A Bike Ride Past Our Old House

A bike ride past our old house. What a mistake I made following the kids there. I wasn’t ready to see it and certainly was not prepared for the aftermath of the shock of Captain Awesome seeing it. I couldn’t leave it fast enough, while he wanted to stay and feel the pain of the loss, I made him leave it. “Let’s go. We shouldn’t have come here.”

Nothing is the same anymore, not even our old neighbors. The single dad and his kids moved from across the street a few months before we left. When we were closing on our new house, their house went up for sale and sold within a week or two. The neighbor that was our oldest remaining neighbor on our old street passed away a couple weeks before this infamous bike ride. The house next door to us that used to be the home of one of my husband’s former players when he coached high school football moved to Texas a couple years before with his family and younger siblings. When we moved into the home that neighbor and I were both pregnant, my baby came in November hers in January. Since they moved, one other family rented the home and lived there for about a year. Most recently it was sold and basically torn down to the foundation and now is in the process of being rebuilt into a mini mansion. The house on the other side of our little home was sold a few years before having been previously owned by the same Aunt and Uncle that owned the home we rented from for all those years. 

Now as we looked around our old backyard which has been completely torn down as we knew it, my heart yearns for our old home. All I can do is grab my oldest boy and hold him as he screams and cries like I want to. Everything that we knew as our home, the home my husband and I brought both our babies home to has been changed and torn to pieces. The laundry room has been taken down, all that’s left are the connections for the washer and dryer. The little playhouse that the boys spent hours playing in making mud pies and serving me dirt coffee is completely gone. The curbing around the grass that we wanted to remove ourselves if we had bought this house is now gone. They have even taken down the pool fence that divided the yard into two yards. The RV gate is gone too, it used to rattle as it shook back in forth in the wind and dust storms. 

Even though I know the inside is completely changed as well, I can’t bring myself to go look at it. Though my boys want to see it, especially the oldest. He wants to see everything. He wants to see his favorite place, his old bedroom. At the time I had a key to the house, but instead I chose to hurry him away. I couldn’t be there any longer. It was too hard. Too hard to see the changes. Too hard for me to come to terms with the fact that we had indeed moved on, that we no longer lived here. This was no longer our home. And yet, this was the home that I lived in the longest of any home in my entire life. This was the home that brought the most joy in my life, a home where my husband and I transformed from a couple with a dog, to a family of three with a dog, and eventually to a family of four with two dogs. This was the home where our boys learned to walk and talk, where they transformed from babies to kids. 

There were so many great things that happened in this home and I think that by saying goodbye to the home it made me feel as if I was saying goodbye to all those good memories too. Now as I sit here and reminisce about all those wonderful times, I realize that just because we moved from that home doesn’t mean that we moved from those memories. Those memories are in our hearts and will be cherished forever. We still have our growing family and my life with them brings me joy daily. In our new home, we will continue to make cherished memories. 

While I feel bad for my initial reaction to my eldest son’s outburst regarding our old home, rushing him out of the backyard and far, far away from that house. I realize now, it was his reaction that triggered my own. I didn’t know how to handle that emotion and neither did he. He was trying to let it go with screaming and crying while I was trying to stuff it deep down inside, which is probably why this moment keeps replaying in my head. I have been unable to let it go, not only the uncomfortable feelings it brought up, but my reaction to my son’s outburst. I was so quick to push the uncomfortableness away and wanted my children to push it away too. 

Writing about this incident has obviously brought up all that raw emotion and finally a few weeks later I have the courage to talk to Captain Awesome about it. I asked him why he cried like that. I apologized for rushing him away from there. And I asked him what we could do to make our current home feel more like our old home. He had a very helpful solution. He suggested having our crafts on the walls. When I look around our new home, I see the bareness that he is talking about. We haven’t hung much of anything on the walls. I am embarrassed to admit it, but even though we’ve been here for four months now, I still haven’t finished unpacking. I haven’t hung anything on the walls yet. 

Now, I have no more excuses. School is just about out. It’s time to finish unpacking and hang things on the wall. It’s time to make this home as wonderful as our old home, because when it comes down to it, it’s not the home that makes the cherished memories, it’s the people in the home.