Today we let it go.

Today was an exercise in letting go.  The prying of the final threads that stick to sweaty fingers and palms; the ones you have to be purposeful about loosening, long after the chord itself has fallen away.  And so we pulled up to our house after school, to live in it for our last ten minutes--except that it was a blank box of a house, and my kids imagined it to be a castle, a maze of legos, a house for stuffed hamsters.  I chose instead to paint it with memories; of babies born, and birthday parties and bed rest and Christmases.


I KNOW I have to mourn this house.  And so I walked through its rooms and talked myself into remembering it with it's once hunter green carpet, the way I fell in love with it.  It was SO big then, before the shots of hormones I took for WEEKS in the kitchen, while going through invitro.  When we had one, sweet baby--before the Lazy Boy, and the 13 weeks I spent chained to it in the family room.  Before going into labor, twice, in our bedroom.  Before we brought the twins home with their countless tanks of oxygen.  Before I had ever watched my kids--all of my kids-- take their first steps.  I can talk myself into believing that the memory of it all stays packed, invisibly in that house--but really, it's just the setting of their baby-hood.  


I wondered what today would feel like.  The letting-go, on paper.  I assumed that the hours of this day would be drawn with heavy shadows--that the adventure and excitement of it all would be balanced in equal proportion by a fear and anxiety that would emotionally cancel everything out, and leave me feeling very paralyzed.  But as it turns out, selling our house feels like brushing three sets of small teeth and tying shoes.  It was driving to school and taking a shower and checking Facebook every hour.  It was also signing some papers and eating some carbs to celebrate.  It was cleaning our basement and folding laundry and feeding the kids chicken nuggets for dinner.  Letting go feels like every other day, when the threads of their childhood are falling unnoticed from my grasp, as the kids learn to read, and multiply and rollerblade and fold their own clothes.  It's always about them; because time is FLYING by in the context of their little lives, and no house or castle or Lego maze can contain it.


And we are HERE, moving on.  It seemed like a big decision when we first discussed putting our house on the market, and again when it took over three weeks to pack up our family and move out.  We questioned it some--like when we were sure we were going to die in an avalanche of boxes in my in-laws basement, or when we *lost* all of our winter clothes (that we are soon to be reunited with...in MARCH.).  And again, when month after month would go by without a contract, and it seemed like we would NEVER have our DVR back again.  We loved that house, and our eight years there, and I suppose that for eight months it has been our fall back--but today it was about signing some papers and letting it go.  


To set the story for another young family, with one baby...