The Hardest Part of Moving Out of the Family Home Is the Space Between Homes

One of our kids is having a rough time. Nothing catastrophic, thankfully. Just normal life stuff, which sometimes feels plenty catastrophic when you’re the one living through it. We were talking last night, and somewhere in the conversation she said, “I just wish I could come home.”

It stopped me cold because I knew exactly what she meant. She didn’t mean she wanted to come stay with us at the lake. She meant home. Our old home. The house where she grew up, where her bedroom was still her bedroom, where the dogs would come sit with her and she could sink into a routine of self care and start feeling better. She meant the place where she could walk through the door, drop her things and, for a little while, not have to work quite so hard at being an adult.

And I couldn’t give it to her.

What I Didn't Expect About Moving Out of the Family Home

When we decided to sell the house where we had lived for nearly 20 years and build Five Trails, we knew there would be an awkward middle. We planned for it carefully. We would sell our house and if it sold fast, move in with family at the lake for several months and build our new home. Our furniture would go into storage, we would bring what we needed with us, and before we knew it, we would be moving into the place we had spent years imagining.

Logistically, the plan made sense and it still does. Renting with two big dogs was more than twice our mortgage, my parents welcomed us here, and there are far worse ways to spend six months than waking up next to a Wisconsin lake. I knew I would miss my own bed and kitchen and office. I knew living in someone else's home, no matter how generously it was offered, would occasionally make me long for my own space.

What I didn't understand was what it would mean for our kids who have basically known one home their whole lives. I didn't anticipate how strange it would feel to have sold that home before we had another home ready for them to come back to.

There Is a Difference Between Having Somewhere to Live and Having a Home

We are obviously not without a place to live. We have everything we need and more. But I'm beginning to understand that there is a strange emotional geography to this season. We have left one home, and we haven't arrived at the next. For the first time in our family's life, there isn't a physical place that all five of us can point to and call home.

I don't think I realized how much that mattered until my daughter said those six words.

Home isn't simply wherever your parents happen to be living. At least not entirely. For our kids, home was a specific place filled with nearly two decades of accumulated familiarity. Their childhoods happened there. So did adolescence, graduations, college breaks, holidays, illnesses, heartbreaks, celebrations and thousands of ordinary days that none of us knew were worth remembering while we were living them.

That house was the place they could always return to. No matter what changed in their own lives, there was something reassuringly familiar waiting for them there. Their parents were there. Their dogs were there. Their things were there. Even as their lives expanded beyond us, there was still one place in the world where they knew exactly where they belonged.

We sold a house. I think we're only now discovering that we also temporarily removed that pin from our family map.

I Thought Leaving Would Be Hardest for Me

I've written a lot about the emotion of leaving our old house because I expected this transition to be difficult for me. It was the longest I had ever lived anywhere, and almost my entire life as a mother happened inside those walls. I could stand in almost any room and see different versions of our family layered on top of one another. For the last year or so, I called it the “house of memories” as I worked there alone each day until Mike got home.

I knew leaving all of that would hurt. What I hadn't fully considered was that our children would have their own relationship with the loss of that house. They're adults now, building lives and homes and routines of their own, which is exactly what we raised them to do. But adulthood doesn't eliminate the need for somewhere you can occasionally stop being quite so adult.

Sometimes life is hard and you want to go somewhere that requires nothing from you. You want to walk through a familiar door, drop your bag, open the fridge and collapse on the couch. You want to sit on the deck under the white lights of Harley's tree. You want the comfort of a place where you don't have to explain yourself or figure anything out because you've known how to exist there for most of your life.

Last night, one of my kids needed exactly that. Every maternal instinct in me wanted to hand it to her, and for the first time, I couldn't. That may be one of the hardest moments of this move so far.

The Strange Space Between the Life We Left and the Life We're Building

What makes this complicated is that I don't wish we hadn't moved. I'm still super excited about Five Trails. I love our land. I love watching the house slowly emerge from a place that not long ago was just trees and dirt (sand) and an idea. I love thinking about the life Mike and I will have there and about our kids coming home for holidays, bringing partners and someday, perhaps, families of their own. I believe as strongly as ever that moving was the right decision for us.

Knowing you made the right decision doesn't mean every consequence of that decision feels good. (This one's for you, kid.)

We tend to tell stories about big life transitions as though there is a clean line between before and after. You sell the old house, build the new one and begin the next chapter. You become an empty nester. You retire. You change careers. You move to a new city. One thing ends and another begins.

Real life isn't nearly that tidy. Sometimes there is a long stretch between the two, when the old life is genuinely over but the new one hasn't quite begun. That's where we are right now. Our furniture is in storage. Our routines have disappeared. Our kids can't come back to the house where they grew up, and the house we hope will eventually feel like home is still a construction site.

We are building something wonderful while simultaneously discovering all the invisible things we lost when we left the old place. Both things can be true without canceling each other out.

Moving Out of the Family Home Changes More Than an Address

Before we moved, I thought the hardest part of leaving a family home would be saying goodbye to the memories. I'm beginning to think the harder part is losing access to the place where those memories lived.

You don't realize how comforting it is to know you could go back until you can't.

We have thousands of photographs from our years there. We can tell stories about Christmas mornings and birthday parties and dinners around the table. We can laugh about the disasters and remember the celebrations and tell stories that would mean absolutely nothing to anyone outside our family. None of that disappeared when we handed over the keys.

But we can't open that front door anymore.

Someone else can.

There's something about that reality I don't think any of us completely understood when we moved. I certainly didn't understand it until my daughter wanted to go home and I realized that, for the moment, the home she was asking for no longer exists.

Now We Get to Build Home Again

I've spent an absurd amount of time thinking about what Five Trails will look like. I've thought about stone and siding and walnut cabinets and countertops and windows and paint colors. I've thought about where people will sit and where we'll put the Christmas tree and how the kitchen will function when everyone is home. I've obsessed over details because I love design, but also because I genuinely believe our physical surroundings shape the way we live.

Last night's conversation reminded me that the most important thing we will build at Five Trails won't be visible on a floor plan.

We have to make it home.

Not just for Mike and me, but somehow for all five of us. Our kids won't grow up there. There won't be pencil marks recording their heights on a doorframe or childhood bedrooms filled with trophies and school pictures. Their histories will always be rooted somewhere else.

But there can be bedrooms they instinctively think of as theirs. There can be dogs waiting at the door and favorite meals in the kitchen and familiar blankets on the couch. There can be Thanksgivings and Sunday dinners and terrible days when someone needs somewhere safe to land. We can fill that house with enough ordinary life that eventually nobody has to think about whether it feels like home. It simply will.

I can't give my daughter her old home back, and that realization hurts more than I expected it to. But there is something beautiful hidden inside that sadness, too. For nearly 20 years, we created a place our children loved enough that when life got hard, their instinct was still to come back to it.

That's a pretty extraordinary thing for a house to have been.

Now we get to do it again.

Maybe that's what this strange space between homes is teaching me. Moving forward doesn't require us to minimize what we've left behind. We can be certain about where we're going and still ache for where we've been. For a little while, we may even feel suspended between the two.

We're not quite home yet. But we're building our way there.