The only home I have even known

Lessons from moving houses around impermanence and being with what is right here.

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All the outside furniture has been moved, so I am sitting with my back resting against the post. If I look up from my screen, I see the trees in the distance and my hammock (originally my husband’s grandmother’s) nestled in between them.

I wrote this bit weeks ago while laying in the hammock, looking up at the trees…

How I’ll miss the trees, full and green, resting in my sights as I sway in the hammock in the back corner of the yard. I’ll miss this house we made a home with the surprise of our son’s conception two months after moving in. He took his first steps here, he started to talk here, I became a mother here, I became myself here…in this small house that we never quite intended to be a home.

We started our family here, we started our life together here. This house with the deck (yes, the one I am sitting on right now), because of this we knew it had to be ours.

We have always been guided together to exactly what we need to grow.

I wrote this to my partner but I also wonder if I am referring to something greater. This move to this new house feels like something greater. It is hard to nail down with words. The closest I have come is with this idea.

This house held all of us while we built something, my husband and I created a family here. When we moved into this house we were two individuals (in every sense of the word) who were dating. We weren’t thinking about kids or marriage but in a few months, those discussions became relevant.

When we moved here, this house felt spacious. Three bedrooms for two people felt like a luxury. There was space for each of us, separate and together. We each had our own play spaces. For my husband, it was a room to work and make music. For me, it was a room to work and practice yoga, dance, and paint. We needed these spaces, or so we thought.

Two months into living in this house, I unexpectedly found out I was pregnant (it shouldn’t have been shocking, but I was convinced I couldn’t conceive because I thought I didn’t matter. Our lives began to rearrange, and within a few months our rooms rearranged too.

All the while, this house held us. It held me through my pregnancy and those early days of motherhood. It did not shake or fall over when I struggled postpartum, it kept letting us live here even as I raged inside of it.

It held me and my partner as we raised our son together. It held us as our marriage struggled greatly under the strain of being new parents and navigating the mountains of trauma I was surfacing.

This house held space for me to heal. This house held space for my partner as he let me take the time I needed. This house watched my son go from a bunch of cells to a walking and talking toddler.

Maybe I am giving too much credit to a house, maybe these are things that happen in a home of a loving family. I am saddened to find myself confused by this. I know leaving a place can feel sad, but I never felt sad about moving before. And while I do love this space and feel immense gratitude for how this house held us, I think the bigger truth is what we built inside of these walls.

Rooting into love

I grew from being a girl without a family or a sense of herself or her worth to a woman with a family and a strong sense of worth and purpose. I do not think the house did that, I did that. My partner held space for me to do that. My son’s presence ignited all of it.

I am realizing and learning family can change you for the better. I never had that before, I never knew this. It feels dumb to write, honestly. But growing up I knew only my environment, I knew other family’s were different and sometimes I thought it would be nice to be normal.

But normal isn’t love. To me, normal meant my mother would make it through the day without crying. Normal meant she wouldn’t yell about something as meaningless to me as a dish in the sink.

I never thought about love and family because I did not know it. I had no sense of home, I usually felt homesick as a child and a young adult. Love beyond my immediate family had a lot of showmanship. I didn’t understand this as a kid but I do now. Love was not present, there was a lot of acting around the idea of what a caring family looks like, but inside it was empty and hollow.

This house, the one we are leaving, it helped me build a family, one of my own creation and one rooted in love. I am not sure I even believed this was a real thing until I did it for myself. I am not sure I thought anyone could ever love me.

At least once a week, sometimes daily, I have a moment where my husband says something to me and I say, out loud to him, wow you really love me. Today, it was when he told me he had a plan for my hammock at the new house. Because he knows how much I love my hammock spot with the trees here.

Embracing impermanence

It is all changing, it is all shifting. My toddler knows it, he keeps waking up in the middle of the night going “hooooouse” which is how he is referring to our new place.

It is confusing for him, I know, we have started moving over there but we are sleeping here until the end of the week. We needed the time to move with no childcare instead of cramming it all into a weekend and exhausting ourselves (it is exhausting either way, it seems). I also hope that when we fully move in, he will be a bit used to the new place.

But regardless of how gentle and affirming I try to make this transition for him, I cannot control what he is experiencing because of it. It is sad, I am sad, he feels my sadness. It is hard to explain to a toddler why I am sad about this transition. I want to be joyful and excited about this transition in hope it may ease the confusion for him, and yet I refuse to hide my sadness.

As exciting as it is, this house has much more space and we have been needing that. This house was never intended to house two adults, a toddler, a dog and our stuff. But now it is and we have grown, it is time to move on to something new.

At first, I wanted to rush through the discomfort of this moving process, but now I am making friends with it. It will be over, soon. All the changes will be made, soon. There is no need to rush to the end because there is so much happening right now, there is so much to be felt in this moment.

This is probably the last piece of writing I will write from this deck, I started my Substack on this deck. I began so much here. And yet a chapter is ending, and there are many new beginnings, beyond the literal changing of home, on the horizon for me, for my family. Some tangible, some I feel in the energy around us.

I am going to miss this place. We are only moving a few miles down the road and yet I know it will feel like worlds away soon. Soon, this will all be behind me. Soon, this chapter will be closed.

But not now, right now I am walking in between, in the liminal, not quite changed over to the new house (literally), not quite in this home because many belongings have already moved over. There is no need to rush to the end of this chapter because it will come, in time.

I keep reminding myself to be with what is. I keep asking myself to notice what is right here. The breeze on my face, a gross amount of flies touching my body and dancing on my skin (something I hope we have less of in our new backyard). It is all right here.

I am sad, I am excited, I am relieved we are half way through this move. I am trusting this chapter to close at its own pace, I am trusting in the magic that is yet to come. I am certain my love and my family will deepen and maybe even grow in this new space.

We are exactly where we need to be and we are heading exactly where we are meant to.

Thank you for joining me on this journey.

Love,

Emma

Hi, I’m Emma, if you are new here, welcome. I’m a mother, writer, and artist. I have studied trauma, therapeutic tools, and mindfulness. I am moved by honesty, reflection, slow living, and a deep connection to the earth. I hold space for mothers to share their truths and be in their experiences. If you enjoyed this, please subscribe and join me on this journey of being.

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