The Five Stages of Moving

Hallelujah!

We're NOT moving to a Mormon Mansion and I feel great about it!

A more skeptical person might say that the way things worked out was all due to my stubborn nature, but a God-fearing lady, I choose to believe it was His intervention that got us to where we are now---which is to say, NOT moving to a Mormon Mansion.

You see, after a lot of back-and-forth and negotiations and compromises, I had agreed to move to the large house on 82 acres, 30 minutes away from town. I consoled myself with the knowledge that I would get to redo the house exactly the way I wanted with no argument from my husband and that the superior school system was worth it--or, if nothing else, by sacrificing what I wanted now, I'd be building stories onto my mansion in Heaven while Dom would be consigned to the position of my celestial landscaper once we reached the hereafter.

But, that didn't happen! Instead, while we were waiting to sign back a counter offer to the sellers of the MM, a different house came on the market and because I had been obsessively checking Zillow every 17 seconds, as soon as it was listed, I asked our realtor to show it to us--"just so we can check it off the list."

Long story short, 30 minutes after stepping foot into the home, we put in our offer.

I won't go into the details of the home here, suffice it to say that it is beautiful, with a normal amount of acreage, and close to town. Oh, and it has a front porch (you can take the girl out of the South but you can't take the South out of the girl).

But anyway, that leaves us here--two days away from officially selling our current home and a month-and-a-half away from being able to move into our new one.

And in case you're bad at math, that's 6 weeks (42 days) where we will be officially homeless...with 4 kids, 1 dog, 2 boats and about a decade's worth of accumulated junk.

The buyers of this place have allowed us to rent it back for a couple of weeks, and we have friends who are willing to let our motley crew rent their 700 st. ft. converted garage apartment for the remainder of the time, so the housing issue, while not ideal, is managed.

We’re also supposed to be getting the keys for the new home at 5 PM on May 17^th, which is about 12 hours before the kids and I fly off to GA for my sister’s wedding. Again, not ideal but manageable.

In all of this, what I have found least manageable is the physical act of moving. We’ve lived in this home for about 4 years so I am a little rusty at all of it (before this home, I had had 13 address from the time I moved out of my parents home to landing in this one).

Which is why, when confronted with the task of boxing up all of our belongings and living a nomadic existence for the next 6 weeks, I have chosen to write this instead:

THE FIVE STAGES OF MOVING

1-      EXCITEMENT—Hello, Pinterest. Why, yes, I will pin 4,524 idea for laundry room paint colors.  This first phase is awesome because you get to envision everything you will do to make your new home yours. You imagine having holidays and hosting supper club at your new place and see the shiny sparkle of a new home through rose colored glasses.

2-      DENIAL – Coming off the high of the excitement is denial. It’ll be fine! We have weeks and weeks to move this stuff. I can totally do everything I want to do to the new house on time and under budget, moving isn’t going to cost that much or take away that much of my free time. Sure, I’ll sign-up for a 50 mile relay! WRONG.

3-      PROCRASITONATION –After a long time spent in Denial-ville, you’ve accepted that you’re going to have to move and that it might not all be roses, but that doesn’t mean you have to get everything packed right now. You need to enjoy life a little bit, go to the coast, write a blog…It is in this phase that bingeing on a new Netflix series, listening to an entire podcast and picking-up reading again all sound like really, really good ideas.

4-      DESPERATION – It is T-72 hours until moving day and suddenly taking a match to the whole thing doesn’t seem like a terrible idea, except you’ve already sold your house and don’t want to leave another family homeless so you start cold-calling people, begging them to take the kids for an afternoon so you can cram things in boxes because you’re convinced that even though you procrastinated, you’re still going to make this move happen in a mature, orderly fashion. The piles labeled “donate” and “trash” grow bigger and bigger and suddenly you find yourself staring at the artwork for your 3-your-olds telling yourself that they’re never going to want to see that stuff when they’re older, and if they do, sloppy finger painting isn’t that hard to recreate.

5-      RESIGNATION—It’s moving day and you are standing outside of your child’s closet with an extra strength Hefty bag in one hand, and sweeping your other arm across the built-ins to slide their clothes/crap/treasures/toys/random sock all into the bag. Maybe I’ll go through this and organize at the new house you tell yourself. Then, you kind of shake your head and softly snort, because let’s be real.

And because you’ve learned nothing, you’ll experience these same emotions when you finally get into your new home. You’ll be excited to make it yours, that all of the moving is now behind you; then you’ll refuse to believe that your dreams are too expensive or your kids aren’t going to wreck everything inside of a week; you’ll pin DIY projects you’ll never actually get around to because, well...life; then you’ll see your beautiful new home start to fade away and you’ll implement chore charts and incentivize your kids to pick-up their crap, you’ll pay obscene amounts of money to landscapers so your home doesn’t slide into a Haunted Mansion aesthetic; then eventually, you’ll resign yourself to the fact that you are a busy, tired mother and while you can aspire to one day having a beautiful, clean, organized home, that right now it just isn’t in the cards.

Okay, maybe I should go fill a box…

After I pick-up the Big Girl from school.

P.S.

Also, in case you were wondering, the uniform of a thirty-something mother-of-four packing-up and  moving households is very similar to that of an 18-year-old girl attending Bonnaroo: No make-up, Chacos, running shorts, t-shirt, Ray-Bans and hair up in some sort of nasty ponytail/bun/dreadlock knot. So if you see me around town, you have been warned.