where wildly different is perfectly normal
After a year
After a year

After a year

A year ago yesterday we frantically packed and cleaned the house, threw the remaining freezer beef at our friends as a thank you for helping, closed on our house, and hauled ass east, destined to be homeless for eleven days.

I am just now coming up for air.

I have a hard time believing it’s been a year, and yet it feels like we left eons ago. Because this last year has been rocked with one major change after another, we still don’t feel settled here. First the move. Then back to school, I got a job, A crashed and burned at school, I quit my job, I started homeschooling A, Tom quit his job and started a new one, we painted every last square inch of the house and essentially moved back in a second time (and we’re still not entirely done), I started two vastly different home-based businesses, and I finished my book.

We would like some down time, please.

Now that we’ve been here for ten days shy of a full year, I want to feel settled. Want things to not buck and heave just for shits and giggles. It’s been three years (THREE!) of nonstop hits. That list above was just the previous 12 months; the 24 before that were just as ugly and then some. Most days I have enough energy to get back in the ring, but lately I’ve been having more “on the ropes” kinds of days. Tom feels the same way. We sure can’t both go down for the count at the same time, so we’re tagging in and out as best we can.

A year. There’s a lot we miss about Colorado, but I don’t miss the wind or the cracked and bleeding hands from the arid climate or the fires. I miss our old view and lower mortgage and our friends. But here? We have family and the gratitude that living here is how Tom got his new gig and the opportunity to homeschool A; not sure I could pull that off in Colorado. Pros and cons.

I’m glad we’re here. We gave up so much to move here and sometimes I wonder why. And then we spend the day with family and I watch my nephew as he laughs with my boys and I see Tom so relaxed as he works from home again…and I know we made the right decision.

I just pray the next twelve months are calmer than the last.

5 Comments

  1. I know it’s been rough, but if it makes any difference, I’M glad you’re here! 😛

    You can put “meeting ChiTown” on your list of pros. tee hee.

    It’s going to get better, I promise. Now that the painting is (almost) done, there’ll be more down-time so you can enjoy what’s left of hell. I mean, the summer.

    Let me know when you have a free night that you’d be available to meet up somewhere in the middle for a “Girl’s Night.” I wish you didn’t live so damn far away, because I would LOVE for you to come to the F*ck CPS Party I’m planning on having in the next couple weeks. You’d get to meet all my fellow sufferers. I’m sure it’s going to be a rockin’ good time!

  2. I’m not going to make any comments about the next year lest I jinx you, but the fact you are have survived and your family is intact after eating a meal at my house, I mean after moving back this way, says a lot.

    Um, he got a new job? However did I miss that bit?

Whaddya think?

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