I have an urgent need to apologise to my friends, my readers for going completely MIA for the past few months. It has been “full on” to say the very least.
Life does, indeed, throw us many curve balls along the way, I guess this is how we learn and grow and gain strength and perspective.
One of the main reasons I have not written of late, is that I have been experiencing a feeling of “flat”. It is something which does not happen to me very often at all, so it took me by surprise and I was not sure exactly what I should do to make it stop. I felt that if I wrote when I was feeling that way, that it would not be my true self writing and whatever I did write would not be authentic and me.
Some of my friends said that it was just the reason that I should write, to make others aware that it is okay to “be flat”, lol! The thing is, that writing is what I love doing most, and all I could think about was writing and I was getting increasingly frustrated that I just could not make myself sit down and just write.
But I’m here now and that is all that matters. Finally, I made it 🙂
So…what has been happening?
Well, we were living in sunny Queensland, in the middle of nowhere but our lease was about to run out in July and we weren’t sure what our next step was.
The reason for this was that my husband’s employer kept saying that they wanted him to relocate to Newcastle but they couldn’t say when or if for sure.
At the same time, Forrest, our eldest, came back to live with us. And again, we could not enrol him at school because we didn’t know where we would be living and the end of term was drawing near. So, I got to home school him. Yay! Good times 🙂
And, of course, because I am a super organised control freak, I started packing all the things we weren’t using every day, getting slowly ready for the inevitable move.
The situation had us in limbo. I did not like being in that place at all. I function well with dates, goals, lists and generally the full knowledge of what is going on. To say I was out of my comfort zone would be a gross understatement.
Anyway, we had to let the real estate know our plans (which we didn’t have) so that they could make plans and we set the moving date as the end of August. We decided we would move to Brisbane and stay with family until we knew exactly what was going on with Billy’s work. I was adamant that I did NOT want to move to Newcastle. I didn’t know anyone there, all of our families were in Brisbane/ Queensland and I would have absolutely no support with five children if we were to move to Newcastle.
But at least now I had dates and I could get on with what I do best: organising!
So, I organised the movers and the pest control and the cleaners and all that jazz. Finally, I was on a mission!
And then, on the weekend before our move, we got a phone call that Forrest’s mum had an accident and was in a critical condition at the hospital. Of course, Billy and Forrest got in the car straight away and drove the four hours to the hospital in Brisbane. As much as I would have wanted to go as well, I did have to stay behind with the four children and the two dogs.
A couple of days later, she died.
Naturally, there was no way I was going to miss the funeral as well, so I knew I had to get a move on. The movers were scheduled for that Thursday and it was very late on Tuesday afternoon that I found out that the funeral had also been scheduled for that Thursday. Before panic set in, I called the movers, who could indeed make it over…. the next morning!!!!!
Then the panic truly set in. I had less than ten hours to pack up the whole house, the kids, everything!
So I sat down and did something I very rarely do. I cried. Then I cried some more.
Then I went to get wine. But I packed all the glasses and the cups. Never the one to be unclassy and drink out of a bottle, I drank out of the only other vessel available: baby plastic sippa cup.
I had friends calling me from all over the place offering to come and help, and I was so very touched by their kindness. It’s funny how in the midst of all that mayhem a kind act or a kind word can just make you stop for a minute and put it all into perspective.
Anyway, here is a photo of the damn trampoline. It is the one with the sides. Billy was meant to disassemble it (one of his three jobs for the move) but then he wasn’t there so I had to. I figured after taking the sides and the legs off, that it could just go into the truck. Then I rolled it up against the garage and realised this was not possible and yes, I really did have to go ahead and take the springs off, one by one. This is why.
And also, thank god for my beautiful neighbours, who came over with their weed cutting things and lawn mowers and ride on lawn mowers and tidied up the lawn and mowed an acre’s worth of grass.
So, that night, I managed to move everything into the garage and only leave the big furniture in the house. I had two trucks coming the next morning.
In the morning, I did a trip to the dump on the way to school, dropped off Madi and Rahn at the school, went home and helped pack up two twenty foot containers. I also packed my car to the brim and after cleaning up, was left with a bag full of rubbish which poor Rahn had to have on his lap while I drove around to find a wheelie bin to put it into after school.
Of course, it all happened so suddenly that they didn’t have the time to say good bye to their friends properly and Madison managed to leave a heap of stuff at the school.
So, we got to Brisbane that night, went to the funeral next day and then back to limbo land.
I had enrolled Madison and Rahn at the school at the Gold Coast they previously attended, to make it all a bit easier since they already had friends there. Forrest, of course, was in no state to go to school at that stage.
Billy and I went to Newcastle to have a look around since we had never been there before, and we found a couple of houses that were suitable, however, I still deep down really did not want to live there.
The bottom line was though, that if Billy was to accept the promotion which has been offered to him and take advantage of the growth that would provide for his career, which he had worked so very hard for, we simply had to move.
I realised that. But I would still wake up in a panic in the middle of the night. Every night.
And then.
Billy went to Newcastle for a business trip and while he was there, he had a look around at some other houses.
He found a house in a place called Fingal Bay. It is actually over an hour away from his office, so we never looked this far out. But this house….it’s like a doll’s house and it is 450 meters away from the beach. When I lie in bed at night, I can hear the waves breaking on the shore.
So we have been here for about six weeks now and the kids are settled at school and there is some kind of a normalcy coming back into our lives and I am finally starting to get over the “flat” feeling.
I think that the amazing thing is that if you have faith and trust (or FaT, thank you Amanda) then you know it will all work out in the end, and that all things indeed have a purpose.
The amount of love and support and kind words I have had from my friends all over the world has been so very overwhelming and sometimes made me feel guilty because I just didn’t have the strength to reply to their messages straight away, but they meant SO much to me. Thank you xxxx
So, in conclusion, I am back and I am sorry and I thank you 🙂 xxxx
Ana-phylactic 