Moving

We’ve been living together for three weeks. Really, it seems much longer. If you choose to subscribe to popular opinion, or at least to the stuff that might be being said behind our backs, it was way too soon for such a big step. People can’t understand what scares them. And I’m certain at some point that I would have been scared of this too. But now that we’re here, as it turns out, I’ve never been less scared of any decision in my life. Although I wouldn’t qualify the move-in as my decision exactly. It was more of a business transaction between my boyfriend and my roommate. It went something like this: “You’re here all the time anyway. Why don’t you just move your stuff in and pay rent?”

“Cool.”

“Sweet.”

Done.

And here we are. I mentioned that this was my life they were accelerating at mach speed in an effort to diminish the burden of pricey rent. They didn’t seem phased. I had about a week and a half to adjust to the idea. The week and a half of Christmas through New Year’s Eve, actually. And in gentile time, those ten or so days pass like seconds. And this year in particular, I had plenty of other things on my mind. I didn’t have to explain this to my boyfriend, thankfully. He said, “I realize you’ll be busy with family stuff and Christmas stuff, I’ll take care of everything.” And really, he did. I returned from an emotionally draining Christmas with my family to find all of his furniture, books, suitcases, golf clubs, shoes, suits, hangers, CDs, movies and clothes crammed into our already tiny (though not by New York standards) living room. I sat down on the sofa, pushed some bags to the side and wondered briefly if a meltdown might present itself in my immediate future. Again, thinking on his feet, my darling boyfriend allowed me to open one of my Christmas presents (we were planning to exchange on New Year’s Eve). Much to my delight at noon that Friday, my present was a martini shaker, a bottle of Kettle One and a jar of olives. He made me a drink, “just for the occasion” and departed then for Manhattan on another trip with his worldly possessions and left me at peace with my drink. It occurred to me then that I could never be freaked out by this person, no matter how present he ever became in my world. He takes better care of me than I do.

As I showered off the airplane ride and tried not to think about the mountain of stuff in my living room, I realized what a good idea this move actually was. It was timed perfectly, right after the holidays when everyone’s checking accounts had been badly depleted, we would be saving around $1,000 combined on rent. My family situation, ever miserably complicated, threatened a potential onset of depression at any time. We were to be heading into the dreariest couple of months that New Yorkers ever have to face. January, February and March are long, cold and quiet months. Nothing ever happens, except the occasional happy hour that you’re just dying to leave. But he never allows me to remain too down, and having something positive to focus on would serve to distract me even further from my sadness. Also, I reasoned, I’d lived with people I hated plenty of times. I completely love this guy and he doesn’t bug me at all. This, it turns out, was going to be fantastic.

After my idealistic shower, we spent the next 48hours moving all of our stuff into Marc’s old room and all of his stuff into mine. There was cleaning. (LOTS of cleaning.) I scrubbed floors, we threw things away, we filled closets, filled trash bags, emptied suitcases and blew fuses. Two days later, on New Year’s Eve, the move was complete. And I have to say, I felt nothing short of total relief. (And a little exhaustion and probably some hunger, and I think a little sleepiness.) All in all, it was the most flawless move of my life.

Speaking of moves, my Mom bought a house today. It’s her very own, two bedroom home in Mt. Lebanon. It’s away from my dad, which she hasn’t been in her entire life. She’ll have to adjust to grocery shopping for one, sitting at home in the audible silence, and enjoying the freedoms of guilt-free naps in the afternoon and leaving the dishes in the sink. We’re in exactly opposite realms of the world. My bed is now “our” bed. As in, “I saw your shoes under my bed. Oh, I mean the bed…I mean our bed. Sorry.” Telling him he has to clean up his stuff doesn’t really fly so much anymore, since he always has the “it’s my apartment too, darling. I’ll clean later if I feel like it.” Kiss on the head, and that, as they say, is that.

It turns out that the weird growing times in life happen absolutely all along. They happen in reverse and they happen without you even knowing. You learn to be alone too late. You learn how to love when you least expect it. You move into and out of homes, and love, and times in your life. And the thing about all of these moves, is that most are out of our control. Most of our movements throughout this world are entirely up to life. I’m going to enjoy this one then, every second of the way.

My mom can do it, in a time in her life that she expected much less change and much less moving. She can do it with a smile on her face. With excitement about her new home, her new life. Excitement about her new move, and the appropriate amount of sadness at the lost of the way it used to be. Everything changes. Everything moves. She can do it. And so, then, can I.

I forgot to post this @ Christmas

I’m going to miss my house. After my parents have divorced, which feels to be taking forever, they will sell our house, the place where I grew up, and move into condominiums in separate corners of their worlds. My house will be gone then, the way that houses sometimes go. Until then, and I guess after it’s over, I will have to remember this Christmas as one of our last memories together. My parents, me, and our house.

I landed at Pittsburgh International Airport and my father picked me up as he always does. We drove home and discussed the state of the family, the various levels of sadness, senility and disaster in Pittsburgh this Christmas season. We tried to predict whether or not my brother might make an appearance. My father seemed out of sorts. He’s been that way since Memorial Day, or D-Day, as I refer to the day they announced the pending divorce. He looks older, too.

The next morning my mother and I left for two days at the spa. We had a lovely time. Facials, pedicures, paraffin wax treatments and endless money spending aside, it was so nice to just spend time with her, minus the usual distractions of home. We talked about my father, and she asked me to please not bring down the mood of the weekend. Every time we spoke about it for too long, one or the other of us cried. No one felt like crying on Christmas weekend. I noted, however, that if I did start crying, I may never stop.

Instead we decided to focus on the exciting changes awaiting us back at home. Once we left our champagne and chalet in the woods and headed back to a world where no one offers you a fresh heated neck wrap while you’re busy drinking herbal tea submerged to your knees in mineral mud, we would be facing the introduction of my boyfriend and my father. An introduction that Carl J. Smith has probably been dreading since he first heard the words “it’s a girl,” some twenty-four years ago. My mother was confident. “He’ll be fine,” she said. “Give your Dad some credit. They’re going to get along just great.”

I frowned.

Not only did I doubt my father’s capacity to be “fine” when presented the proposition of shaking hands with the guy who is about to move in with his daughter, I doubted my capacity to be “fine” in the face of it. When I was a teenager who hated her older brother and all of his friends, and thus boys in general, I used to assert regularly that I was to be convent bound. “I hate boys.” I’d say. A late adapter in the relationship arena, at twenty-four, this is actually my first real relationship. My father was thrilled with the convent idea. Less so with the shaking the boyfriend’s hand idea. Understandably.

But much to my surprise, perhaps I did underestimate him. They got along quite well. Better than well, in fact. They seemed to actually like each other. Strange silences aside, and differences in politics and religion, they smoked and drank and chatted about law and the family, and whatever else I don’t know. I didn’t see a whole lot of either of them for three days. After the boyfriend left, I was getting ready to go out with my friends. My father found his way into my doorway and said, (in a grand gesture for a man who rarely shares his thoughts) “Yeah. I liked him. I shook his hand when he left and told him I was sure I’d see him again.”

“I’m sure you will,” I said. And all of the parent/boyfriend angst was over. Unfortunately, the parents weren’t the only ones with opinions. I fielded a barrage of questions from the rest of my family and friends about our relationship and our plans for the future and all other things that generally make me nervous. I answered them to the best of my ability, while my mother smiled, and I could see her thinking she told me so. I have, in fact, fallen into real love, despite my best efforts to avoid it.

There were sad times too, and moments when it became clear again, that despite the show of friendship and affection from my parents, that their marriage was in fact about to be over. My brother surfaced briefly, for one dinner that my family for the most part ran to with open arms. I cried and called Manderz to come pick me up before he arrived. We ate salads at Eat N’ Park and I wondered aloud how I became so hopelessly fucked up. Whose family was this? And how the hell it got this bad. Then we drank white Russians, and I took a bath and went to sleep. It didn’t feel like the last time I’d ever take a bath and go to sleep in my house. But it was.

By the end of the week my time had come. It’d been a lovely and sad Christmas, but it was over now, and I’d need to let it go with the house and family it accompanied. The boyfriend was back in New York moving his things into what was about to become “our” apartment. (A combination of “my” apartment, “Marc’s apartment” and now with the boyfriend addition, his apartment too.) I wanted to get home to watch helplessly as he moved all of his worldly possessions into what I still very much considered only MY apartment. That isn’t to say that I wasn’t excited. Mostly, I just wanted all of these dramatic changes to be over. Changes, it turns out, even changes for the better, can be terribly uncomfortable and complicated at times.

All in all, this Christmas marked as many new beginnings as it marked endings. There were memories about to be lost and new ones being made even as I watched but could do nothing. I felt helpless, saying goodbye to the past and trying to understand the new way that everything was about to be. Only one thing was absolutely certain at the end of this Holiday season. And that was my new and undeniable role as an adult. My changes were making me a grown up. The house and family that raised me; that captured the moments and memories of my childhood, might be fading into the background. But I had my own emerging house and family now in New York. And it was time to go home.