I Don't Know What to Say

I don't know how to start this blog.  I guess I should just start by telling the truth.

I am so happy.

For months I wondered what this would feel like.  My stuff is in a new place.  My kids are still trying to figure out where everything is.  My cat looks at me, completely bewildered, wondering where in the hell she is.

She's home.

~

 

I've gone back and forth on the whole moving thing for a long time.  Let's see...Brad died almost exactly eight years ago...so seven and a half years ago I thought about moving.  And I didn't and I was right.

Until I did.  And I was right then, too.

This is just like everything else we've been through on this road; what's hard for you is a speed bump to someone else and a small twist in the road to someone else might derail you.

It's personal.

In this new house, I don't see the spot where my husband said goodbye for the last time.  I don't see where the Christmas tree has been for the last twelve years, eight of them without him.  I don't see the work bench he built.  I don't walk the lawn wondering if he likes the way I'm mowing it.

It wasn't easy.  These last few weeks have been like, yet again, ripping off a band-aid.  As I cleaned the kids' rooms, I shared a silent memory in each one and shut the door quietly as if kissing each one goodbye: the border Brad pasted to Haley's room when she was five; the border I painted in Michael's when he was a baby; Sarah...she came home from the hospital to that house. 

I looked around my room and remembered for the last time that morning my husband said goodbye.

 I loved that house for being a home...and I hated it for trapping me. 

It was simultaneously a source of comfort and pain.

~

And now?

Here I am.  I'm typing this in a new room.  Kids are laughing outside.  I'm surrounded by boxes.  I have a glass of red wine next to me.  I don't like the color of this room, but I can change it because it's mine. 

It's mine.