The Grief of Moving
on loving and leaving a home
I did it for weeks.
No, it was, actually, months.
I’d be on my way home from the store, my brain would be on auto-pilot, and I’d start to drive to the old house.
In 2017 my husband and I sold the home my family had lived in for ten years. It was the house I brought my youngest baby home to. The house where all the kids learned how to ride bikes, how to read, lost their baby teeth, and spent ten consecutive Christmas mornings. It was the only house any of them had actually remembered living in.
We didn’t move far. In fact, our new neighborhood butted up against our old one. We loved our old house, but we wanted more space to accommodate my husband’s home office, my homeschooling paraphernalia, and all the kids’ musical instruments, lego creations, and craft projects.
We also hosted small groups from church and often had out-of-town houseguests. We wanted more space, and a house upgrade felt like a good investment. The problem was, we had put a lot of love into our old house, and we didn’t realize until we packed up our things and gave the keys to the new owners how much leaving our beloved home was going to hurt.
My kids had very different responses to the move. All three of them missed the creek in the backyard of the old house and the sweet neighbor kids who met them to play every day in the cul-de-sac. My oldest was excited to have her own room and was ready for a new adventure. The youngest liked the new house’s big basement where she could spread out her toys, but she missed sharing a room with her big sister. For my middle kid, who depended on routine and rhythms, the change brought deep loss and instability.
I missed knowing intuitively how to work the oven and which drawer to open to find a spatula.
It was the little nostalgic things that stung the most. In our old house, there was a false drawer front on the kitchen island, and the builder, for some reason, had put a hinge on the bottom of it instead of nailing it down. When you pulled the knob, the drawer face would flap open to reveal a solid surface instead of a hole for a drawer. The kids, over the years, had used the fake drawer as a secret mailbox where they would leave each other messages in sealed envelopes. When we were packing up the house, I wondered, “How will the kids leave each other messages now?” It was a sweet childhood ritual they would’ve eventually outgrown, but because there was nothing like a secret flap on any of the drawers in our new kitchen, we had to say goodbye to it early.
The new house was wonderful, but at first, it didn’t feel like ours. The house we were leaving had our fingerprints and memories all over it–the paint colors I had chosen, the fire pit Dan built by the creek, purple coneflowers and Black-eyed Susans in the yard that we planted and anticipated blooming each year, and light dimmers on all the overhead light switches, because we are “dim light people.” The new house, on the other hand, was filled with its previous owners’ fingerprints and ghosts.
My kids felt far away in bedrooms on a separate floor from my own. And that fancy chandelier in the entryway was beautiful, but it definitely didn’t feel like me.
It was going to take time to make the new house our own. To make it feel like home–our landing spot, the place that reflects who we are and our family culture. As we were transitioning from one home to another, I felt so lost.
During those first few weeks, I grieved. But I felt like a brat for feeling so melancholy about a house upgrade. My new house was big and beautiful. It wasn’t as if I wanted to change my mind and cancel the move. I just somehow wanted to hold onto both the new house and the old at the same time. The old house was a repository of a million beautiful moments and memories, and it felt like they went along with the house, like the window blinds and the appliances.
Meanwhile, because we didn’t have enough furniture to fill it, the new house was cavernous and empty. The walls were bare, and all the comforts of home were packed in boxes. In fact, one of my kids pleaded that he wanted to go “back home,” but he was referring to the house that now belonged to a new family.
I assured him, “We’re going to build new memories in this house, and someday you’re going to feel just as attached to this one as you do the other house. It takes a bit of time. But we’ll get there.”
I hoped I was right.
We often think that grief is associated only with death, but we grieve a lot of different kinds of losses: a broken relationship, loss of our health or a physical ability, leaving a church community, losing a job, or saying goodbye to a dream. Grief can be mingled with joy when a kid graduates high school and moves on to the next phase of life or when retirement brings desired freedom but also a loss of identity and purpose.
All of these different types of grief are real, and feeling sad about moving to a different house is legitimate and normal. But the move was not primarily a loss; it was mostly an opportunity–to build new memories, new traditions, and to maximize the potential of a new space.
As soon as we moved in, we chose paint colors that felt more “us.” We put light dimmers on all the overhead light switches. We kept Wayfair, Amazon, and Pottery Barn in business while we filled and furnished all the rooms. We hung family pictures and placed mementos on shelves and table tops. Outside, we planted a ridiculous amount of flowers and fruit trees that we could anticipate blooming and bearing fruit every year.
We started putting our fingerprints everywhere.
Little by little, we filled the house, not only with stuff, but with memories and special moments–Indian feasts and Quiplash games with friends and family; visits from friends who live in Kansas, Alabama, Germany, England, and Thailand; neighbors who drop by because they think of us at the apple orchard or the donut shop and gift-giving is their love language; birthday parties and high school graduation parties for two of our kids; and a Covid quarantine that gave us more of a sense of home than we could’ve ever imagined.
I think the fact that we were sad when we moved eight years ago means that we did something right while we lived in our old house. We loved it well and maximized the home we were blessed with.
And the good news is, I was wrong about the old memories staying with the old house. Somebody must’ve sneaked them onto the moving truck at the last minute. Turns out, we’ve still got them.
Do you know someone who is moving and could use to read this essay to help put words to feelings? If so, feel free to share this essay with them!
i forgot about the mailbox!! holy cow!!
It's been almost 30 years and I still drive by East St., still miss it and look longingly when I see it.