Miss Mom: Moving Again Day

This past March, my daughter Ashley and her daughter Helene’, the toy strewing toddler, moved out of my house and into her own with her new husband. I freely admit that I spent the night of their honeymoon turning her room into my new office.

I was enjoying my new space, dreaming about the new bookshelves, credenza-style desk and oversize chair I wanted to put in there one day, when I got some unexpected news. Well, a series of unexpected news. The first was the announcement that I was going to be a Nana again and that Helene’ was going to be a big sister this next August. That news was quickly followed by the confirmation of Ashley’s husband Derek getting the date he was supposed to report for basic training. We’d been waiting on the second bit of news, the first was a complete surprise.

So we send the young recruit off to basic, and begin wondering where the young family will be stationed. It soon becomes apparent the two stages of training Derek will undergo will be completed sometime in mid-February, broken up by a short break for Christmas. After the second stage, he would be reporting to his first duty station. That would put the timing right around six weeks before the new baby would arrive. In the meantime, the lease on their townhouse would end. So it was decided that we would pack up the townhouse, put most of their things into storage and Ashley and Helene’ would stay with me until they went to Derek’s new duty station. The moving date was set to fall around the two weeks Derek would be home so he could help with the heavy lifting. I brought Ashley a steady supply of boxes and she began packing for the upcoming move.

Then she finds out that the landlord wants to sell the place and the realtor was eager to start showing the property. By this time her house had approached the state most homes do when in the preparing-to-move stage: boxes everywhere, some packed, some not, general disorder as one tries to figure out what to go into what box, and the rest that you need to keep unpacked yet. Add a toddler’s day of toy strewing, and you can get a good idea of what things looked like. There was no way Ashley was letting anyone in to take pictures or show the house, so she decided to move up the moving date to the weekend before Thanksgiving.

Thankfully, we had been working a bit at a time on moving some of the things going into storage, (i.e., her in-laws’ basement), and she’d gotten a fair amount of packing done, but it was a whirlwind week of packing and moving. I couldn’t help much with the actual move as I had worked the entire weekend, but I helped where I could, mostly by toddler herding. Her former bedroom/my-new-and-now-former office was emptied in one evening as I threw everything into my room to make space for her things. I managed to keep a path to the new location of my desk, my bathroom and the bed. But other then that my room looked like a room you’d find on the television show, Clean Sweep.

She got the last bit of things out of her townhouse and either into mine or her in-laws’ on Wednesday, just in time for all of us to leave town for the Thanksgiving holiday. It will probably take us a good solid week to set my house back into some semblance of order, as both of my daughters have finals coming up and Helene’ “helps” by leaving Mr. Potato Head parts all over the house. We need to vacuum, do laundry, put things away, find places to put those things we have no room for but still need to get out of the middle of the room. Last night, as we are looking at the post apocalyptic state my house has been turned into, someone wonders if we can go ahead and put up the Christmas tree.

Despite the upheaval and the mess and the fact that my stress levels are hovering around the red line mark, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I am very thankful to have a few more months to spend with my daughter and granddaughter before they move far, far away. It is going to be quite hard not to have them around and I am going to miss my granddaughter so much. There is nothing in the world I would trade for one of her hugs or moments of her sitting in my lap while I read her a book. I will miss those and time spent with my older daughter. I have never been more thankful for modern means of communication like cell phones, web cams and instant messaging. I will be using them even more soon.

Life is full of adventure, no matter how mundane it may seem. You can find joy sorrow, courage, the limits of your endurance, uncertainty and determination all within a single week. Often one aspect of your life comes to a close just as a brand new opportunity opens up. That is true in my own life and the lives of my children. They have faced interesting and unique challenges in their own lives and have met them with integrity and determination. I know that they will be successful all through their lives in whatever it is they do, even if I am not around to see. I don’t tell them enough how proud I am of all three of them and how blessed I am to have them in my life.