It bugs me when my landlord refers to my home as a unit. It feels like a slight. I know you are ruler over many units, your majesty, and ours is just one in a thousand. To us it is where we planned on our lives truly starting.
This is where I thought I’d surprise Jack with our very first positive pregnancy test.
It’s where I thought we’d see our child take their first wobbly steps.
I really thought this place was where new beginnings would blossom and where our family would grow. Instead we cried and worried and wondered why you wouldn’t come.
Tonight Jack calls me over and we watch a fawn graze in the snow, while peering out the window and spying the snowflakes twirling down and around. I feel amiss that I haven’t looked out this way as much as I’ve stared at our courtyard, wanting to see a picnic blanket and a sweet infant that looks like my husband upon it. I bet there are many scenes I would have loved to witness.
Our street really is beautiful, and the view of the mountains is spectacularly unique. We can see pops of autumn reds in September and the first frosts in November, and the green mossiness of spring in March. We get to see the previews to each season.
Instead of pondering this facet of our home’s individuality, I have cursed my body while looking in the mirrors that have been here for a decade, mirrors that have held space for dozens of other women. I have snarled at my empty fridge, and rolled my eyes at the little mold spots on our bathroom ceiling.
Gosh, this place means so much to me. I need to speak this into existence and thank every square foot of this abode, this perfect haven that’s been just ours for the past two years.
While it s devastating to consider that the whole time we’ve lived here we have ached to fill it with a baby’s midnight cries and bathtub babbling, I remember late nights that we stayed up and laughed and laughed, smiling so wide our lips audibly cracked. I recall lazy afternoons when we were sick in bed and the healthier partner brought us food and medicine to swallow. I remember decorating the Christmas tree and reading poems every night on the couch. I think of the cozy bed without a fancy headboard, a spare room we collected useless things that mean the world to us, the carpet fibers clinging onto dirt from mountain hikes and crumbs from everything bagels. I will never forget that our clothes were never dry without two cycles on high heat, or that our shower squeaked incessantly until you relented and turned the knob in a bit, lessening the flow of water onto your skin. That our pantry was not a pantry but five separate cupboards all spaced out. That my dollhouse was more important than our sitting at our kitchen table for dinner ever was. We had the couch to eat on.
This place isn’t what I thought it would be. It holds an era of my life that I have eagerly wanted to pass by. A time that has tested me so. “I thought I would bring a baby here,” I think to myself as we head out the door for the very last time.
I revere this home for what it represents. I prayed so many times to God that my dream would come true right here, right in this very spot. It didn’t.
He showed me where to go next. We are so afraid and overjoyed, all at once. We are grieving this home not just for what we thought it would be, but now we consciously cry at what it has been: home, a healing place; our Gethsemane.