Monday, February 1, 2010

Changes...

Moving sucks! Although, it is exciting too, bittersweet would be more accurate, in our case anyway. We did move on December 30th, which made for lots of chaos. Christmas this year was the abridged version, as was New Years. It rained on moving day. Apropos of something I guess. Maybe it was symbolic of a clean start, washing away the troubles of the past...ha, or maybe it was just rain!

We had so much stuff to move after ten years of living in the same place and watching our kids grow out of diapers, tricycles, cribs, pink walls in the bedroom, Dora and High School Musical. Now they have grown into cell phones, iPods, Wii, "Secret Life of the American Teenager", makeup, and little girls texting my son at 7 am. The house we are currently renting is much smaller than the old house so there was and still is, a lot to purge. Its funny that the more house you have the greater the need to fill it. We are streamlining our lives in this process and realizing that owning a house is not the key to our happiness.

We held onto that "American Dream" so tight that it came close to being our demise. Don't get me wrong, we contemplated selling many times over the past few years, ultimately believing that is was the wrong thing to do. We bought into the fantasy. Owning that house never felt like a dream, it felt more like a drain and I didn't realize it until we were out. It felt as the entire weight of that place was lifted off of our backs. When things got bad, a friend of mine said to me, " You have to think of this as a business decision and take the emotion out of it." In that moment, I realized she was right. She was an objective observer and she helped me see that the hope for the family's future did not lie in those four walls but in the strength that had held us all together over all the years of struggle. I called the real estate agent 5 minutes later. I am forever grateful to her for that little kick in the ass.

I was sad, we were all sad but knew that we had to move on. The kids were troopers. They were initially brokenhearted but they quickly recovered when they felt the strain lift. They saw how life could be when we all weren't cowering every time the phone rang or someone knocked on the door.

It felt good to write those checks to those family members who helped when they were able. To pay off so many things that I could never envision doing before.

It's time to reevaluate what exactly the next step will be. Hopefully this give us a chance to be clear headed and make choices. Choices that come from the pursuit of happiness and not from desperation.

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