A Surprisingly Sane Blog

I thought I’d be sad when I saw our lovely Tucson home vacant, scrubbed, and ready for renters last night.  I wasn’t, though.  Instead, it was just a faint sense of well, I guess this is it.  Finality.

Living under my parents’ roof for the next couple weeks is a mixed flavor between deja vu and weirdness.  It feels exactly like the home I grew up in; complete with the stressed, grumpy dad coming home from work, the TV murmuring until a late hour, and the dog’s toenails click-clicking on the porcelain tile floors in the middle of the night.  But the weirdness stems from my behalf.  The fact that I have changed drastically during the last almost-five years that I have been married and living with my husband makes it evident that I have moved on from my childhood.

And that’s the weird part.

Up until I had to go through therapy several months ago, I was still mommy and daddy’s little girl.  Living the life they would have have hand-picked for themselves and any of their offspring.  I was nearly a mirror image of them and their values.  The goody-goody Catholic girl, college graduate, married, stay-at-home-mom-of-two-kids for as much time as I could half-sanely muster.  I moved in with my spouse only after saying “I do”, bought a similarly-styled house 10 minutes away from the one in which I grew up, and only made choices that I knew would never cause any strife with my family.

That is, until all hell broke loose and I nearly stepped in front of a speeding bus back in January.

I couldn’t be a puppet any longer.  It wasn’t my parents’ fault- it’s just that I’d played the role of the “perfect oldest child” to avoid inevitable rebellious conflict for much too long, and I never learned to spread my wings the way my sister did.  They way I should have.

Until therapy pointed me in the right direction, that is, and I had to learn the hard way that the choices (or lack thereof) that I had been making for my entire adult life weren’t healthy for me.  I wasn’t living any of my hopes or dreams, and I had just settled, miserably, into a life that was chosen for me.

Once I learned the pathetic truth behind my mental breakdown (besides the obvious postpartum insanity that I tried so hard to avoid) and began walking the necessary steps to better my situation, my darling husband was able to acknowledge his own depression.  You know what it was caused by?  The same force that was hold me back from becoming the wife, mom, and human that I want to be: settling for the security and safety of what is expected of us rather by everyone else rather than taking the risks we hyper, attention-deficit sort crave.

So being “home” is a bit odd to me, as was the fact that I didn’t feel nearly as empty as I anticipated while the movers piled all of our belongings into the moving van yesterday.  I no longer belong here, and I feel that stirring within me.  Currently, all of our stuff with the exception of a few necessary sets of clothing is somewhere between Arizona and Washington, and although I’m physically staying in my old room for the next two weeks, I’ve already moved on from this place.

While I admit to constantly craving change, I wasn’t expecting to feel this resolved and comfortable about our vast and unknown future in Seattle.  I like unknowns, and it’s funny to think that I grew up in a family that has difficulty deviating from their daily routine.

It’s a good thing, and I’m looking forward to being somewhere new.  Finally.

Current Mood: Happy

Tags: Seattle

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 at 6:49 pm and is filed under Daily Ramble. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.