life adjustments, packing, moving, and other opposite-of-fun adult things

trying to put my muddled thoughts down on paper

It’s been an age since I’ve written here and I do miss it and all the wonderful people I talk with and read on Substack, and I have so many jumbled up thoughts that I thought: to heck with it, here’s an old fashioned brain dump of a post because these newsletters should be newsletters not content.

So we’re in the process of moving. And heavy emphasis on process because I’ve been packing up this house for a month now, and still am not sleeping in the new house. It sounds worse than it is, of course- because I’m dramatic, but because we don’t have to be out of our current house we have time to move “leisurely”. We don’t have to be out of our current house because it is owned by my parents and sits on the property that they also live on, so it’s not as if they have a random stranger lined up to live 10 miles from the nearest town at the edge of the boreal forest. It also means that I don’t have to clean nearly as thoroughly as if strangers had purchased this house. I appreciate that fact as I’m fully decluttering closets.

We got possession of our new house which is about an hour and a half from where we currently live on August 30, and since then we’ve been spending most of our free time and weekends painting the bedrooms and trying to get some basic fixes done in the house before we move in. Again, a very luxurious thing to be able to do! But our painting seems to be going slowly, or maybe it’s because we underestimated how big these bedrooms actually are, and it seems we still are barely half way to our painting goal. We’ve been driving back and forth to the new house with loaded trucks full of our sundry stuffs for the past few weeks and it’s kind of been exhausting. Most of my possessions aren’t in my immediate vicinity anymore, but I still have so much stuff to move! We still don’t have a firm day to move our furniture nailed down yet because my husband’s work has an extremely busy month of work happening, and it has an unknown and unpredictable quality of possibly requiring my husband to work overtime and weekends at any moment. That hasn’t happened yet, but we know it would be irresponsible to choose a moving date and tell our friends and family they have to show up and help that day when we may very well have to cancel because my husband has to work that weekend. But we’re hoping that the last weekend of the month will work, crossing our fingers the project at work goes without unseen hitches.

So with all that being said my life feels very much up in the air. I’m spending most of my time packing, cleaning, organizing, painting, unpacking but also still have to do laundry, cook, and school people. My older, high school age kids have started their classes and things so that has to still happen, and I’m starting the younger kids on the school subjects that require the least amount of work on my part so that they can at least not get too bogged down in too many subjects. But it leaves me feeling upended and overwhelmed with the amount of things I need to get done, and I just generally hate transitions in life. Starting at college, having newborns, any time where you have to go through the muddy slog of finding new routines are times I struggle in. I love routine. I like predictability, I like not having my hallway full of boxes.

It’s also just an overwhelming time with all the emotions of moving, and the prospect of such a stark change after living in one house for the past 17 years. I know it’s a good change and one that I want, but there still will be and has been so many times of sadness or not-knowing that leave me discombobulated and tired. Obviously this is normal and to be expected, but I like my emotions to not drag on for months and this feels like months! I also keep thinking about how this is going to last for so long! It’s going to take me months to feel out of transition and settled! Can I do this for months without losing my mind?!

Dramatic, guys.

I feel like this is one of those situations where you see it happening to other people, and it looks so easy and fast! Like the pregnancies of other women on instagram. “She’s pregnant?! That’s so exciting and great!” Four hours later: “I can’t believe she had that baby already!” While your own pregnancy feels as if it lasts at least a full decade.

“That person moved across the country to a brand new gorgeous house that only cost $100,000 in a weekend!?!” Meanwhile I have been moving for half a year.

I should also mention that in addition to all of this happening my garden is still growing, there are loads of flowers, and I flowered my first wedding at the end of August which was a stressful but overall exciting experience! A little behind the scenes of what it looks like to order locally grown flowers from a flower farmer: it takes three days of prep to have flowers ready for your wedding!

Of course, we also had the fun experience of our vehicle dying last week as I was driving a load of boxes to the new house and we are now the proud owner of a brand new transmission - which cost approximately how much a boomer paid in a down payment for an entire home! Or at least we will be the proud owner of a new transmission if it ever gets out of the shop because the car is still in the shop. I’ve been without a vehicle for a whole week! But actually come to think of it, it’s probably in not having a vehicle that I have a couple minutes to type down this post! Bright sides abound!

And to top off our very uncharacteristic, stressful, busy in all ways and aspects of our lives month, I will leave for our pilgrimage to Ireland on October 2 — what might be three mere days after moving our furniture to the new house! As someone who never travels internationally this is quite the to-do. Sometimes you just have to laugh at God’s timing because it could not be further from how you would have put it down on the calendar.

I think what’s been helpful in not getting completely overwhelmed in all this, is almost laughing at the sheer amount of things happening all at the same time right now. There’s almost too many things going on for me to have anxiety about! Obviously I have some anxiety, but whenever I feel it starting to ramp up, I think about how so much has yet to happen that I simply can’t control, and that helps put things in perspective. All this busy-ness and doing things that have to be done that seem very important and out of the ordinary for me, is all very good. And for that I am thankful, and should be more thankful. It is stress, but at least stress that I know is happening for good reasons, and the culmination of many years of hard work and intention. And even though I want to document that this time of transition feels like it’s taking years, it definitely will not last forever.

So those are some thoughts for you in the midst of this crazy time. I hope to get back to regularly writing and reading all your thoughts soon, but I still have fall garden clean-up, and possibly new garden designing barrelling towards me and did I mention three of my kids will be able to go to a hybrid Chesterton Academy two days a week? So things are totally going to slow down around here…