Five years ago

Yesterday was D.'s 19th birthday, today is J.'s birthday, and tomorrow is our 31st anniversary. It's a busy three days. There is also another layer on these three days which hadn't been there originally. Five years ago on D.'s birthday the movers came and took away all the furniture and boxes from the Big Ugly House. Fiver years ago today, we did the final cleaning and crammed as much as we could possibly cram into our two vehicles, and locked the door to the Big Ugly House for the final time. Five years ago tomorrow we sat in our hotel room waiting for the phone call that would tell us that we officially closed on the sale of the Big Ugly House and the afternoon would involve closing on our new house. 

I've been thinking about that transition a lot over the past couple of days. I've also been thinking about the ensuing five years. There was so much of it that was hard while there were also parts of it that were good. Having a pandemic in the middle didn't really help much. We thought we had started to settle in when life completely shut down. Much of what we thought we had figured out turned out not to be able to withstand the complete break that the shut down caused. Looking back at it all, I think it was much more traumatic than I was willing to acknowledge. Those first two years I was positively manic to develop some sort of social support system. It didn't help that there were some challenging issues with children at the same time. That is difficult enough if you feel as though you are connected to your community; it is much more difficult when you feel cut off from everything familiar. 

I wish I could go back in time and tell myself a few things. The first would be that it will all sort itself out and you really will begin to feel at home out here. You will find new pursuits that you could have only dreamed of happening at the old house. You will learn your way around and not have to rely on Google Maps to go... well, anywhere. There will actually be weeks where you don't think about your old life; where you don't drive around this new area and feel as though you are a visitor. 

The second would be that no matter how hard you try, it takes more than a couple of years to develop the same social network that was built over thirty years. Deep friendships take time; they cannot be artificially created. You will always miss seeing your very close friends regularly, but they will still be there, they will not disappear. I would suggest that I take my own advice and remind myself that attachment to another person takes years, not weeks or months. Unrealistic expectations always make things more difficult. Please, give yourself some grace.

The last would be to try to see the whole thing as a gift. There is nothing like moving to grow and stretch you in new directions; directions that would never have been possible by staying in the same place. Like so many good things, the process is not always comfortable. Going through hard things can make one a better person in the long run. I would tell myself that as hard as the move feels, you will find a sense of peace in this new place that you never experienced in the old. 

I've written about the anniversary of the move each year. It has felt as though it was necessary to continue to process through it all, and writing is how I process. This post could be the last time I feel the need to do that. I feel more rooted. I see the beginnings of real friendships beginning to develop. I am excited by the things I do here. There will always be things I miss about Evanston and the Big Ugly House, but that, too, is okay. As we often remind R., it is okay to miss things and people feel sad about that. Probably it's just as well that I didn't know it would take five years here to reach this place. That would have felt too long, and I don't think I could have navigated knowing I would feel in the in-between phase for so long. 

I'm excited for the what the next five years bring.