We've Ruined Our Lives

It's a week of endings and beginnings. I was supposed to be in New Jersey today, overseeing movers and officially bidding farewell to our house; but it was not to be. This has been a very poorly timed, convoluted, logistically complex move, and we'd made a complicated plan to pull it off--and you know the saying: Want to make God laugh? Make a plan. Or something like that. And so it was. A death in our family meant my parents could no longer stay with the kids this week, which meant I could not go to New Jersey, which meant Andrew is now tying up the ends of our life himself.  

Life happens. Endings and beginnings are rarely separate. Maybe never. The mess and misery of a move are temporary, inconsequential. Though it's a sad time for my family, it's also a time of new beginnings, and we're getting there, day by day. 

The movers packed up our Maplewood house yesterday with Andrew overseeing, while I greeted--at long last!--our POD here in Pittsburgh. I was overjoyed to see it, and half-expected to open it up to find someone else's belongings, but my fears were unfounded. The chaotic pile of junk inside was ours. I spent part of the day unloading everything I could lift by myself, and then I hired two guys from Task Rabbit to unload the rest. Andrew and I are do-it-ourselves people, rarely hiring help for things like this, but I could not empty the POD by myself. There were mattresses, there were shelves, there were huge boxes of firewood. And the POD had to be empty and gone before the moving truck arrives on Wednesday. So we threw some money at the problem and now the POD is empty. 

You know what isn't empty? All those boxes. I'm frankly shocked at how much we'd shoved into that POD. Now those things are in our living room, a large, "formal" (not for long) room that we actually don't have even one piece of furniture for. I honestly don't know how I'm ever going to unpack these boxes. And more boxes--double, triple this number--will be arriving on Wednesday. I feel like we've maybe ruined our life. Like we're never, ever going to unpack and settle in and that we'll never find anything ever again. 

Could I hire someone from Task Rabbit to unpack? Certainly. There's a whole category of Unpackers. (Could Task Rabbit become an expensive addiction? Certainly.) But this is not going to work for me. First, covid etc etc. It's not the right time for a stranger to be handling all my stuff. Second, what would a stranger do when faced with this box, which I'm using as a representative example: Margo's TBRs, desk misc, Day of the Dead figures, old jars, recipe boxes. I am way too micro-managey to let anyone even attempt unloading a box like that, and ALL the boxes are like that. 

It's a mess. A big, big, big mess. Which is why I'm drinking coffee and writing this post instead of going into the living room with my box cutter and actually facing Box Mountain.