Moving On...

 I know that around the holidays people say they are really busy.

And I am sure that they are.

But I have been REALLY, TRULY busy in a way I haven't been busy for a very long time. Sixteen years, to be exact.

You see, in one week, are moving.

After sixteen years of being in this place, we are relocating. It is a very big change, for a very good reason, and overall a very positive thing. It's really and truly a blessing, to be honest. 

I am not going to say why or where at this time, but suffice it to say there has been a home remodel for the past 7 months on top of the current moving process.

Did I mention, I HAVE BEEN BUSY?

There have been many Marie Kondo moments in the past few weeks for me, and I have donated an astonishing amount of things. You can accumulate quite a bit in that amount of time, and we have even done a fair bit of purging here and there too. But still, so much to go through. 

As I have grown older, I am realizing that things are just, things. I am trying not to hold on to these things too tightly. Especially as I see all of the things that my mother has and that we have not even begun really to deal with, and I feel like we have already spent hours and hours going through. I don't want to do that to my kids. 

Do my children really want old birthday cards written by my friends who they probably will barely remember? As much as I love the people and the sentiments in them, do I really need to keep them forever and ever? The answer is no.

But another thing I realized is that I am not the person in the family who truly has an attachment to things.

It's my husband.

My husband is a low-key hoarder. 

No, not a hoarder in the sense of we are living amongst towers of old newspapers and trash, but he likes to collect specific things. Ah, quite a lot of specific things. More things than most people would think is normal. As we are packing up, most of the stuff is not even mine. It's his. I was teasing him about it, that it must be associated with his place in the family as 4th of 5 siblings and that he subconsciously has a need to have these things to reassure himself. Of what, I am not sure, but I know that his brothers stole and broke his stuff all the time, so my armchair diagnosis is confident that it somehow ties back to that. 

My sister was much older than me, and rarely was interested in my things at all, so I never really dealt with anything like what he did. Also, my family had a bit more money than his, so I pretty much got everything I wanted, whereas his family started out somewhat wealthy, but as he got older, lost more and more of their money. I won't get into the details, but it got to the point where they wouldn't even help to pay for my husband's letterman jacket in high school. Sigh... I mean, they could have, but they chose not to, but that is a story for another time. 

So, I am taking a break from packing to write this. Just so I can turn around next week and begin UN-packing. That is such an injustice...

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