When Ken and I had been dating for a few months, I told my mom it “wasn’t going to last.” We’d had some fun, but he was joining the Navy, I would be counseling teenagers in Florida, and “I wasn’t going to sit and wait for him.”
I didn’t wait. That much is true. Instead, we got married, and we’ve traveled the globe ever since.
Which brings us to household move number eight — our second stint on the West Coast, the first since we’ve had all three kids. He’s out of the Navy now, but the new locations keep on coming. I hoped that having more kids would mean more hands to help with the unpacking this time. The jury is still out on that. But I have noticed that with more children, we’ve acquired more stuff.
More stuff and more chores. We have been in California for only a few days, but the dishwasher still needs to be loaded. There is still laundry waiting to be washed and waiting to be folded. The kids still need Band-Aids and baths and breakfast. They still squabble over who gets the last raspberry. And I’m still just as tired when I wake up in the morning as I was the night before.
All of this is such a nuisance. Whenever we move, I kind of hope that a new place will result in a NEW ME. Maybe here, I won’t be so disastrous at cleaning. Maybe I won’t stress snack after the kids go to bed.
This has not been the case. If anything, the utter discombobulation of our trans-American move has me hitting the nighttime Nutella even harder than usual.
However, though you will not hear me say it very often, there is also something comforting about the perpetuation of our routine household mayhem. Even though I said goodbye to my family, my friends, and my favorite hamburger joint, and moved 2400 miles away, plenty of things have stayed exactly, 100% the same. In this ridiculous heap of a house, I can’t find the dental floss, cookbooks, or my favorite jogging shorts. But that, in itself, is a sign that I am still me, we are still us, and everything is going to be okay.