Updates - Moving again

July 3rd.

Midsummer has come and gone. Many days have passed and many things have happened since the last time I wrote, and although I cannot chronicle them all, I find myself with a minute to look back and reminisce and to look forward as we embark on a new chapter.

I am also grieving the last chapter of our lives and anxious about the next and hope that writing for a minute might help clear my mind, as I can't seem to move out of the mental spiral I find myself in. 

The latest update is that we have packed up and left Texas and arrived in northern Indiana, where my husband has been living and working since the end of January. We stopped along the way to see both sets of grandparents and one set of cousins. The cousins have a big, beautiful, newly built house with a huge backyard and a pool that is making me question our decision to leave suburbia and return to urban life.  And another friend sent photos of their new farm in Pennsylvania. Then we spent a day at my parents' farm in southern Indiana.  Rural life was also looking attractive. 

So when we drove up to our new house that I had only seen online and in a Facetime call, my stomach dropped. My 19 year old, who was with me, said, "Oh Mom, I don't think this is your forever home." And I felt the same thing. My heart didn't leap up; it sank. We will have only a tiny backyard, which is actually a side yard since the house in on a corner, with a little patio, a small plot of grass, and a koi pond - bonus! The front and side yards are landscaped nicely, but in my mind the back yard was bigger, more of a sanctuary space. And in person, the house paint looks shabby, the front entrance needs an update, and the windows are ancient.

We looked at many houses, and my husband looked at this one in person. We put an offer in on one (not one of the two in the last post) and sacrificed the earnest money to make an offer on this one. The one we had an offer on was tiny and dark inside and needed a major renovation/addition to accommodate our family, but the price was great, it was in the neighborhood we liked, and it had a beautiful yard. The house we will sign for tomorrow was actually one I looked at on Zillow based on pictures from 10 years ago when it was sold last after it was renovated.  Dan Face-timed me when he walked through, and we both loved what we saw. It was so much better than what we had looked at before in terms of space and updates.  But I didn't look closely at windows and and bathroom fixtures, and for some reason, I thought the yard was oriented differently and was larger.

Then I also started fretting because the kitchen is in the back of the house and connects to a dining room and a small sitting room, but not to the living room. I like the detailing in the house - it's an older home with nice moldings and built-in bookshelves, and it has a sizeable basement and 4 bedrooms, plus a little office that can function as a guest room. There is much to like about it, but it is just not what I thought it was.

This is the peril of online shopping. Ask me why I didn't fly out to see it myself when it first came on the market? We had to decide quickly because there were two other offers on the house. And then I was so, so, so busy at the end of the school year, and I had just been out to visit to see the little house with the great yard that we had put an offer on two weeks before.  I had driven by this house, but didn't really pay attention to it, other than to note that it was the house I had seen online.  I trusted my husband's opinion, and I was feeling overwhelmed by the amount of work we would had to have done to transform the little house.

So there I am looking at buying a house I didn't really love. Was this just "cold feet" before a big purchase? My feet literally tingled with anxiety.  

I spent hours that first night here researching real estate deals gone bad. What happens when a buyer backs out at the last minute?  They lose the earnest money. They could be sued. But what happens when someone buys a house then decides it isn't right for the family?  They could lose thousands in the process of selling and buying a different place. Moving is expensive - the fees, the commissions, the insurance, packing costs, the moving company, new curtains and rugs, and the replenishing of all the groceries and cleaning supplies and stupid things like toilet bowl brushes and trash cans that you give and throw away and have to purchase again on the other end, etc. 

And then there is the emotional cost. Our family is mourning friendships, neighbors, our fun house and million dollar view, our parish and school, my students, the Texas rivers, Austin hikes, and even the things we didn't do yet- we never went to the Schlitterbahn! Why, I even spent a ridiculous amount of time moaning about a bag of old ND t-shirts I gave away to Goodwill at the last minute because they might have had sentimental value. Meanwhile I crammed into the car a ridiculous amount of junk with no value, including 5 old laptops, discarded by the kids when they updated, that we never sent to the e-waste place, because I wasn't sure if the kids had scrubbed the hard drives. 

Why was I mourning old t-shirts? Because I feared that in the bag was a little Notre Dame t-shirt that my husband had worn as a child and then our boys wore when they were little.  I'd been saving the bag to give my sister-in-law, whom we were going to see, for her littlest son. Silly thing to feel sad about, but it represented bigger losses -  the loss of childhood, the loss of connections to the past, and my lack of preparation for leaving. I packed in a rush and didn't give myself time to sort through old things, so in a moment of distress about how much stuff was sitting around, I told my daughter to take the bag along with multiple other bags of stuff that we didn't need to the donation center.

How did we have so much stuff? We just did this 4 years ago. Why didn't I get rid of more? I threw away huge loads of junk, gave away huge loads of junk, and still had loads of junk packed into boxes and shoved into the car. We had boxes of papers we hadn't opened since we left California - some of them hadn't been opened even before that move. They are full of papers from my husband's job and from our children's art and from my class notes. All stuff that is either now irrelevant, online, or just a memento that no one really wants to treasure forever - scribbles from pre-school years, pictures from fourth grade, papers from 9th... I held on to much more from our older kids than the younger ones, so there is an irregular distribution of mementoes.

I also held onto other old t-shirts with the idea of making t-shirt quilts, but here again I don't have an even number for each kid. I stopped keeping them because I realized it was a futile gesture that wasn't ever going to get finished. I haven't even made photo-books for the last 10 years. 

All this unnecessary stuff! All these unfinished projects! 

And now here we are living in a temporary 4 bedroom furnished apartment which is just fine without most of our stuff. (I do have those dead laptops still!)  We closed on the new house Tuesday despite my anxieties, but we are giving the owner a month rent back while he relocates (part of the reason he took our offer).  

Actually, after our walk-through, I felt better about the house. It is a good size for us - not too big when it is just my husband, our daughter, and I, but big enough to accommodate a sizable group when the kids come home or friends visit. We are going to renovate the bathrooms right away, paint a couple rooms, and get new windows and screens for the sun room this fall. Other new windows and updates like exterior paint and adding a front portico, can wait till next spring.  Our daughter is excited about picking out wallpaper, an area rug, and new furniture for her room. We're all excited about outfitting the game room in the basement - but that may take place over time, too. 

After a couple of days of getting used to adjusted expectations, I feel better about the house, but I'm not sure it's our forever house, and I'm giving up on the idea that such a thing exists as I observe our aging relatives moving out of their "forever homes" into smaller places. There's a part of me that wishes we had committed to renting for a year to get a feel for the area and what our next chapter will look like. That was sort of the idea with the little house - buy it to live in for a bit until we decided what we wanted in a future home.  But part of the problem is that what I want shifts all the time - one minute small, sustainable, and tidy is appealing, the next minute, wide open spaces are what I crave. 

I haven't forgotten (and neither has my husband) the anxiety I felt about our Texas house, which was such a shift from where we were before. Big, expensive, contemporary.  I lost a lot of sleep about making such a big commitment, but we were happy there. The kids loved it. The neighbors were great. After having a fraught relationship with the pool in Coronado, I ended up loving the Texas pool, which we swam in every day before we left. The neighbors came over to swim almost every day, too! The game room and bar and movie theater at our Texas house bothered me when we were moving, but by the time we left, they were part of the fun. And now guess what we are putting in our new basement? A projector and either a pool table or ping pong table or something. The 19 yr old has requested a peloton or treadmill. And under the stairs is a little bar space - snack bar, that is. Perfect for making popcorn and serving up soda or hot chocolate!

If moving all these times has taught me anything, it's that we can make anything into a home. We tend to pendulum swing from smaller, urban houses to bigger, suburban houses each time we move.  I just want the kids to want to come and see us and to feel comfortable staying as long as they want/can, although I know our lives have shifted.  The 19 yr old said she feels like she doesn't belong anywhere, but she'll always have a home with us, wherever we are.  The platitudes about home being wherever we are together ring true. Soon we'll be putting out a new welcome mat and turning on the lights to welcome all!