Me vs Moving

Last November my life went from what it had always been, to something I pretty much didn’t recognize as my own.  I had lived in the same city for my entire life, and was finally as an adult, ok with that. For years as a disenchanted teenager I’d broadcast my dislike of the place, but in reality it didn’t suck nearly as much as teenage me thought it did.

Earlier that year we had made the difficult, but necessary, decision to move. Husband was starting a new job that allowed him to be at home, rather than travel half the year. This was a big improvement and made sense for our young family (however I did enjoy the snore-free sleep environment that a bed to myself provided). Still, I wasn’t’ sure I was ready to give up my local conveniences. Like Starbucks. I really miss Starbucks.

It felt a bit like moving to the moon. Our house in Big Place, BC was rooted in suburbia. I could look out my window and tell you what the neighbour was making for dinner, and what they were wearing. Or not wearing. In Small Place, BC, our view is astounding, but our neighbours are a distant mystery and I miss the over the fence chats. Transient cows shit in my yard, we have actual winter, and there are deer.  Hate-filled, mangy, bat-shit crazy deer.  Calling it a big change seems a bit understated.  

Added to the chaos of having to leave my house and neighbourhood that I loved, and pretty much everything I had ever known, I was doing it with a new baby, an opinionated four year old, and a dying cat (who sadly didn’t end up making it to moving day). I’m sure somehow it could have been more stressful, but at the time, I wasn’t sure that was possible.

Luckily, the company my Husband was working for hired us movers, as I was totally beyond the task of packing an entire house while managing a baby, a four year old, and a dying cat (…also, I really hate packing). The movers crammed the contents of our house into boxes in a day. I’m pretty sure that I couldn’t have compiled a grocery list in that timeframe, let alone packed up all my crap. It was bloody impressive.  The downside to having them pack was that they packed everything. And not just packed, but wrapped things in layer after layer of packing paper. When we began unpacking on the other end, we found gems like a single half-used pencil wrapped in two layers of paper, and my favourite: a package of paper wrapped in paper. Maybe you guys went just a teensy bit overboard on the packaging.

The other drawback to having others pack was that we didn’t really have any idea what was in each box, and frankly, we still don’t. The boxes were labeled, but simply labeling a box bathroom doesn’t really provide any explanation as to why the teapot is in there.  To date there are still some things we haven’t found, like one of the couch cushions.....how do you lose a couch cushion??? 

To be fair, we haven’t unpacked everything yet. The plan was to move here, rent for a few months, then buy a house. That didn’t go as planned, so now we’re in the middle of a house building circus, and almost a year later we are still living partially out of boxes. The statement “I didn’t lose it, it’s probably still in a box” has become a legit excuse for pretty much everything, and a running joke with friends.

And now we wait with baited breath for the new house to be finished, so that we can do this all over again, a year later, and with different, but probably not less, stress than the last time. Ideally, this will be the last move for years….but I’m pretty sure I said that about the last place we lived.