Running Toward Roots
When moving dredges up phantoms from the past, we sometimes discover we’ve come further than we’d ever dreamed
When I tentatively left Boston to move in with my now-husband Kurt an hour north in New Hampshire, I was determined that his house was going to be the one I died in. Our children were going to be born there, we were going to grow things and make things and live a sweet life by the river. I committed to that place wholeheartedly; I dug in, I planted trees. Even as I realized that the house itself was making me sick with allergies, I barely wavered in my commitment to that place, to not attempting to solve a problem with a relocation.
I was 17 years old when I convinced a landlord to rent me my first apartment — one unit in a fourplex in the middle of the woods of South Carolina. Our new house in Peterborough has the same hardwood floors, the same style of wooden blinds, and a bunch of specific memories of that place and time are surfacing: the German girls, friends of my boyfriend, who’d come over to trade clothes and practice modeling poses; the spaghetti dinner that was one of the first meals from scratch I cooked just for myself; watching Snatch on my first couch at 3 am with a UTI, in pain and sort of scared in the dark, alone.
For the majority of my adult life, drastic geographic relocations have been my self-help tool of choice. Every time I moved I left friendships or romances in my wake, certain that what I needed must be there, just a few thousand miles away. I moved from South Carolina to Indiana and back, on to Oregon before turning tail to a different part of South Carolina, and then, finally, to Boston. When my first marriage crumbled there, I found myself alone again, too poor and exhausted to run anymore. I finally realized that a change of scenery doesn’t make friends for you, doesn’t help you find your life’s purpose, and definitely doesn’t save a bad relationship. Wherever I went, there I still was, and I had to come to terms with that person.
It would probably sound disgustingly dull and mature to that seventeen-year-old who wanted to create her adult life through force of will and some curated bookshelves, but it ended up being a matter of cold finances, a hard look at the time we have available in our busy days, and some frank discussions about our future that opened the door to this move. That, plus a gigantic pinch of luck and some undeniable shoves from the universe, and here we are, doing this thing Kurt and I promised each other was never an actual option. Despite the hard parts, both foreseen and unexpected, we’re already better off for it.
When somebody moves by choice, they’re indulging in a huge act of fantasy world-building. What do I want to be different? In what ways do I want my life to be better? Who do I want to become? That first apartment was where I created myself as an adult. This current move, in contrast, is about our priorities as a family. If we have indulged in constructing fantasies, some are already proving to be true and possible. We moved only a couple towns over, so this isn’t one of my cross-country uprootings, but it does feel like a different world in a lot of ways. We moved from an isolated old farmhouse surrounded by forest to a 1960s suburb a mile from town. We are giving up a backyard river and the acres I once dreamed of farming in favor of community.
In our previous house, we couldn’t even see a neighbor, save for maybe a faint glow of lights through the trees in the dead of winter. We were at minimum a twenty-minute drive from friends or stores. Now our kids are romping down the street with other neighborhood kids, spontaneous gatherings with friends are already happening, we’re biking to the library and the pool and already living in many ways exactly the life I had imagined, even as unpacked boxes still line the half-painted walls.
Whether I can actually become a better person from moving this time is something that’s just going to take a bit more unpacking.
I don’t think the extreme stress of buying a new house is just from the queasiness that comes when you write one of the biggest checks of your life, nor the physical difficulty of hauling furniture, nor even the absolute endless hassle of trying to unpack with kids underfoot. I don’t think the stress of moving is about the uncertain waiting game of contract negotiations or the trickiness of getting everything lined up while also working a 9-to-5. No, what does it is the physical dredging up of all the memorabilia of who you’ve been up until now even as you’re confronted with all the ways you’re not quite who you want to be.
I’m definitely in full-on memory-assault mode here. All my old dreams and wishes, plans and promises are raw, always lurking just under the surface of my mind. My angst is not triggered by any particular physical items so much as by a kind of mental reckoning, an unconscious desire to deal with a few more bits of the past so I can move forward into this new era.
I’m having revelations about past relationships, verbalizing ancient mistakes, forgiving, recategorizing, moving on. I’m wrestling with a lot of parts of myself that are usually suppressed, or at least better-controlled. Something about moving has me connected to my past in a way that I’m not used to day-to-day; parts of my life that feel like they were other lives or lived by other people are suddenly fresh. It doesn’t take a lot of digging to find that childish, anxious core that still thinks that I’ll be able to purge all of my problems with an environmental change.
I’m in much healthier mental shape than I ever have been, but I’m still me, and this move has me confronting all the ugliest parts of myself. Old hurts have resurfaced, old thought patterns suddenly carry me away, old fears have taken on new lives.
This is the mental version of the chaos of unpacking: come in in the middle of it and everything looks hopeless, bits and pieces scattered everywhere in barely-distinguishable piles, no order evident. The order is coming, but things have to be sorted through and discarded before it can emerge. The hope being, of course, that the reordering will end up leading to a system that functions better than before, whether we’re talking a living room arrangement or a mind or a whole pattern of living.