Moving Stress

Today was truthfully the most stressful day of my life. I acknowledge that means that my life thus far has been a cakewalk. But no matter how blessed I am or how much we love Aberdeen, moving is still stressful y’all. Especially when you move all of your stuff across an ocean, anxiously await its arrival for 6 weeks, and then discover that hardly any of it fits into your house.

I got seriously weary of hearing the moving guys say ‘yea, that’s not going to fit up the stairwell’ or ‘the doorway’s not big enough to fit your couch through’. Towards the end, they just started laughing when I asked if something might fit upstairs or in our living room.

The silver lining logic of ‘well not having our furniture right away will give us time to plan out where we want everything to go’ went out the window quite quickly. I was forced to be two things that definitely aren’t part of my genetic makeup: flexible and decisive.

Honestly, I was so stressed out that at one point, I was in the fetal position with my hands around my knees, rocking myself as a form of self-soothing. And at another point, I called my mom and started bawling as soon as she answered the phone. I’m not proud of either of these reactions. I thought I was a bit stronger. But, when your life is a cakewalk, you start to think you’re pretty well adjusted when you’re actually one barely-too-big-to-fit entertainment console away from a psychotic break. 

After a good cry and an equally good ‘snap out of it’ pep talk from my mom, I started to regain my composure and ever since, Jonathan and I have been brainstorming on how we can possibly rearrange our layout to accommodate our belongings. Our Guest bedroom furniture won’t fit up the stairs, which means it’s got to go downstairs. Which means our office has to go upstairs.

And our pull out sofa didn’t even come close to fitting through the door frame of our living room and for now is setting up camp in our kitchen until we can find a good home for her. In the meantime, I am scouring Laura Ashley catalogs for a suitable replacement. 

We also had to get creative with shoving as much furniture up the stairwell that we could. Sometimes this means sawing off the legs of your dresser. Sometimes it means your husband pitching in to help with some heavy lifting.

I don’t even want to think of how we are supposed to get that thing out of our house. I’m sure our movers will be writing down our address and are already planning on calling in sick the day we move out of Aberdeen. 

It’s just so frustrating! Our house was definitely not the nicest one we saw while house hunting, but one of the draws was that the rooms were big enough for our furnishings. We just didn’t realize that it was the pathways to these rooms that weren’t quite big enough.

It’s only our 3^rd move in 4 years. I’m sure next time, we’ll finally get it right…

Sorry that there isn’t much of a positive spin on this post, but anything other than whiny complaining would be a bit dishonest. Poor, poor, pitiful me, having a hard time moving my Pottery Barn furniture to Scotland. You really feel sorry for me, don’t you? I know, I know...first world problems. But moving is stressful, y'all! 

And just so you know, I wasn't the only one who regressed in my coping patterns. Samson also fell back into his old neuroses of licking the wall when he's nervous.

And yes, I'm totally using my dog's psychotic behavior to normalize my own pitiful defense mechanisms. Because that's not crazy at all...