A Good Little House

The time has finally come, dear readers. We are moving on Monday. In between overwhelming waves of sheer panic, trying to schedule the movers, the closing, the repair of a cracked sidewalk slab (Really town inspector? Really?) and finish packing, I have been fighting the deep, deep sadness I feel leaving our little house.

It feels like yesterday I was puling up in front of it, in our red Jetta, with a three month old #1 in the back seat and my dad riding shotgun to come see the house we would be living in gratis while Hubby and I rode out an ill-timed stint of unemployment. We had been planning on moving to the suburbs and renting while we saved for a house anyway, since I was realizing quickly hauling a baby up and down the four flights of stairs to our walk-up apartment in Hoboken was going to kill me, or turn me into Quadzilla, in short order. So when our luck took a turn for the worse and Pop, H’s grandfather, went into a nursing home, it seemed like the solution to everyone’s problems.

Then I walked in. Before I begin to describe my reaction to the house, let me explain that Pop was in his nineties, and up until months before, had been living on his own since his wife passed away ten years earlier. The house I walked into was exactly what you would expect of a man left to his own devices. No serious improvements had been made in years, I’m sure Mama loved her home the way it was, when she was keeping it. As we all know, most men, when on their own, will eventually come close to going feral, so as you would expect, getting new carpeting or giving the walls a fresh coat of paint to spruce things up did not even pass through his mind. He loved his yard and the Yankees and his house was just fine for him.

But not for me. Between the fifties bathroom that Pop really hadn’t done a great job of keeping clean (as his Y chromosome would dictate) and the cracked, orange linoleum floor in the kitchen with the seventies oak cabinetry, I was overwhelmed. After viewing my future home, I walked up to the park up the street with my father where I sat on a bench and sobbed, “I can’t live here!”*. I had no choice though, we were broke and it was free thanks to my father in-law’s generosity. So move in, we did.

Thus began what would be, unbeknownst to us, our seven year stay. We began making over the house bit by bit as money would allow. We ripped out the old carpeting, H choking on thirty years of dust, we painted the Brady Bunch-espque cabinets a bright white and replaced the hardware and laid a black and white checkered floor over that blindness-inducing linoleum and we painted rooms and stripped wallpaper. When our financial situation improved, we actually bought the house from my father in-law, as sadly, Pop had passed away shortly after our move in. We found money to redo the bathroom and finish the basement, making more room for our growing family.

As the house evolved over the years, so did we. We moved into our three bedroom bungalow, making the two other bedrooms an office and a nursery for #1. Then, when #2 unexpectedly came along, we essentially had two nurseries. And now, we have one nursery and a big girls room complete with bunk beds and Hannah Montana paraphernalia. And we changed as people. The day H and I moved into that house we were a young couple with a baby, now we are a family. We were a professionally frustrated young father and shell-shocked, struggling new mother trying to figure out if she could survive without a career. And now H is so happy, and doing well, at his job, and while I don’t claim to have all the answers, I have come to trust myself as a parent and I know the days when I can think about having a professional life are just around the corner.

Monday will be a day of reflection for both H and I. When I walk around the empty house I will be envisioning all the things, good and bad, that have taken place under this roof. This is the house where all of my children took their first steps. All those life changing moments, new jobs, first words, positive pregnancy tests, happened in this house. This tiny house was like my den, where I lived for seven sleep-deprived, milk-sodden years, surrounded by my babies, all of us on top of each other, but, most times, happy to be so. Now we move on to a bigger house to create new memories, but while I am happy about all the new space, I will miss this closeness.

When we close the door for the last time on Monday, it’s like we are closing a door on the chapter of our lives titled “The Early Years”. We leave our baby days behind us. While Little Man is still young, the floors in the new house will never be scratched by the dragging of a baby-laden Exersaucer across them. The glider isn’t even making the cut in his new big boy room and we are leaving his blue and white gingham curtains for the new owners. And my girls, they will both be in elementary school, away from me, in the real world. And we moved forward.

So to our house I say, I will miss you. We walked in your door so unsure, and we leave much the same way, but certain in our strength as a couple and as a family. While some times were tough, our memories of them are wonderful, as memories of hard times survived are. You will live on in our memory forever as the house where we became a family. You were, and still are, a good, good little house.

*Pop, please in no way think I was ever not grateful to you, but even you have to admit, it was like walking in to a time machine.