This summer we moved “Home”. 

Well, to one of the places we call home. 

In this case, ‘home’ was Aylmer. The small town in southwestern Ontario where I grew up. The small town that has grown from 5,000 to 7,500 people in the 25 years since I have been gone. There had been intermittent and short-term homecomings. When Tim and I moved back from the UK and were getting settled back in Canada we stayed with my parents for two glorious weeks. We have also come home for a variety of holidays and events – usually happy ones.

Somewhere in the last 25 years we agreed that moving back to Aylmer was part of our plan. We would downsize when the kids got older. Move closer to my parents, my brother, his family. One floor so we (mostly Tim) could get old and crumbly. It would be the start of the ‘next chapter’.

 

Smaller house and more adventures. Less work, more play. Get a boat. Start a garden. Travel. And suddenly the “next chapter” was happening. Sooner than I had imagined. Faster than I thought. 

And like the top of most slippery-slopes, I was at the bottom, bruised, slightly confused and largely unsure of what had happened other than I had been up there and now I was down here. Here is what I have been able to piece together so far:

•  Tim saw a century house with property as he was scrolling on his phone one weekend. He suggested we “go and check it out” and I thought, what the hell. We are going home to see my parents anyways and it would be good to see ‘what was out there’ FYI: Going to check out houses is like going to check out a litter of puppies. That’s how we got Stella. 

• It all escalated quickly from there and less than thirty days later we bought a new home. And then I was too busy to think about it what we had done because what we had done triggered another whole series of events including: 

  • Selling our current home AND getting rid of 2/3rds of our shit because someone bought a house 1/3rd the size of the current one. 

  • Cleaning and decluttering and all the malarkey of spit polishing and staging a home that has been well loved and lived in hard for 10 glorious – and horrifyingly painful and traumatizing – and memorable years. 

  • Fast forward through the sale and the move (sweaty, anxiety ridden and physically and emotionally exhausting

  • Getting settling into a new town and doing things like filling out school registrations and hooking up the utilities, finding places to walk our dog and sussing out our neighbours. 

All of this happened while we continued with the rest of ‘life’ which included working full time, stick-handling remote learning, taking on new keynotes and events, podcasting, chasing vaccination appointments and generally living through a third wave of a global pandemic.

 

It was a lot. 

 

And then about two weeks ago, sitting on my new front porch, Tim said he loved our new little house. Then he turned to me and asked me if I loved it too - And I paused, for a long time, and said “Not yet”

 

The reality is that this is still a ‘house’ for me. It likely will be for a while.

I ran into a high-school friend while we both waited around like we didn’t have anything better to do (because we didn’t – or at least I didn’t) to pick our respective sons up from football practice. She was lovely – somethings never change – and said something along the lines of “So, life’s good?” While EVERY fiber of my social programming screamed at me to say “Yes!” or “We love it here!” or something effusively happy and categorically good – or at least a luke-warm nod and smile or a “Yeah, it’s all going fine” – I resisted.

Instead I said that I was adjusting. That it was going well overall but that it all felt a bit weird and I was, out of the entire family, potentially doing the least well in managing the adjustment. She nodded and said “It’s been a long time.” In those five words she did something quietly that is hard to do: Listen. Accept. Validate. 

 

And that is still where I am at. I am adjusting. Simon misses his friends and while football has started again and he is making friends – we think. It’s a bit of a teeth pulling effort to get updates or any kind of detail. Fiona is in a similar spot. 

 

Tim, on other hand, is blooming. This is his time to shine and I get a lot of joy from watching how much this change suits him down to the ground. 

• A little house that takes less than an hour to clean top to bottom? Yes. 

• Projects and things to do that he has been dreaming of and relentlessly researching on YouTube for years? Yes. 

• Christ – we even bought a boat. 

 

Tim is blossoming and I am paying attention. I am watching – and learning – from him in this process. 

The less. The smaller. The simpler. The slower. And somehow the more. More quiet. More time. More space (which is fucked cause this house is weensy – but you know what I mean.) 

 

I know I want that – but I am less sure how to do it. Two and a half years after I wrote my letter to Fiona promising her I would try to be less of a human-doing and more of a human-being, I am still figuring it out. This move and the changes happening now are all part of that. Part of that promise. Part of that evolution. 

I think the only one doing better than Tim is the dog. 

 

But I am not worried. From experience, I know that adjustments take time. The house we left – the house that became our home and that we lived and loved and lost in for 10 years – started in the same way. Tim bought it without me. And when I went to see it, I didn’t like it. A lot. In fact, I hated it.

 

Luckily I had the distraction of being 5 months pregnant, having a preschooler and a full time job with husband who also worked full time. As a result, my hate was relegated to minutes and second between the daily activities required to keep people alive, including me. 

That distraction – that mania of that phase of our lives – helped the time pass with less attention. This transition be done without that distraction. 

 

And that’s okay. I am here for all of it. I am not distracted. I am paying attention and that means it is going to feel. I am going to feel. And while I am still putting the language together to understand all that I am feeling, I know for sure that this current feeling will pass. 

 

As life happens – and it always does – while we live in this house and in this community – it will create memories and the rooms in this house and the spaces around it will become the backdrop and the stage for the events that make up a life.

 

That is when this house will become our home.

And I will love it because I will have the experiences - good and bad and in-between - of the life we will live together in this house.

And then I can sit on that same front porch and if Tim turns to ask me if I like our little house and how our ‘next chapter’ is unfolding, there will be no pause. There will be a different answer.

But he won’t need to ask me the question. He will know.