Chapter 3 | Saying Goodbye

How do you put into words the wide range of emotions you feel when you experience something you have been both looking forward to and dreading at the same time?  

How is it possible to feel both excited and depressed?

How do you say goodbye to the life that you have spent the last twelve years establishing?

How can you ask your children to leave their friends?  To be okay that you sold literally every piece of furniture from their rooms?  To trust that all of their special legos, stuffed animals, and books will be okay crammed in a giant moving van that some random person will drive out to our new house?  A house that they have never even seen in person.

It’s asking a lot my kids. 

I hope that my kids can be strong.  I hope that they can be resilient.  I hope that they can get through this and not be too mad at me.  I hope that they can be happy.

And of course, I hope the same thing for myself.  

My feelings haven’t changed.  I still feel that this complete uprooting of our family is the right thing to do.  I still feel that we will learn and grow in ways that we cannot even imagine.  But it doesn’t make the process any easier.  

Decluttering our house was hard.  It felt like I was throwing away my memories.  (If you have never seen the hilarious Mickey Mouse short about spring cleaning, look it up.  It’s on Disney+.  You can find it here if you have that service).  And then putting all of that stuff out in a garage sale was even worse.  Watching random people shuffle through your stuff and then pay pennies for it.  I felt like my heart was getting ripped out.

But the decluttering was nothing compared to the actual packing.  I mistakenly believed that packing was going to be pretty easy and that it wouldn’t take that long.  Oh, how wrong I was.  It took my several weeks to pack everything up.  I was still throwing things in boxes the morning that we were supposed to be loading up the moving truck.

Charlie measured everything we wanted to take with us and we knew it was going to be very tight trying to get everything to fit in that one truck.  And so we sold nearly all of our furniture.  That was hard.  We sold couches, chairs, tables, patio furniture, desks, nightstands, the playset, and perhaps the hardest for me, the boat.  I understand why we had to do it.  Paying for all of these things to be shipped would have been more than we wanted to pay.  We would have had to rent a whole other truck.  But it didn’t make it any easier saying goodbye to our stuff.  Stuff that we had enjoyed.  Stuff that had memories.  But at the end of the day, it was still just stuff.

And stuff is not what is important.

Family is what matters.  Stuff will come and go, but my family will be with me for eternity.  

So while it is so hard to say goodbye to wonderful neighbors, dear friends, and precious extended family, we are excited about the adventure that we are embarking on and the future that we are planning with our own little family.

Somehow it is possible to feel both excited and depressed at the same time.  I guess the word is bittersweet.  Two things that can exist together.  And so we say goodbye to our life here, but look forward with much anticipation for the life that we are going to make.  

Thank you to all of you who have impacted our lives in so many ways.  Please, we hope that you will remain a part of our lives.  This doesn’t have to be goodbye, but until we meet again!

~ Rachel