Sunday, August 27, 2017

Growing Pains

We moved.

Are moving?

We have lived our new house, just up the street (1.7 miles to be exact), for almost three weeks now.

We are STILL cleaning stuff out of the old house. And no, we haven't listed it yet...

This last month has been rough. And 90% un-fun. It has been majorly un-fun for the children, which compounds the un-fun for the adults. We were all ready to be finished with the moving process about three weeks ago. AND school started - which just means less time to tackle the slowly diminishing mountain of stuff to sort through.

Tonight, after a particularly un-fun time trying again to finish cleaning out the basement, Michael said to me, "You know what I wish? I wish this was all a bad dream and I would wake up and we wouldn't be moving and I would be in our old house. This house does not feel like my home."

Ouch. That was a bit of an emotional sucker-punch for me. As an adult I can rationalize that three weeks is not very long and I know that we will make many happy memories here and it will feel like (and be) our home. For Michael this past three weeks has been an eternity.

There's no bigger message here tonight - just a reminder to myself that the things that feel overwhelming/uncomfortable/un-fun to me, feel the same way multiplied by about 1,000 to my children.

I also wanted to get these words down so, in the future, when we are all happy in this home, I might be able to remind Michael about how difficult this transition was for him. Maybe remembering/being reminded of that, when everything has turned out just fine, will help him face other difficult transitions.