When is moving not moving?

I have a lot to cover and a short amount of time to do it, so I'm just going to get straight to the point.

Oh, who am I kidding?  Really I have nothing but time to cover my non-anything, so I could (if I so chose) simply meander around aimlessly for like three or four paragraphs before teasing some promising premise that I ultimately kill with more composition apraxia.  But since I took the liberty and just put the entire post to death immediately, I guess there's no choice but to get right down to brass tacks.

Can you tell I haven't written in awhile?

So this week has been quite eventful.  Not eventful in the 'Oil that is, black gold, Texas Tea' sort of way, but there was definitely some 'loading up the truck' and moving to...well, not Beverly Hills.  Or even Shiras Hills.  Nope, we bypassed the entire spectrum of independence, swallowed our pride, and moved in with the in-laws.

So far, the move has been largely positive.  No, seriously, it has.  Okay, please stop the giggling- it is perfectly possible for a family of four to move in with the parents of the wife and have the situation not devolve into a train wreck worthy of Jerry Springer.  Besides, even if the situation was tenuous, it is much better than the NMU townhouse we just left.  I'm seriously not sure we could have listened to any more arguments between our children and poorly supervised not-even-neighbor kids or audible assaults of inquiry from boundary-disregarding youngsters.  Indeed, I think most of the issues with the townhouses (other than the boring white walls and shrinking space) revolved around the fact that we felt like ants living in an ant farm.  You all remember ant farms, right? 

If a move to your in-laws is a step-up in the privacy arena, then maybe you should think about moving.

Besides, living here wasn't our first choice.  We certainly searched for other places that would have enabled us to maintain our independence...but realistically you have to be independent in the first place, and without delving too deeply into our financial situation, suffice to say that the emphasis is less on the in and more on the depend.  In fact, one of the factors that led us to decide on tucking tail back home is a desire to work ourselves free from dependence on others.

Before I continue, allow me to explain- I'm not under any sort of impression that there is this magical place we'll arrive at where we completely and totally are self-sufficient.  I'm much too learned for that- humans are social beings, and we don't just need other people to thrive- we need them to survive, period.  What I mean, then, is that we want to cut ties with dependence on faceless bureaucratic systems and start to depend on the people that we were meant to depend on- family.

In America, there is huge cultural value placed on independence, and part of this value that we are taught explicitly and subconsciously is that when we "grow up", we move away and carve out our own lives doing our own thing, away from the nest.  Not everybody does this- but a large number do.  If I had the time/energy/smarts, I would delve deeper into the mechanization of how young American boys and girls learn they have to move away in order to make it, and the consequences of failing to prepare them to do so.  The point is that there are many cultures where family units stay in close physical proximity as the rule (not the exception), so even though it feels weird, it's actually probably pretty normal.  Which for us is pretty weird.

The hardest part so far (other than the physical act of moving and organizing and sorting and driving a 24-foot U-Haul) has been trying to explain the move to our kids.  I think they were both excited about living with grandpa and grandma and, although Delaney seemed to be more cognizant of the whole thing than Shane did, the truth is that neither one of them really understood that we were not going to still be living in what the kids came to refer to as "Mommy and Daddy's house".  It's been a process (that I think is starting to take hold) of explaining to them the difference between a 'house' and a 'home' and that anywhere we are living as a family is our 'home'.

All in all, I'm excited about this next chapter of our lives.  In addition to the financial benefits, it will be great to get more connected with Sara's family and to be closer to her sister and husband.  It'll be nice to watch Detroit sports on the 50 inch crazy-high-def TV that sits upstairs.  I'm really looking forward to the kids each having their own room and to them having the space to run and play in the woods and fields and just let their imaginations carry them away.  I'm stoked to be able to go from my car to my couch without having to answer a hundred questions from nosy kids.

But mostly, I'm grateful for the opportunity to clean the slate and give this life thing another shot.