Milestones in Life

I’m going to talk a bit about life tonight and maybe a bit about the strange plateaus we come across as we grow and such. That’s ok isn’t it? I know it isn’t something we talk about often or anything like that but ya, life does go on outside of the pages here.

As crazy as this might sound, my oldest daughter and her family have lived with us while she is going to school (college mind you). Imagine the cramped space of a house built for 3 or 4 people that is cram packed with 7. Granted the babies don’t really count as full people, until you take into account all their stuff. Babies have a ton, seriously, a ton of stuff. That stuff takes up quite a bit of space. And then there is out dog, our 90 lb. yellow lab. We are talking some big time close quarters. But you do for family what you can, that should go without saying.

So for a little more than the past week, our house has been under siege as my daughter and her husband prepare for the move. I might have just jumped ahead a bit here. Today they moved out, got their own apartment. My house has been a war zone of more and more space lost to packing and preparing. It can be enough to drive you insane. To be honest it never really felt real. You spend so long with your kids that it never really occurs to you that one day they will find their wings.

All her life she has known no home but ours. To make it even stranger, her kids; the Bewk and the Squish have known no home but ours. There is a bit of emptiness around the house even now that will take a bit of time to grow on me. I am still expecting the go to sleep battles that would be happening sometime between now and maybe 1 am. On the plus side I get to move into an office of my own in the house now.

Anyway back to the day. We weren’t at my house today but I heard that when stuff was being packed into cars to make the journey to the apartment, the Bewk cried no on several occasions and grabbed onto stuff like her life depended on it. She did not like the new place and didn’t want to leave (picture she is still just shy of 2). And then of course, we got a message that she licked some water off the dishwasher at the new apartment. Her strangeness is catching back up with her.

reference to show the amount we moved today. We packed this thing.

What we didn’t count on today though. Last night my son in law and I packed the moving truck. We filled the thing in roughly an hour, good time for how big it is. And then the unloading happened. Three flights of tight cornered stairs and an entertainment center and a couch and love seat later (not to mention the boxes all the damn boxes) and about 5 hours later we were done.

Cold weather and poor building design were almost our undoing today. I dare say, that I fought the move and the move won. When i finally made it back to my own house I was damn near ready to sleep for a week. But I digress.

I had time to think about it all today. I looked back to many years ago when my wife and I first started out and all the trouble we went through with moving from apartment and then to parents houses and then apartment again, and I see that my child is pushing her way into the world kicking and screaming (the kicking and screaming would be on the part of my wife cause she doesn’t want to lose her babies).

At some point they may be back again. Who knows what the future might bring. My wife and I went through those times. It is always possible that my children will run into them as well. But one thing is certain from this moment on. My home will never actually be my daughters home again. She has stepped into a part of the world where she has now left something behind she will never again have. And for me and my wife, we will never quite have that same thing either.

I don’t hold no beliefs that we are the first to ever experience this, but it is something you never really know until you have run across it. As I sit in my living room typing away on my keyboard I am haunted by the echoes of laughter of not only my little girl who is gone but also the laughter of her own kids. They will come back but the special time we had with them in our home is gone and will never quite be the same again.

Sometimes the ghosts that haunt us are not the ghosts we expect. But one thing is for sure, the ghosts are always the echoes of memories that roam inside our hearts and minds.