It was bound to happen sometime.
With all the stress of selling our house, moving, unpacking, and everything else that goes along with all of that, the arrival of a seriously major meltdown was just a matter of time.
And it finally happened. Saturday, July 6. I had The Fit.
Mostly, things have been moving along. We have been getting a lot of little things finished up, managed, taken care of. The bigger things are coming more slowly, but they aren’t too far behind. But it’s also been stressful, tiring, lonely, and taxing my creative resources at just about every turn.
Add to that the busy week we’d had, and matters were even more ripe for craziness.
On Thursday, we hosted our first “event” — a party for the Fourth for my family. So we spent the week getting ready. I finished a manuscript I was working on. We cleaned. Emptied a few remaining boxes. Stuffed the rest of them away. Made room. Fixed food. Got everything ready. And then my family showed up and we had a good day of hanging out, talking, and eating.
Then, suddenly, it was the weekend. We were caught up on our cleaning. On unpacking. We were open. We could actually dedicate an entire weekend to some major project we hadn’t been able to tackle theretofore. So Eric and his dad and brother decided it was time to burn stuff. Now, you have to understand that Eric’s dad is a closet pyromaniac. That man can make anything burn. ANYTHING. So the fact that it had rained every day for the entire month of June was not going to dissuade anyone from burning some of the old barn. It needs to come down. Everyone had a day off. Let’s burn stuff, people!
And since the garage is right next to the barn they’d be tearing down, I decided it was also a good day to try to organize that particular pit of despair.
The garage is a good distance from the doublewide. So getting there to work with 4 kids hanging on me just isn’t going to happen normally (thankfully, my MIL volunteered to come watch kids for me that day). More importantly, the garage is where things have been dumped for almost 9 months. When we de-cluttered the house to make it show-ready, we dumped the boxes in the doublewide or the garage. When we moved in, a bunch more stuff got dumped in the garage. And as we unpacked and started settling into the doublewide, even more stuff got dumped into the garage. But that day, I decided was the end of all dumping. It was time to start organizing, no matter how painful.
And until that moment, we thought the garage was fine. Turns out…it wasn’t.
As I began to pull things out, organize, sort, and generally deal with the stuff dumped into the garage, I noticed it. The big wet spot on the exact middle of the floor. It hadn’t been there long. The garage had been dry with good drainage for months. But, as I began to move more stuff and shift more boxes, I realized the wet spot was surprisingly big, some important stuff was sitting in the middle of it, and worst of all, there was mold and mildew growing everywhere.
The longer I worked, the worse things looked. And I lost it. I sobbed. Literally. Tears. Snot. The occasional stamped foot. It was not pretty.
Thankfully, I was alone for the initial ugliness. The guys arrived to work on the barn (they’d been working to steer a bull calf), and Eric noticed (surprisingly fast) that all was not well. He came over to see what was up. I showed him. I cried some more. He started to help.
I will be forever grateful that no one thought I was overreacting. Eric was totally understanding and helpful and concerned, too. My MIL gave me a huge hug and let me cry a bit on her shoulder. Everyone else stayed out of my way. Because I cried when I saw my card table mildewed. I cried for fear that the bins and bins of kids clothes might be ruined. I cried to see our Christmas tree box sitting in the worst of the wet and the advent calendar box on the bottom of the pile, right at the edge of the water. I cried a lot.
I kept telling myself (and everyone else) that it was just stuff. So what? If it was ruined, it wasn’t the end of the world. But I was heartbroken. And it wasn’t really about the stuff. It was the first time that the entire burden of the move was more than my cup could hold. All the stress, the sadness, the frustrations, the sifting and packing and sorting and repacking to fit our family into a house suddenly 2/3 the size of the house we’d had. All the disappointment of leaving my friends, my family, my sister, our church, a decade of my life. All the nerves about moving to a new place, the loneliness, the frustrations of starting over, the sense of being outside, of being an outsider. It all came together in a puddle exactly the size and shape of the wet spot on the floor of the garage.
And I cried.
To be fair, it was not as bad as things at first appeared. The fit subsided. My MIL took my kids to nap at her house. Eric stayed and helped me until there was nothing else we could do. I cleaned and scrubbed and unloaded and threw a few things away, and in the end, we lost…almost nothing.
The tubs of clothes were fine (and are now in my MIL’s basement). The furniture that mattered cleaned up beautifully, and the furniture that didn’t matter either cleaned up or burned up. The advent calendar could be washed. The stuff was still just stuff.
As far as we could tell, the driving rains for days on end had simply beaten sheets of water under the garage door, creating the puddle. And the wet, humid weather and air-tight garage kept everything so moist that the mold formed. But it hadn’t been there long or things would have been much worse. And we found it and dealt with it and can guard against it now.
But for all my “putting on a good face” about the move, The Fit was a pretty clear indicator that the last few months have been much harder than I imagined. It’s a definite struggle to live as we are living…and to choose to LIVE here. I know I could rant and rave, and I have struggled not to keep a running list of all the things I miss or dislike or wish were different.
But I am adamant that the Fit won’t be repeated too many times. Sometimes, the state of affairs surprises you, and you react. The reaction, in my opinion, is fine. It’s normal. But what you do after that initial shock…that is what really matters.
And I’ve decided…
I will not waste these days. These months. However long. I will not waste them, wishing them away and telling myself “I’ll be happy when…” Because I won’t be happy then. I have to find happy now. I have to find Jesus now. Right here, where I am…where we are.
And that is hard. That costs something. Sometimes, it costs tears.
But at least The Fit is now behind us. There will probably be another one or two along the way. Humility is not my normal. I’m not good at it. I’m not used to it. I’m quick to excuse myself from being made low. And yet, for the first time in a long time, or maybe ever, I have only that road to follow. Accepting humility with open hands and letting God change me, mold me, break me open. The only other option is to harden my heart – against God, my family, and life in general. And that is not the way I want to go.
So I threw my Fit. And we moved on. And we moved some stuff. And when we build a house, we’ll move it all again. And in all of it, I just want to find more of Him and less of me, more of beauty and less of ugly, more of love and less of pride.
Because I cannot stop the rains from coming, but I can choose to let them push me closer to the only One who can protect me from the storm. The One who is never turned away by my Fits, but who can use them to bring me closer to His heart.
Which is the goal, anyway.
