I got up at 7 am and tried all day to blog and between three non-working keys on the laptop (that have fixed themselves miraculously) and the million other interruptions/to-do items, I never even typed in the blog url to get started until ten o’clock tonight. How I’ve needed to write. It’s silly, this love affair I have with writing.  It’s as if the blank page is my sanctuary. I fill it up and become the sanctuary for myself.

Firefly Lane is my latest read.  My 4-star review can be found over on GoodReads. The book is about two best friends over a thirty year period of time. It was heart wrenching and touching in every single decade. It made me wish for a friendship like that of fictional Kate and Tully. I have great friends but none who know me as well as these two knew one another and none who have been around and close for 30 years. Well, maybe my sisters count. I’ve known them a long time and they are pretty intimate with my insanity.

As I set down this book upon completion I was overcome with the idea that relationships are all that matter. The only thing I am taking with me when I die is my relationship with God, my relationship with myself, my relationship with my family, and my relationship with my fellow human beings. That’s it.

I can hope that I can take my relationship with paper and a pen but it ain’t gonna happen. Anything I write is stuck in mortality. Hmm. Maybe that’s not actually true. Maybe this explains my love with language. Like Kristin Hannah, I can write something that could inspire someone to have better relationships. If I do, they will take that inspiration with them….take my words with them. Even though that is a total tangent, it’s cool.

It lifted my spirits today to know that material stuff is petty. It’s not necessary for a happy fulfilled life. Sometimes its a hindrance.

So, life has been pretty crappy around here lately. Our landlord decided to sell the house we have been renting for the past two and a half years. We have a home here and love our neighborhood, but now we have been forced to move on. It’s been hard and emotional.

Not only is it hard to leave our beloved home, it’s also hard because LG and I made the decision to be financially responsible and make a significant downgrade. The downgrade is depressing yet necessary so that we can save money to not just get into our own home again but to be financially secure once we get there. We could have borrowed money to buy the house we are in and saved ourselves the hassle of moving, but if and when the furnace went out, we’d be in trouble. We have learned the hard way that we really don’t want to borrow money and we also don’t want to put ourselves in a position to need to be rescued.

So in the next few weeks we will be leaving our four bedroom 2,600 square foot home with a beautiful yard and a heaven-like neighborhood to reside in a 1,400 square foot 3 bedroom basement apartment with ONE bathroom!! It just sucks. There is no other way around it. There is nothing worse than knowing I am a parent who is failing my kids. They aren’t getting the stability we want them to have. They don’t get a lot of what we want them to have. What feels really crappy is knowing if we hadn’t taken our vacation last year to Disneyland, we may have had a different outcome now. If I would have known at the time that I was choosing future stability over one nice vacation for my kids before they fly from the nest, I don’t know what I would have done.

I do know one thing: I’m not taking my place of residence with me when I go, but we will all hopefully take with us the memories that were made. We will even take with us the memories we are going to make while fighting over the one toilet for the next few years. Somehow that makes this broken mom feel o.k. with it all. It also makes me feel better to know that the relationships I’ve forged in our current home are not just gone because I am moving, they will continue with me forever.

A song comes to mind.