And one move during childhood—especially in the age of the internet, where it’s infinitely easier to keep up with people—probably wouldn’t have the same effect as half a dozen moves, would it?
* * *
We also heard: “Ugh.”
It’s impossible to spell the actual sound I mean here—it’s more guttural than “ugh,” sort of a combination of “unh” and “yecch”—but you’d know it if you heard it. It’s hardly more than a forceful exhale, really. A verbal eye roll. It conveys sentiments like, “Oh come on, that’s stupid,” or, “Who do you think you are?” It’s dismissive, but there’s also an undertone of bitterness to it.
I understand this one, too. Social scientists call it “crab mentality.” Say there are a bunch of crabs at the bottom of a bucket, and one crab starts trying to crawl out. Instead of giving that crab a boost, the others grab at him with their pincers, pulling him back into the bucket. If they’re going to be in the bucket, they want everyone to be in the bucket.
I’d change the crabs-in-a-bucket analogy to make it a bit gentler, though. Some of the people who looked askance at our plans were dear to us. I can’t think of them as crabs. They were surprised and perhaps hurt and, maybe some of them, a little unsure about their own choices. It’s that confirmation bias thing again: People want to believe the choices they’ve made about where and how they live are right, and sometimes the easiest way to do that is by deciding that all other choices are wrong. If we were choosing to leave life in Atlanta behind, did that mean we thought everyone who stayed was making the wrong choice? No, but it’s typical for the human brain to react that way. So I’ve got to go with some analogy that’s a little more endearing than crabs. Let’s say sloths. I love sloths.
Sloths are slow-moving. Inertia is their jam. Often, in a tight group of human friends, an unspoken accord congeals over time, an agreement that not only are we all in this life together, but we must also do everything together. It can make a reasonable move look radical simply because it veers away from the group.
I’d amend the bucket part of the analogy, too. Our life in Atlanta wasn’t a bucket. We weren’t trapped. I felt trapped, but that was a function of my own mind—the way you can feel claustrophobic sitting in a wide-open room if you don’t want to be in it. I no longer wanted to be there. But I wasn’t being held anywhere against my will, and it was no less objectively lovely a place just because I wanted out. So let’s not say the sloths are in a bucket. Let’s say they’re on a waterbed. A big, comfortable waterbed that’s easy to sink into and hard to get up from. I remember climbing onto my friend Jen’s mom’s waterbed when we were ten years old. When we were ready to climb off, we couldn’t steady our hands and knees, and the waves rolling within the mattress kept knocking us back down. We snorted and giggled, but there was panic in our laughter, too.
I told myself my friendships were like snuggly sloths on a waterbed, and I was the weird sloth who wanted off, and all of this was normal.
It’s not easy to be a people-pleaser who chooses to do something that doesn’t please people, especially if you’ve got that little kid inside your head wanting to be praised and told she’s the best. But sometimes you have to do the thing you have to do, even if it makes people mad. Even if it makes you feel like you’ve lost the support of people you want in your corner. Even if it feels like some people are giving you a big fat F instead of an A+.
* * *
There was one other thing people said a lot: “How’d you do it?”
John heard this less than I did, but I heard it many, many times. Always in hushed tones, in conversations that began with someone pulling me aside—like they were about to ask me for the number of my weed dealer. These friends and acquaintances were the ones who got giddy when they found out what we were doing. “I’ve been thinking about moving to ______ for years!” they’d say. Or, “We talk about it all the time. How’d you finally decide to go?” And, “Was it hard to sell your house?” As it turns out, change appeals to lots of people. “Tell me,” they’d ask, “do you think I could do it, too?”
“Build your room,” I always said.
And Then the Dog Died
In moving, as in life, there are so many things you think you can control and so few that you actually can.
This is how I envisioned our family’s final night as Atlanta residents: We’d eat at our favorite pizza place, sit out on our back porch until dark, and then drift off to sleep in our rooms one last time.
This is what actually happened: Just before dinner on that muggy June evening, Eleanor Roosevelt, the younger of our two beagles, suffered the rupture of an infected anal gland, requiring John to pack her off to the emergency vet while I stayed home with both children and our other hound, Phoebe, while fielding questions such as, “Can a dog die of an exploded butt?” Our night was shot, to the tune of $350 and a shaved dog-bottom. Eleanor was just fine when she and John finally got home around midnight, but our picture-perfect sunset farewell to our city did not happen. We followed the moving truck over the Georgia-Tennessee border the next day a little more frazzled than we’d intended to be, Eleanor Roosevelt banging her plastic cone against the back of my seat the whole way, and her big sister, Phoebe, growling her displeasure with the noise. None of this was quite as we’d expected.
* * *
One night several months earlier, John whispered from the pillow next to me, “But where will we be buried?”
Moving meant sorting through lots of questions, like, did we want a house or a condo? Would we live in town or out in the country? And—if you’re John and this is how your mind works, I guess—where should our earthly remains be placed if we were to die in our new city?
“Wait, you want to be buried?” I said. “I thought you wanted to be cremated.”
“I don’t know, now we’re going to Nashville—maybe there’s somewhere there I’d rather be.”
“Technically, you wouldn’t rather anything. You’d be dead.”
“But where would my friends go for my funeral?”
We stayed on this topic for several minutes before I started getting frustrated.
“Do we have to know where our bodies will go after we die to know where we want to live right now?” I asked.
If figuring out what step to take next meant we immediately had to figure out every step afterward, too, then taking the next step would be impossible. I was tired of needing to know all the answers. I wanted just enough answers. (Also, I truly do not care what anybody does with my body after I’m dead. Dress it up in a sequined jumpsuit and fly it from a flagpole if you want. I won’t need it anymore.)
“Let’s look at life in chunks,” I said. “Right now, we just need to answer the questions relevant to this next chunk. When we get to that chunk, we’ll figure out the chunk after that.”
“Okay, fine,” John said. “Chunks.”
Then we spent ten minutes giggling over the word chunks, which sounds really funny when you whisper it repeatedly.
Breaking the news to the kids that our family would be moving away from the only place they’d ever called home gave me a new respect for my mother and all the times she had to do the same thing for me.
When we first had even the tiniest inkling that a move might be a possibility, I started taking our kids with me on jaunts to Nashville—a day here, an overnight there. They got to hang out at the bookstore and read all the free books they could fit into their heads while I was in meetings with authors and booksellers. In the afternoons, I handed them each a dollar and sent them down the sidewalk to Fox’s Donut Den. By the time the move had begun to look like a reality, we had successfully brainwashed them enough that when I casually mentioned, “We’re going to try living in Nashville for a while,” my son responded, “Nashville? I love Nashville!”
“Books and donuts!” my daughter said.
Telling them was easier than I’d thought, but it didn’t quell my uncertainty as I thought it might. I often had days that spring w
hen I thought, What the hell are we doing? I told myself that if it didn’t work out, we could always move back.
I held on to that thought as I watched hulking men in matching blue shirts wrap protective plastic around our kitchen table, our sofa, and our mattresses and load them into the moving truck. Part of my brain wanted to be absolutely positive we were doing the right thing; the other part knew there was no way to be sure about anything.
* * *
I read somewhere that children need to know they can rely on some things to stay the same, even when a big transition comes along. So I put a lot of thought into creating a sense of consistency in order to manage how much change and disorder our kids would experience. Now, of course, I can see that this concept makes as much sense as a “birth plan.”
We timed everything to happen over the summer. We thought it would be easier to handle the move-related chaos in a season when everything’s a little more laid-back. Can’t find the box with sheets and pillows in it? That’s okay, there’s no rush on bedtime. Don’t have an oven in the kitchen yet? No problem. Throw something on the grill and eat outside. Summer was indeed a perfect time to explore our new surroundings. We could go for a hike on a weekday morning, lie around reading in the afternoon. We went to concerts, parks, and movies, and tried all our neighborhood sandwich shops and ice cream parlors. (I put on a dozen pounds in our first year there. That’s what happens when you grab hold of your city with both hands and stuff it in your face.)
For a couple of early months, Nashville was one big vacation. And for those two months, not once did either of the children say they missed Atlanta. The chaos seemed under control. Yes, we were in a new place. And yes, we’d begun renovations on our house right after we moved into it. Sometimes we woke up at 6:30 a.m. to the sound of buzz saws in our kitchen. But I made sure to keep a lot of things the same: same morning schedule of walking our dogs and making beds. Same routines and rules. The locale may have been new, but that didn’t mean everything else had to change, too.
Then, as summer got shorter and shorter, reality began to kick in.
My children, like most, have never been wild about getting pulled out of bed before they’re fully awake. They have never liked having to stop playing to take a shower or brush their teeth. They’ve always dragged their feet when it’s time to put on shoes or jackets or whatever else prevents them from running free and barefoot and barely clothed through the world the way they want to. The annual letdown of returning to the weekday grind had everyone at our house a little on edge. The more stressed they felt, the more they desired the familiar and the old. Without those comforts to soothe their anxiety, their stress came out in uncharacteristic outbursts over small things. Suddenly old complaints had a recurrent new theme.
When I told my son to put on a raincoat, he cursed Nashville’s weather: “The sun NEVER comes out!”
When I asked my daughter to pick up the piles of Legos in the hall, she broke down: “I don’t even know WHERE LEGOS GO HERE.”
They came to experience what we adults already know: When you move, you take more than just your stuff with you. You take yourself. You take all your likes, dislikes, hang-ups, hopes, and problems, and you place them in a new and unfamiliar setting. Certain things are true no matter where you are. If you’re a kid, the end of summer blows, wherever you live.
Still, we had it all under control.
* * *
Then both children got pink eye and ear infections and nasty colds.
And a toilet broke.
And a car battery gave out.
And we busted a batch of carpenter ants living in our shower.
And just to keep things exciting, a family of mice took up residence in the garage.
* * *
And then sweet old Phoebe—the beagle who had been with us for fourteen years and served as a surrogate parent to pup Eleanor Roosevelt—left us. She was sleeping in a kennel at the veterinary clinic, boarding while we were out of town overnight, when she died. Our vet called to deliver the news, “I’m afraid Phoebe didn’t wake up this morning.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.” Okay, okay, okay, I mouthed to myself as I hung up the phone.
Telling the children about their dog was so much harder than telling them we were moving.
Much sobbing ensued.
When I went in to pick up Eleanor Roosevelt from the kennel that afternoon, I made a joke about whether I’d still have to pay for both dogs considering I’d dropped off two and was getting only one back. The front-desk staff laughed the kind of nervous chuckle you do when you’re afraid of upsetting a crazy person.
* * *
A few days after we lost Phoebe, on a hectic Monday morning, I was trying to hustle the children to the car to go meet their new pediatrician, so we could have the health forms completed for their new school. I couldn’t find my keys, it was ninety-five degrees out, and I was also wrestling a basket of laundry out the front door to drop at the laundromat, because the washer and dryer were a week late being installed. Everyone was sweating and fussing at one another.
I put Eleanor Roosevelt into the bathroom she and Phoebe had been sharing as a makeshift dog room during the construction. “You take a nap,” I said. “We’ll be back soon.”
She started howling. And howling and howling. The saddest little I’ve-never-been-an-only-dog-before-please-don’t-leave-me howl.
The pitiful howling kept up for days. Exercise, playtime, a new bone—nothing helped. She moped around the house and yard. When I was at home writing, she sat under my chair. When I left the room, she followed me. If she couldn’t go with me, she bayed at the door. She was heartbroken.
“Mom,” my son said, “Eleanor Roosevelt is lonely. Are we going to get another dog?”
Was it part of our plan to adopt a new dog the week before starting school in a new city, while our house was still half under construction? Oh, hell no. But we’re a two-dog family, and we were one dog down. This was no time for the plan.
So the next day, we headed off to the Love at First Sight shelter. There we met a yellow pup, some kind of Labrador mix brought in with an abandoned litter. He had just started eating (and eating and eating) again after recovering from a nearly fatal bout of parvovirus, and his kibble-filled belly ballooned out on either side of his scrawny ribs. This little fellow was the last boy pup of his siblings left—the others, all prettier and pudgier, had been adopted.
I bet he didn’t think his summer was going to go like this either.
He rolled around with the other shelter puppies on the floor. When I crouched down, he skidded and skated across the linoleum and burrowed between my knees, tail a-wagging. Contrary to plan but consistent with everyone’s desires, I looked up at the vet tech and said, “This one.” I couldn’t believe what I was doing, but I also couldn’t wait to tell John we’d found the exact dog he’d been wanting all his life.
“Remember how you said that one day when you had a real yard, you’d want a big dog, like a yellow Lab?” I asked him that afternoon. “Guess what? I found your yellow Lab puppy.”
“At last—my big dog!” John said.
We all laughed and decided to call the new pup Woodstock, a beagle’s best friend.
Sure enough, Woodstock and John bonded fast. Woodstock let John feed him his mushy vet-approved food from a spoon. Woodstock ran to the front door every evening when he heard John’s car arrive. And as days passed, Woodstock grew . . . kind of. His body got longer and longer, and his legs stayed more or less the same. “What a funny little Lab he is,” we’d say, wondering when his height would catch up with his length.
At his six-month checkup, we asked the vet what she guessed his heritage was. Lab-hound? Lab-shepherd?
“This dog? Oh, he’s some kind of dachshund mix, maybe a little terrier or something,” she said.
Of course he was.
Wish List
Every December, we go through this. It’s like someone hits the “play” button on a favorit
e holiday song, and we all remember the words we’ve sung countless times.
Here we are again: When I sense it coming, I begin burying my phone at the bottom of my purse with the sound turned off. I’m trying to ignore the calls, emails, and texts from well-meaning relatives, all of whom are asking, Where is the Christmas list?
They want suggestions for what to give the kids, the more specific the better. If I say, “Maybe a book?” they’ll ask, “Which one?”
I don’t know which one. I still haven’t given much thought to holiday shopping. I despise the charmless online gift registry, it’s true, but my reluctance to create—on command—a catalog of child-appropriate gifts is more than just resistance to materialism.
I think it’s about longing: to be taken care of, to let someone else do at least part of the planning. I may be an adult, but some part of me still has a child’s desire to wake up, starry-eyed, and find that gifts have materialized by some kind of magic under the tree—surprises chosen with love and obtained in secret, waiting to be opened in wonder. We don’t outgrow that. On some level, we are all still five-year-olds.
* * *
Then there’s the guilt, of course. I suspect our relatives wouldn’t need ideas for what to give our children if I did a better job of keeping in touch during the rest of the year. If we visited more often—if I were a better daughter and sister—they’d know all my kids’ hobbies and wishes, and I would know theirs. (I haven’t asked anyone for a Christmas list in several years. I hope the recipients don’t hate their gifts from me, but I really do enjoy putting a little imagination into them.)
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