so her puppies could nurse. Just, don’t have dogs, or puppies, or animals 😂 And definitely don’t be pregnant while you do — too much sympathetic projecting.
I would greatly appreciate you keeping any horror stories to yourself… 😬
Why yes, I do have secondary ptsd from chronic illness facebook groups. I’ve heard way too many horror stories about both ticks and mold. They are real; also I remind myself that I am not helpless and have a lot of tools.
um, also my kids. My kids are very noisy.
We've got some potentially huge changes on the horizon too, and I've been hanging on to this Mary Oliver quote from an interview she did:
"...so many of us live most of our lives seeking the answerable and somehow demeaning or bypassing the things that can’t be answered, and therefore denuding one’s life of the acceptance of mystery and the pleasure of mystery and the willingness to live with mystery, is greatly what I think about. And if I could do something for people, I would say, don’t forget about the mystery, love the mystery . . . don’t want answers all the time.”
Is there anything more mysterious than a cross-country move?! Praying you guys keep leaning into it.
This is hard, and also, I am excited for you. I hope that the transition will be a smooth as possible and that you will fall in love with your new situation. I'll be praying for you!
And in terms of ticks -- tick checks every day. It'll be fine!