Sell the house! For Sale! Sold!

When we met, I was still living in the home that I had been living in for six years. Me with my two boys. I loved that home. It was happy. I had lived there married and I had lived there divorced, but through it all, it always felt like our home, me and the boys. A safe place where I was a Mom to my boys, where friends and family came to visit, where two young parents had started a life and where I could always be myself. Even when the family of four experienced the painful process of becoming a family where the parents lived apart, being in that home still felt like being in a place where the picture I had of the Mom I was always going to be was still steadfastly in place. I never realized I was jeopardizing who I was as a Mom until much later. Back then, I never considered that there were relationships out there where you learned to not be yourself.

In year two of dating, we decided to try moving in together. My house went on the market and sold before the for-sale sign went up on the lawn. Everything happened so fast. I don’t even remember the conversations I had with the kids about selling and moving. It was a whirlwind. My oldest was 15 by then, and I know he would have been against moving, especially against moving in together. Thinking about how he must have felt, when this was all happening, is one of the many parts of the story that still makes my stomach hurt, makes waves of nausea start, opens the ever present wound and fills me with overwhelming regret that I need to talk myself through, and remind myself ‘we are not there anymore, we are not back in that time, you do not make those mistakes anymore’. This is the first blog in this story that has made me cry. The ugly cry. The ‘how could you do that?’ cry. There is no way to go back in time and fix the moments when you hurt the people you love the most. No way to go back in time and protect the people who were yours to protect. So I guess these blogs are not only for you, the reader. They are for me too. For the parts of me that have not yet healed, but that I am working on. It matters more to me that I am whole and healed and present for my loved ones now that we are in this new place than to let the pain of regret and shame continue. But it is still an effort to let go of the sadness in these memories – It is important to me to push towards that goal because the life we have now is more important than the mistakes that were made then. In my relationships with my children I value love, truth, transparency, loyalty, sincerity. I value the deep conversations, the wondering about life choices, the sharing of alternate perspectives and the observations about human nature. For me it is most important they know that I will always, always be someone they can depend on. I will not let them down again. Those lessons have been learned.      

Back to the house sale. I remember sitting at his dining room table, with the real estate agent who was also a friend, signing the final paperwork on the sale of my home. I can picture me alone at the table, him busy in the living room and her watching me from the kitchen. As my pen left the page, I started crying. Funny how your heart can know so well the things your head is not yet ready to accept. I knew I had made a colossal mistake. We hadn’t even found a new home yet. I was going to jam my boys into the one room he had free in his home while we looked for a house. I cannot even believe that was me making those decisions. But I was determined to move forward, determined to bury all the warning signs because to not move forward was failing, wasn’t it? And I had already failed at marriage. I was not going to fail at this relationship too. Moving in together seemed like the next step that should happen in the second year of dating. I still lived in shoulds back then. I don’t anymore. And I won’t again.