By Catherine DiMercurio
These past several months I have felt as if keeping my head above water takes most of my energy. Each moving-related milestone felt less like a hurdle overcome and more like a wave crashing down on me, until it is over, and I can float a little, catch my breath a little, until the next wave hits. In the midst of all the painting I was doing this past week at the new house, I was fighting to do just that, catch my breath. The task felt overwhelming, the number of walls, the trim to either paint or tape off, the cutting in, the multiple coats, the clean-up, the way the plaster was so thirsty and gulped up all the paint, the cove ceilings and their delicate curves, the yucky and ancient vinyl floorboard molding in the kitchen, the ruined window frame in the living room.
It’s been over a year since I got it in my head that I was going to move. I took my time with the process, knowing how much I loathe how urgency makes me feel. Winter and early spring were focused on clearing out the basement and making plans, and then in April and May I began to ramp things up with house repairs. Then things really sped up in June when I listed my house for sale and began searching for a new home in earnest. Now, I’ve closed on both houses. I spent a long weekend at the new house organizing some initial improvements—tearing out carpet and having a fence built—and cleaning. This past week, I went back to paint. It’s a task I always enjoy in the beginning, but by the end, I’m ready to be done. And this time the end didn’t come until the fourth room was painted on the fourth day. It was a big job, and like any home improvement task, it came with unexpected obstacles.
But, this isn’t going to be a boring home improvement post. I thought I wanted it to be about how good it felt to let this new-to-me but old house breathe and feel cared for again after a couple of years of vacancy. I thought I wanted to write about how I was trying to make this random place feel like my home. And I thought it was going to be about what a long, sometimes scary journey it has been.
Yet what is hitting me most right now, as a sit in my cozy current home now that I’ve returned from the painting week, is how confusing and chaotic prolonged transitions feel. Many people are in the midst of them now, with grown children off on new adventures or otherwise finding their footing in adult life. People are ending relationships, or starting them, or moving, or grieving, or changing jobs. Sometimes we go through big changes with others and sometimes we go through them alone. And we might have folks helping out where they can, but when we’re flying solo, the upheaval of big changes can hit especially hard.
Somewhere between wrapping up the painting of the bedroom and the office and the hallway and beginning the painting of the kitchen, I felt particularly wrung out and empty, and then I sort of remembered why I was where I was. Two miles west of me was one of the best stress-busters I’ve ever known: Lake Michigan. So that morning I made my coffee and loaded Zero in the car, and we drove the short five minutes to the lake to see the morning light play on the waves. We just stayed in the car, because we see off leash dogs all the time and that is not a great thing with a reactive dog whose training got derailed. I wanted this to be a moment of calm, so we stayed cozy, and watched the other early morning people go by, or do the same thing we were doing, viewing the lake from our cars as if we were at a drive-in theater. I’m looking forward to when I’m actually living at the new place, and I can go grab moments of lake-calm for myself whenever I need to. In this particular moment, I marveled at the way the light of the morning could be both bright and soft at the same time, and the way a gull sounds different when it’s swooping around the shoreline than a gull sounds in the old Kmart parking lot in the puddle of my childhood memories.
That moment was also a reminder to seek out calm wherever I am, lake or not. Because life can feel so big and so chaotic, whether or not we’re in periods of momentous transition. It’s not as if I forgot that I need to do that, or like I wasn’t trying all along to manage my stress with yoga and walks and early morning coffee in the yard with Zero and chats with family or friends. But sometimes we tell ourselves there’s no time, or that it won’t help anyway because there’s too much to do or our feelings of overwhelm are too great.
We tell ourselves a lot of things when we’re tired or drowning in all there is to do every day. We tell ourselves there’s not enough time to sit quietly in a safe place and catch our breath. Maybe we even tell ourselves there are no safe places, and it is tragic when that is true. But sometimes we’re still learning to be our own safe place and that takes time and practice. Sometimes we tell ourselves that we miss things that weren’t particularly good for us. Sometimes there were good parts to miss, but that doesn’t change things. We might ask ourselves why we ever thought we could handle the enormity of moving farther away than we’ve moved before and then we remind ourselves that we are, in fact, handling it. We’re almost there. We’re almost home.
And still, that doesn’t erase the hard parts. Holding two opposing truths within us at the same time can cause a bit of inevitable heartache. For reasons of financial and mental health, I need to go. To follow the dream of living near the lake, I need to go. Because I want to love where I live, I need to go, and at the same time, the fact that I’ll be almost three hours from my kids instead of half an hour hurts like hell. I haven’t made peace with that. I don’t know how to. And I guess, I don’t really want to make peace with it. I want that angst to keep motivating me to find ways to make it easier for us to see each other. I don’t want to slip in to “but it’s so far and everyone is so busy.” I want to remain highly motivated to find someone who can watch my sweet but challenging pup so I can take off for a long drive and a short visit, or to take a weekend here and there to see friends and family. People figure this stuff out all the time and I will too. It’s just, in moments of high contrast, the difficult parts feel sharper. Having just had time to hang out with my kids, the prospect of missing them is looming large.
It’s as if we have to keep finding ways to be bigger on the inside than we are on the outside, so we can hold all that life seems to ask us to hold. And sometimes there is no more room, and we have to become willing and able to put something else down so we can hold on to what we want to hold on to. Maybe there are old griefs I can leave behind so that there’s space to manage this new challenge of geography and proximity to the people I love. Maybe the perplexing problems I have for so long felt gnawing at me are less about algebra (as in, how do I solve for all these variables) and more about physics (as in, this is about the realities of force, mass, and acceleration, as in, how can I move myself forward through this particular time and space). Maybe the math analogy is bad but what I’m saying is that maybe it’s time to get practical instead of theoretical.
We’re all moving—together and separately—through this particular time and space and I hope we all find ways to allow ourselves to lean on one another and to be strong when we can’t and to be strong when someone else needs to lean on us.
Love, Cath
Chronicles of the Open Hearted 