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Oct
2005 |
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For
sale by owner
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Homes
reflect past, future; memories, dreams |
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We just moved. Bill and I bought our first house, on
Eula Court, when Jacob was 13 months old. He learned
to walk in the dining room shortly after we moved in.
Jacob is now 10. The people who owned the Eula house
before us had a 9-year-old when they moved out.
“It goes so fast,” Julie, the previous owner, told me at the closing.
I smiled at her, not really believing. Nothing about babyhood seemed to go fast
to me. At the time, I was still waiting for Jacob to start sleeping through the
night. At the time, it felt like I would always be the mother of a baby. I would
always be in my 20s. Thirty was still far off, and school-aged children, further
still.
Shortly after we moved into Eula, I found a pair of little boy’s shoes
in the basement. Julie must have forgotten them. They would fit Jacob at 3 or
4, I decided, and packed them away to save. By the time I re-discovered them,
Jacob had long outgrown them. I put them aside to save for Liam, and the same
thing happened. I began to understand that Julie had had a point.
Selling our Eula Court house was as much a milestone for me as any graduation
ever was. While our toddler, Jamie, keeps me connected to the little-kid world
I’ve come to know so well, Jacob is pulling me hard into the next phase
of parenting. Selling our first house and moving to this one was an acknowledgement
of growth. Two boys and a girl in one room was fine for awhile, but it wouldn’t
have been for long. I can’t help but note that while all three of our kids
learned to walk in our Eula Court house, they’ll likely learn to drive
while living in this one. Our basement still has plenty of Fischer Price toys
in it, just as our last one did, but it also has a mini-pool table and a ping-pong
table that show how our children’s play is changing.
While I can quickly tick off a list of things the boys learned to do in our first
house — from going on the potty to long division, it’s what Bill
and I learned that makes me even more aware of the passage of time. Some things
we learned on purpose, like when we checked out the book, “How to Build
a Deck” from the library, convinced that if we could read, we could build.
Some things we learned by uncomfortable necessity, like when Bill suddenly lost
his job, and I had to change my plan to be a stay-at-home mom and go to work
full time for a while.
Most things, we learned gradually. Gradually, we learned the rhythms of marriage;
the endurance needed for parenthood, the ebb and the flow of life as a family — a
family first of three, then four, then five.
We moved into our current home knowing more than we could have imagined when
we moved into our last — not just about plastering, plumbing and painting,
but also about ourselves as a couple.
We are quicker to laugh at ourselves than we were moving into our first house.
We are more confident in who we are as a partnership, who we are professionally,
who we are as parents. We know a little more about where we’re heading
in life, yet we have also had enough unforeseen detours to know anything is possible — that
derailment often happens when you’re moving along quickly.
Kari and Drew, the couple we sold our Eula Court home to, are so young and cute
they look like they stepped off the top of a wedding cake. They are eager and
excited and have a dog who loves the yard where Jacob threw a thousand football
passes, where Liam spent hours making forts out of sticks, where both boys, two
foster children, and then Jamie, learned the rule that no one is allowed to eat
the sandbox sand, tasty as it might appear. To Drew and Kari, I’m sure
that our mid-30s life with three kids, homework, soccer practice and little time
to worry about the towels on the bathroom floor, seems unbelievably far-off.
I didn’t even try to explain that it’s closer than they might think.
Over the summer, as I waited for the closing dates for the two homes, I was torn
between peering ahead and glancing back. I sat on my Eula Court porch and drank
in the memories of our first home — the chubby baby cheeks, the mashed
banana coated bibs, and the walks with the stroller that were a part of our days.
Swinging on the porch swing, I looked with wonderment at our future in our new
home, taking a guess at what that future may be, but not knowing. Not really.
Caught between two houses — between our past and our future — I was
able only to blink back my tears and give thanks for all that had been, and pray
for all that will be.
(Scobey-Polacheck and her husband Bill have two sons, Jacob
and Liam, and a daughter, Jamie. They belong to SS. Peter and Paul and St. Monica
parishes. Scobey-Polacheck welcomes dialog regarding her column. E-mail her at <ascobey@hotmail.com>.) |
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