Moving Fears

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving”  Albert Einstein

Although I am beyond-words excited about being in our new house in just over a month, I must admit to being nervous about how it will all work out.  While the Husband and many of our dear and musclebound friends shift boxes onto a truck, I will be entertaining my daughter at a friend's apartment all day, keeping her distracted from the reality that she will never see her old room again.

I am worried that she will miss this place, but not really be able to put into words how she feels about its loss.  She is twenty-one months today, and will be just over twenty-two months when we move, which I fear is old enough to realize she's lost something but not old enough to express it.  I worry she will cry for no reason, sleep badly, or just be mopey for awhile.

Despite our reasons for moving, I will miss this place.  It will always be the place we lived when we brought Maeve home from the hospital, the place where we spent long hours looking out the sliding glass door, waiting to see Daddy's face in the afternoon when she would cry and cry.  The place where she stared at the carpet, then crawled, then wrote on the walls and played chase in her bedroom.  The tub where she learned to love taking baths.  The park I brought her to on every sunny day.  The swimming pool she slowly learned to tolerate.

Maybe I'm just projecting my emotions about moving onto my daughter, who will be so thrilled by the adventure of our new home that this one will fade fast in her memory.  There will be a porch to explore, trees to meet, a basement to cozify, lots of steps to climb.  But this apartment will always be vivid in my mind, the first home my baby ever had outside my body.

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