I share this picture of beautiful flowers because a friend gave them to me today. She felt I needed a reason to smile and I did.
She had been with me having a cuppa and I don’t think I was really present. I’m not at the moment; easily distracted, vague in my commitments and definitely less giving.
What else I see in this picture is family photos that sit on the mantelpiece in what has been my home. But now we have to leave. And I’m struggling with it. This has been an ongoing saga over the last month with our long term landlords surprising us with notice to leave. We are over the huge initial shock of it. I no longer burst into tears without warning. I am able to use the beloved garden again. We are for all intense and purposes getting on as normal. Except we’re not. This home has been tarnished and the remaining 5 weeks we have left feels rather like living in a strangers bedsit; a murkyness has fallen over it all. We just got back from holiday times at my parents and coming home felt like such a wrench because we knew we were coming home to house we must give up.
We’re on the last few days of holidays now and we have planned a street sale for Saturday. This means our dining room is piled high with stuff we want to get rid of. The rest of the house is a shithole. It’s like I just can’t be arsed to keep on top of things and yet the mess just adds to my feelings of sadness in this place.
I’m also feeling a sense of impending dread. It’s one thing to sort through some stuff to clear out but packing and moving?!!! What the actual…… how do I do that? Where do I begin? Come home from work every day and spend the evenings packing, use the weekends to start sorting and putting away bedding or working out what furniture will fit and what needs to go. I was proactively cleaning (I AM a mum on a mission; it’s keeping me busy) a toy kitchen I hope to sell when the kids aren’t looking and I thought ‘oh god, where are we gonna keep the kids art stuff?!”. I realised so much of our stuff is going to be in boxes whilst we figure out it’s place in a new home. It made me feel tired just thinking about it.
I think perhaps, this all sounds ludicrous; I mean we’re only moving house and we seem to have found a new house close by which makes us lucky ones. But I tell you, it’s been like having the rug ripped out from under you. We didn’t get warning or time and we haven’t chosen this. We are attempting to make the whole process exciting for the children when we’ve seen the new place once for 20 minutes and them not at all. They ask us how big their room will be or whether the garden will have space for toys and I don’t knwk. In fact all I can worry about is the total lack of storage compared to our current home and where the hell wvweuthing will go (hence the sale).
And so today, my friend bought me flowers to cheer me up. She’s also my neighbour. It’s another sign for me of what we are saying goodbye to. Our wonderful street.
We are a working family with 3 young kids. We don’t have parents on hand to help us. We have survived some of our hard times in parenthood with the love of a community we joined when we moved in on this street. And so it’s a wrench to be leaving them. We may well be moving round the corner but I think my husband and I know that this truly is an end to an era, one we didn’t intend on giving up.
Still we have our street sale Saturday. We hope we will get rid of some of what we’ve gained over the last 7 years and that will ease the packing. The kids are excited and think they’ll earn whatever they sell. Hmmmmmmmmm. What I think we’ll get, is a day enjoying our lovely community and perhaps a chance, despite the purpose, to forget this whole dam moving bollocks.
MumsMental 