Moving Day

I hate moving.

I thrive on order, so I find the chaos unsettling. Over the years, I've developed a system of small boxes and elaborate labeling to minimize the dissonance. It starts with the first box I pack and doesn't end until I tag every cupboard, closet, and shelf in my new house with a post-it note before I carry in a single box. I unpack just as systematically -- starting with the bedroom and progressing room-by-room through the house until I'm done. The moment I hang the last picture, I send out invitations to the house warming party.

When I moved to the little town, I was even more organized than usual because most of my stuff had to go into storage. My husband and I decided I would crash at the bachelor pad for a couple months while we looked for a house. Other than a season's worth of clothes, cosmetics, some books and CDs, and a few kitchen basics he lacked, everything I owned went from the back of a truck into a storage locker.

At first, he resisted sharing the bachelor pad. It was a fairly small, sparsely furnished two-bedroom apartment, the antithesis of his suburban ranch house -- no kids, no pets, no wife... just lots of empty space to decorate as he pleased. He chose everything -- furniture, rugs, pictures, plants -- with care. Other than pictures of his kids, some books, trinkets, and a couple pieces of art, there were very few artifacts from his married life. He promised to clean out the little closet in the back bedroom for me, but warned me not to disturb anything else in the apartment. This place was HIS and he was proud of it.

After 15 years in the big city, it took me a couple months to shut down my life there. I stopped going to the little town on weekends because I wanted to savor every last moment in the place I'd made my home. My husband and I didn't see each other for most of that time -- the longest stretch of our courtship we spent apart. He came to visit a couple of weekends for parties, but mostly we kept our distance. We stopped having our hours-long phone conversations and daily e-mail banter. Our exchanges were terse and to the point. I kept him updated on my progress, but he made it clear that he didn't want to hear about how hard any of this was for me.

By the time moving day came, I was ready to go, if for no other reason, than to put the long goodbye behind me. I figured that the big chill that had been growing between us would thaw once I was in the little town. I would get established in a routine at work, we would find a house, and I would start making connections in my new community. If only...

Even though I had almost two months lead-time, they weren't ready for me at my new job. After a couple days orientation, I found myself with nothing to do but surf the Internet and read the paper. When I approached my boss about giving me something constructive to do, he confessed that he had failed to properly plan for my position, and that I wouldn't be able to start anything until the beginning of the fiscal year. Which meant another six weeks of staring at a database that wouldn't do me any good without a travel budget. So much for a routine.

Things were not much better at home. My husband accused me of being clingy, needy, weepy, and just plain in the way. My being there full time disrupted his routine, and he resented that he felt responsible for me. We argued over the littlest things -- like how I put my knives on the kitchen counter in a way that purposefully messed with the flow he'd created, or how he was deliberately ruining my hand-washables by throwing them in the machine with everything else. By the time I'd been there three weeks, we were walking on eggshells around each other, unsure what the trigger would be that set either of us off. Somewhere in there, we stopped having sex.

If it hadn't been for house hunting, I probably would have gone mad. My husband started looking before I moved, but gave up in frustration because he couldn't find anything that was quite right. We were both adamant that we didn't want to live on a cul de sac in a featureless subdivision. He was torn, however, between wanting to live in one of the newly converted warehouse lofts in "downtown," and wanting to find a lake house in the country. I said I'd be happy in either place, as long as I had a decent kitchen and enough closet space for my stuff. The first place we looked at together was perfect -- on the lake with a dock for his boat, a pool for the kids, a big enough (though somewhat dated) kitchen for me, and more than enough storage space to keep our junk out of sight. Needless to say, the owners did not accept our offer.

When we lost the perfect house, he gave up. He told me that he didn't want to look any more, and that I should use my best judgment to find us a place to live. Three days later, I found the second-most perfect place. A recently-gutted and beautifully renovated row house, it was at the opposite end of the spectrum from the lake house. It had 12-foot ceilings, a beautifully modern kitchen, hardwood floors throughout, enough bedrooms that none of the kids would have to share, gas logs in the fireplaces, a Jacuzzi tub in the master bathroom, walk in closets.... All we'd have to do was change the paint in a couple rooms and we were good to go.

I was a little nervous when I showed it to my husband for the first time. Keeping my fingers crossed as he wandered from room to room, upstairs and back down again, I waited for his verdict. Finally.... "I love it. You did good baby." The thaw at last!

Six weeks later, we moved in. Though I had to do most of the unpacking and organizing, it was a small price to pay for peace. What I didn't realize as I was setting up our new home, was that it wouldn't take long before he was using it when I traveled for business as an expanded version of the bachelor pad. Home sweet home, indeed.

The Wife Who Knows