Good lord moving is an exciting, exhilarating and monumental pain in the ASS!

My family and I lived in our home for approximately nine years.  Nine years of children learning to read, tantrums, family dinners, laughter, tears, screaming, singing, love, hope and divorce.  Nine years of memories and diligently ignored basement cobwebs.

I’d thought that my divorce was the hard part, but abandoning the physical location of my marriage felt like a special kind of failure and an empowering new adventure all in one.  What a complex time!

How do you leave behind the marks the children left on the windows and the walls?  Well you pack and go and cry and take pictures and move forward … it hurts and you survive.

So here I am now.  A month or so into the new house and finding ‘home’ all over the place .. I even found it on a camping trip where I was robbed and my car window broken … I carry it now, everywhere I am.  How and when that happened I couldn’t tell you exactly but there were small decisions, consciously made, that I wasn’t going to let bullshit ruin my day.  When our window was broken and our camping trip ended early I decided to choose my joy, remember our lovely paddle boat adventures and pick a new vacation to start the next day.  We did and all was lovely.

Long story short, I feel like the turmoil of the last few years is settling into something else.  Not that there is no turmoil, but that my ex leaving isn’t the force of destruction it used to be.  I have learned to carry a kind of ‘safe’ with me everywhere I go.  Safe is no longer dependent on a husband or a cigarette or even a home – it is portable and flexible.  It’s mine.

The gratitude I feel toward my therapist and my divorce support group (divsup!) and my family and all of you is overwhelming sometimes.  Much love to you all!