Moving Again
Friday, November 06, 2009
“Do you realize that this will now be the 11th time I have moved in 3 years?” I was exasperated while talking to my mother. “There is nothing about me that actually wants to make this move at all, and I’ve been sitting here trying to figure out why, but I just can’t. The truth is, it’s a beautiful new flat in a wonderful area of town. It’s cheaper than where I’m living now. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be excited about it Mom, except I’m not. Everything about me hates the prospect of moving again.”
My mother sighed. She’s used to my overly dramatic ways. I like to believe that I don’t need her anymore. That I can pay my own bills and make my way in the world, but when things are messy, I still need to call home, and she, oddly enough, is the only one who can make sense out of anything for me.
“Why do you think that is?” Well hell if I knew. That was my entire point of calling her in the first place. The thing is, I don’t call my mother unless I’m absolutely positively stuck and cannot sort through anything in my life. This is an occurrence that happens at least once every two weeks…sometimes daily.
“Well I know that when it comes to at least 3 of those 11 moves, they were moves that you didn’t particularly want to make. Like in college when the school told you that they weren’t going to give you any form of housing because they didn’t feel the need to provide it for their students with disabilities, or last year when you were up in Scotland. You moved up there so that you could go to school, and less than a year later you were leaving because that school failed you. And now, with this situation…” Her voice trailed off. With this situation, it was terrible. The train station that I was currently living at advertised itself to be wheelchair accessible, but the fact was that they were completely unprepared for anyone with a disability. The workers were all in terrible moods and often completely ignored me. The main station in London would put me on a train and then forget to tell my local station to take me off. Most recently, I had discovered that they were completely unprepared in the event of a fire to provide me with any emergency assistance out of the station. If there were a real fire, it would be my own life, in my own hands, walking on my own unstable legs.
When we were kids, it seemed that more often than not, friends moved away who didn’t particularly want to leave our class. They moved of course because they were the children of parents who got better jobs, or had to downsize; they moved to Las Vegas or Idaho; they moved because of happy times, or in an attempt to escape bad conditions. Our teachers always told us that moving was hard, but good. Eventually you make new friends and the new place becomes home. I hadn’t felt like I had a home for the past two years, and after moving 11 times, I was getting very sick of living in boxes.
People move for reasons far beyond the ones that we saw when we were kids. Immigrants move, sometimes with the hope of a better life, or sometimes to escape persecution. People flee their homes and go into hiding; there are all sorts of complicated reasons that, while narrowly focused on our own lives, we don’t even consider when we see a moving truck in the driveway. The abusive relationship, the mortgage that is unable to be paid, the child who has now hit 23 and is trying to spread her own wings—even though it seems to her parents that she is running away. The act of moving is in and of itself complicated, the reasons behind it are infinitely more so.
My family lived in the same home from the time that I was 3 until I was 10, and then the same house from when I was 10 to 21. Then suddenly, my father got a phone call one day from a headhunter. It had been a particularly bad week for him, and he told my mother the night before that if he suddenly had the opportunity to move and get away from where he was working, he’d take it. The next day the phone rang and within one month he was living in Vegas waiting for us to follow him. That was a happy move. All of those were happy moves.
The move I was facing now felt complicated and frustrating. I had been expecting to live in the same flat for at least five more years after moving in. Nine months later, I realized that the station wasn’t going to improve. I couldn’t stand to be harassed any longer by station staff, and I started calling around to nearby restaurants asking if they had any empty boxes and Styrofoam peanuts.
It all made sense. Life may be an adventure and take you to areas you never dreamed of, but those travels should always be because you wanted them to happen. Not because you were forced into exile by someone else’s idiocy. Unfortunately it sometimes doesn’t work that way, and you’re left wondering what to take, what to leave behind, and what might get lost along the way.
The forced moves may be more aptly named “replacements” or even “misplacements” as the term “moving” seems to give the act a false sense of joy and accomplishment. You “move on” from one phase of life to the next, but you become “replaced” due to lack of action. It’s nothing new. Entire clans went from one location to the next, migrating when hostilities become too much to bear It’s never just, but these movements do turn the pages of history. When this happens we lose something, gain something else. There’s always that one box which disappears and that one item which now needs to be a different size, shape, color. Perhaps we misplace something too. Thinking that this place is “it,” the new home that will suit us for years to come, the neighborhood will welcome our life with open arms, and that we won’t have to move again, we place our hope in a home to be finite, rather realizing that “home” while important, isn’t all there is to life. After all, if it was, we would never move.
