Today is our tenth wedding anniversary (add six or so years to that to get the full total). K gave me the most beautiful cards this morning (we rarely give anniversary gifts, and this year we agreed that since we’re buying each other a house and lots of other things to go inside of it, we could skip the recommended tin items). Naturally we both wrote a bit about the journey in our cards, but K took the time to reflect on the fact that we are back in the city where we met, and the city in which we were married. I had to remind myself that we’ve never lived in Michigan during the time that we’ve been married – we lived in New York the whole time, even though we were married here. This is our first anniversary living in the place where our journey began.

K also reminded me that despite how awful things have been feeling these past few weeks, and all of the moments in which I’ve found myself saying “I don’t want to live here – I want to go back.” We have to believe that this is where we are supposed to be right now. It doesn’t feel that way, but I need to try to believe it.

My dad has been urging me to call Roberta and push her for a closing date on the house, since we foolishly signed a purchase agreement that said something along the lines of “early October.” He said that it’s because he wants to make sure that we’re able to book painters and flooring contractors immediately upon closing, but I’m fairly certain that the real reason is because he wants us out of his house as quickly as possible. I can’t say that I blame him – we want to be out of here too, but it still makes for an unpleasant living situation when you’re aware that your hosts wish that you weren’t there. So I called Roberta and she said that we can tentatively close on the 10th of October, and get painters in by the 13th. My dad then reminded us that since we’re putting in wood floors, the wood will have to sit in the space for two weeks before it can be installed. That pushes our move date back significantly later than we’d hoped, and we found ourselves feeling so despondent about the next ten+ weeks that we actually discussed breaking our contract and buying a different house. We came to our senses pretty quickly when we realized that most closings happen no sooner than 30 days out, and that we wouldn’t likely get in THAT much earlier, particularly since we didn’t have another house in mind.

Ever since we signed the contract I’ve had my sights set on Halloween in our new neighborhood: I pictured us trick-or-treating there and could imagine sitting on the front stoop handing out candy to neighborhood kids, meeting new neighbors as we go. But it’s starting to look like that’s an ambitious target date. I’m super bummed at the prospect of ten more weeks of living out of suitcases in someone else’s space. All of our coats and warm clothes are packed away in boxes in the garage of our future home, and I probably allowed that to happen because of my wishful thinking that we’d be in well before we needed them. Still, I recognize that ten more weeks in the context of ten years of marriage should be small potatoes, and that the next ten years in that house (god willing, because we never want to move again) will be worth it.

Nothing terribly story-worthy has happened this week. On Friday evening, Kristin and the kids were already downtown at the library when I was wrapping up work, so I met them and we strolled around for a bit and talked about how Kalamazoo really seems to have gotten more interesting over the years and seems to be moving in a good direction. Then today we spent a brief chunk of the day at the mall and the cognitive dissonance was almost more than I could handle. I was both hating that this might be our new reality, but also well aware that we chose this so…

Anyway, here are a few pictures from the last couple of days of the kids with trucks. Jonah was the lucky recipient of a hand-me-down John Deere Gator (those battery powered plastic trucks for toddlers) and he saw it for the first time last night and was awfully excited about it. Most of the time was spent with my parents trying to keep him from driving off of a cliff while looking anywhere but in the direction he was driving.

I’m pretty sure that he was either saying or thinking “but I’m a good driver!” We heard that a lot.

He actually wants to stop and dump the cargo bed even more than he wants to drive it.

It was a rainy morning, and about a million degrees out, so we were stuck indoors and spent some time upstairs playing with Papa Doc’s old trucks. Jonah has loved them for quite some time, but now the twins are old enough to be into it too. Jonah calls this “playing beans” because of the dry beans standing in for dirt/gravel.

Have I mentioned how much the twins love the pets? Pets are such a novelty for them. They often get down on their bellies to try to win the dogs and cat over, but it’s usually futile.

At work a number of months ago, I attended this really wonderful training called Change Builders (I can’t find a website for it, otherwise I’d share it). Working from an organizational perspective, it addressed the tough realities of what happens within an organization when significant change occurs, moving through the stages of what was, what is, and what will be. There was a great deal of focus on what a mess “what is” is pretty much always going to be, no matter how well executed the change might be. The trainer talked about how the stages of grief are very real when any sort of major change is occurring, and the importance of allowing people to find healthy ways to cope with those feelings rather than trying to squash them or avoid them.

I have no idea where my workbook from that training went during the move, but I wish that I could find it because I’m struggling.

I know that we’re only six days in, but we definitely aren’t in love with Kalamazoo yet. I’ve been having lots of fears about this being the wrong decision and wondering if we’ll be happy here. Living in this weird in-between place with my parents is really tough, because we aren’t in our space, we’re on top of each other, and I think that we all feel a little bit trapped (my parents included). That said, the idea of making social plans and having to execute on them absolutely exhausts me right now. Everything about the “what is” is so overwhelming to me that I cannot even imagine trying to have a conversation with another person that isn’t wholly transactional.

Little things make me want to explode, and naturally I’m blaming them on Kalamazoo. Like the fact that in two days, as many random men have tried to come up and talk to me downtown. I blew today’s guy off successfully, but yesterday I had to sit and listen to roughly 10 minutes of this weirdo’s blathering about vagrants and his father and the Gilmores, and then was furious at myself for not telling him off when he noted that I was married but continued to go on and on about: “Oh are you a model? You’re so beautiful, you know guys, we can’t help it.” Jackass. And naturally I’m thinking about the fact that no dude ever, in any recent years in New York, bothered me on the street in any way.

Kristin is frustrated and grouchy about how her summer is unfolding, we both desperately need a true vacation (even though that isn’t a thing when you have kids) and we can’t find time to fit one in because work is busy for me right now and all of my vacation days are going to either the move or to her new teacher orientation in a couple of weeks when I have to stay home with the kids because day care doesn’t have room for them yet. No one is getting along, and I think that everyone would rather just retreat to their respective corners than have to deal with another human right now.

The kids honestly seem fine and unphased by all of this change, but the adults are pretty unhappy and I’m not sure how to fix it. I think that both K and I need someone else to pick us up and give us a hug and reassure us, and neither of us has anything left to give. We are both way past empty on empathy right now.

I got an email late this afternoon from the children’s museum in Connecticut that we love so much, and I almost started to cry when I read that there are both dinosaur and astronomy exhibits coming up in the next few months. I’m frustrated with our new day care (which the kids haven’t even started yet) because they’re unavailable two critical weeks this month when we need them, they’ve raised the prices significantly since we signed up, and I just don’t know that we made the right choice. I miss Gladys so much it makes me cry. I just miss what we had so much right now.

 

Kristin took all of the kids to her parents’ house overnight. I’m sure that should feel delightfully relaxing, but I miss them like crazy. So just because, here’s a picture of the twins relaxing on the deck yesterday.

We spent most of the day at home in our pajamas. We woke up to a thunderstorm and it rained for most of the morning and early afternoon, and I think that we were all a little bit reluctant to get back into the car. Kristin and I also feel like we need some time to decompress and figure out how it feels to live here, without the pressure to be social. By 3:00 I decided that we really ought to go do something, and it had stopped raining, so we took the kids downtown to the Kalamazoo Valley Museum, which is free. It doesn’t compare to Stepping Stones (our old museum that we all loved SO much), but it’s something to do on a rainy day.

As we were leaving, my dad called to see if we wanted to meet them for dinner at a pizza place downtown. That sounded perfect, so we joined them and followed it up with ice cream at the best little place that we’ve been wanting to bring Jonah to, but never have. The kids were ridiculously excited. Jude’s tongue started darting in and out as soon as he saw Kristin’s blue moon cone, and Vivi made her signature “Aaahh!” noise with her mouth open wide, waiting for a bite.

As we left the ice cream shop, I noticed a spectacular little independent bookstore I’d never seen before, and Kristin quickly fell in love. We drove by our house on the way home, and felt great about the way our evening had unfolded and started to feel a little more warmth for Kalamazoo. Little by little, I think we’ll find our way here.