An effort on moving and houses

KarenandTess. My older daughter wrote it on the wall behind the door in the computer room at our house. Her name and the name of her best friend. The letters run into each other, tip forward and backward like toddlers learning to walk. They’re all capital letters, “those are easier to read, Daddy,” she has explained to me. I left the writing there on the wall when I found it, out of distraction. I was looking for her socks or shoes or something, in a hurry to get to the library in time for storytime or to meet a friend for a playdate. I continued to leave it there out of inertia, only seeing it when looking for something, and out of laziness, there’s always enough - too much - to do and anyway the door covers it. As we’ve begun packing to move I’ve left it there out of sentimentality. She hasn’t seen Tess in about a year. I don’t know when she will.

My wife was Tess’s nanny close to full-time from age one until about age three (when we had our second kid), and the fill-in nanny from three to five, seeing her two to three times every two to three weeks at the most infrequent. The girls are one month apart in age and with that kind of contact became as much like sisters as friends. We moved away last year.
Karen cried a lot when we moved, and asked often to see Tess. Letters told us Tess did the same. This lessened over the last year. If this were fiction the symbolism of erasing ‘KarenandTess’ from the wall would be cheap but I swear it’s the truth. I should say, Tess is not erased. She comes up often enough in conversation that she is at least a living memory. “Maybe they’ll be roommates some day,” Tess’s grandma had said at her birthday party last summer, one of the last times we saw Tess.

We’re moving away again in about a week. Karen’s friends she’s met here have moved away as well. This is a transient place, people come for work, leave for work. “It’s more okay we’re moving this time, since Leanna moved, and Dawn’s moving,” she tells me. Moving is tiring and annoying and it can be exciting, the sense of possibility of a new place. I’d like to stop doing it. I remember reading in high school that most Americans lived within fifty miles of where they grew up. I remember being fifteen or so and telling my parents, both of whom fit that pattern, that I could not imagine why anyone woud want to stay where they grew up instead of moving somewhere far away and actually cool. (I believe I later said the same to my wife, when she was my girlfriend, and at 21 had lived her entire life in one town. Exceptionally tactful.) At that point, moving meant a sense of possibility through escape from all the things I disliked about my family, my town, and myself, and through new opportunities to be, I don’t know, fancy and cultured and special because of living somewhere Interesting. I’ve now lived enough places to know more about what I do and don’t want in where I live, and to be tired of moving.

This phase of my life has a prequel in an apartment where my brother Tommy moved in with us after graduating high school. My mom talked me into it in that very effective way that I didn’t feel talked into anything at all because it just made sense. It was Urgent that he Escape from my Dad’s house, rather than stay living there and go to community college, if Tommy was going to Turn Out instead of growing up to be Just Like Dad. I later found out that my wife resented this because she was pregnant and the year with Tommy took up what would have been our last year just the two of us. I have later come to resent the ways I always had to be an adult for my brothers and my parents, to feel that this early onset adulting meant some corner-cutting in my chances to be a kid, and maybe helped me be a more anxious kid and as I’ve aged into age-appropriate adulting perhaps also a more anxious adult. Anyway, Tom lived with us. It was okay. We had a funny incident with a bat - the winged mammal kind - and a few shouting matches. He brought the dog with him, which I liked a great deal, even though she slept lengthwise in the bed between my wife and I, and I met more of the neighbors than I would have because Tom got high with them. I used to sit on the back porch and fuck around with guitars with them while everyone smoked. It was fun sometimes.

The real current phase of my life started with the next house, where we moved a month before Karen was born. That’s the house I lived in where I became Somebody’s Dad and lost even the vestigial interest I’d had in being a socializing 20something. The house filled up with kid stuff, books and toys and so many fucking stuffed animals, and little else, grow up shoved in boxes or given away. I took up 30something hobbies like running, sleep deprivation, and walking with The Baby near the lake and showing her flowers and birdies. The lake really defines that house for me. So many walks, with Karen, and as a whole family, often at sunset. That became a goal, to get out at sunset and walk. Even on the shittiest days where we’d fought over whose turn it was to change diapers and why we were broke and who was getting up with the baby when, those walks always ended with all of us smiling and not simply trying to get through the days and weeks but actually enjoying our time. We lived there when my second daughter was born too, as we lost to the new baby all the breathing room we’d gained in Karen’s transition from baby to toddler to early kid.
When her sister arrived, Karen began to aspire downward sometimes, wanting to be younger, to be babied. She likes being the older sister because it has privileges like more computer time and getting to be bossy sometimes, but she is not always the center of attention and gets fewer passes on her behavior. My younger daughter has aspired upward, always wanting to be bigger and older, like her big sister, and so transitioned from baby to toddler faster.

This year, in this new house, she’s transitioned into the early stages of kid, having turned to two this spring and not wanted to be babied. “I big girl!” she shouts. This is the house where that happened. She’s written a lot on the walls too, I think as much as Karen, though her writing lacks letters. (“I write my name!” she shouted this morning as she filled a page with scribbles from a yellow crayon.) This house has been nice in terms of a short chapter in our lives, in terms of our kids. As in, the kid parts of this year have been mostly great, with tantrums gradually lessening and my girls’ ideas and speech getting more complex and creative and interesting. We’ve also lived within a short walk from two lovely parks and a long walk from the library, where we’ve sometimes gone four nights in a week, for story time and a music performance and just to hang out. I also like the calisthenic equipment at one of the parks, where I’ve learned to do things I didn’t know how to do.

The house has otherwise been a shit-hole. I looked up its file in our town’s housing office. It’s been owned by only slumlords as far back as I can tell, and I’ve wished the current one divorce, cancer, and lighting and tornado strikes. As the maintenance guy said on one of his early trips out before we got tired of calling, “god they really did everything wrong in this house, didn’t they?” I will be glad to be done with this place, and to never again have to deal with these landlords, who I hope join some terrible cult where they have to spend twelve hours a day doing makework filing papers in dark rooms alone and live long lonely lives feeling unloved. More generally this short chapter of our live’s been spent being broke and job-hunting, mostly, and that’s gotten old.

It occurred to me tonight as I thought about erasing my kid and her best friend’s name from the wall that not everyone moves, and not every move is for work, and that the idea of moving for work is not as strange-seeming as maybe it could or should be. I’m sure there something sophisticated and leftist that could be said about that. For now I guess I’ll just say that the list of people who I hope end up divorced, lonely, and unloved is very long.
(Pardon the meta but I fear this post has given out like my energy-level, to the limited degree it ever reached a level from which one could say it then gave out, such that I fear to I add it now to this graveyard of well-intentioned beginnings.)

I tell myself that kids are not harmed by moving once, twice. I hope this is the last move at least for a long while, and I worry I’m wrong and my kids will grow up to be those adults who say “well, I’m not really sure, we moved a lot” when asked where they grew up. I remind myself that my kids fill up my life and are so very much themselves and define who I am in a way that feels forever - this is who I am, their dad, this is who I have been for as long as I have been myself - yet they are very new, their lives recent and short. I remember the house I lived in before The First Divorce in only flashes and snippets - a bird in the vent in the basement, a weightlifting plate I dropped on my toe, our dog snapping the chain on his dog house - and not in stories or conversations. It was the pre-narrative era when I was still really learning to talk and so my world and my sense of self wasn’t as organized by stories in the way it becomes as we get older. If moving out of that house harmed me I can’t see it. I didn’t just move away, either, I moved to my grandparents house, full of great memories, and to another house full of terrible ones but where I met my best friends for several years, from the first through fourth grade, Michael and Ian. We lived near each other and had a great time climbing trees and making Ian’s brother Gregory cry and scream and freak out so he’d chase around his yard and through his house with hammers or knives or pitchforks. I moved again in the fourth grade and in a year they weren’t my best friends and I go many months, maybe whole years, where I don’t think of them at all and, frankly, don’t feel that as a loss either. New places, new best friends. At this point my dearest friends are the ones I had in my early twenties, though just a few of those friendships, really just one, goes back to childhood. We become different people and make different friends.

And so some measure of mobility doesn’t harm kids and they may not even remember it. At least so I tell myself. We’re moving either way.