Moving

Thanks to all of you for your pep talks about the house. They really helped. So did driving past the property the university offered us and confirming that it doesn’t have any parking. I was imagining there was at least a driveway or metered space into which one could pull for a few minutes of unloading. In fact, the house is on a one-way lane with no street parking, and there is no driveway. To move in you probably have to get the street blocked off. There’s definitely no pausing with blinkers on to unload groceries.

The other thing that helped was doing our move this week and confirming, as I lay on the floor of a dirty apartment still filled with junk at 9pm on the last day of the lease, crying because my feet and hips hurt too much to stand up any longer, that we don’t want to do this twice. A working full-time pastor and a five-months-pregnant woman are not the ideal moving team. A working full-time pastor and a working full-time seven-months pregnant woman are likely a disaster of a moving team.

The big part of our move is done. I don’t remember how cross-country, get-everything-packed-cleaned-and-out-at-once moves go (and how do you do it when you have all those odd-shaped toys that just don’t fit in boxes??), but having become an expert at small moves, we’re familiar with the phases now.

Day 0: You plunge into packing with energy and courage, tackling the books first because they pack easily and because emptying the bookshelves makes it look like there has been significant progress. Forty-seven boxes later there seem to be an awful lot of stray books still lying around, and you’re starting to look toward other items and realizing what a big job this is going to be. You keep avoiding the kitchen because you don’t want to deal with all those breakable dishes and bulky pots.

Day 1: You pick up the keys to the new place. Your in-laws come to help, and you’re reinvigorated because four bodies working get things done so much faster. Your mother-in-law tackles most of the kitchenware, bless her. Your father-in-law in a minivan, you in a station wagon, and your husband in a borrowed pick-up truck start running loads to the new place. Lots of stuff is moving out. It feels promising. By the end of the day, though, your in-laws are exhausted and are making noises about getting too old for this. And any shred of homemaking credibility you had with your mother-in-law is shot now that she’s seen the state of your kitchen cabinets. Moving dispels many illusions.

You return home and keep packing late into the night, while trying to keep preschooler volatility about the upheaval in check. You hand the preschooler random snacks for dinner and hope she has a hearty constitution.

In this, the fifth move or our marriage and the one for which I had the least amount of lead-up prep time, I finally adopted Tom’s moving strategy and focused on simply getting things into the car by the fastest means possible, rather than taking time to consider what went into each box and whether those things were all alike and would be going to the same room. In Tom’s view, packing is grunt labor to get through, not an intricate logic problem—and I’m beginning to see his point. In past moves we’ve had two or three boxes of random miscellany at the end; this time probably one-third of our boxes, bags, and suitcases are filled with random miscellany. We’ll see if it’s appreciably harder to unpack at the other end when the Halloween decorations, baby bottles, gardening equipment, and a few power cords all come out of in the same box.

Day 2: The tense day, when the moving van comes for the furniture. This part is sadly familiar. There are the vague calls from the dispatcher saying the truck is running late, your subsequent calls to the dispatcher after the truck has had double or triple the amount of time it would take to make the trip from headquarters, asking where the heck it is. More vague promises and professions of ignorance. Finally the truck arrives and the foreman presents a contract showing a different hourly rate than the signed contract you're holding. The appearance of negotiation, a call to the apologetic woman at headquarters with whom you negotiated the original contract, and an agreement to the original rate.

The movers get everything on board the truck, when suddenly the dispatcher calls to explain why it has to be the higher rate--you live on the second floor and you have a piano. They never should have quoted you the original rate. Tense conversations ensue. The second floor and the piano were both duly noted in the original contract. That was a mistake, they say. Your husband is put on the phone with different people at headquarters with different stories. The woman who negotiated the original contract has disappeared into the ether. The movers stop work; you are acutely aware of your lack of leverage. The dispatcher says he’d be glad to have the movers take everything back off the truck and they won’t charge anything at all. Your steaming spouse wants very much to call their bluff, making quick calculations about how many friends he can round up to load your stuff onto a U-Haul, provided one is available last minute on the last day of the month…as thunderclouds roll in. The good-cop foreman is apologizing, saying he’s so sorry, he has nothing to do with that end of the business. Finally your angry husband strikes a devil’s bargain with the dispatcher, that has you still $120 higher than the original quote but lower than the dispatcher started. Which was probably how they knew it would end.

I don’t know whether it’s better or not to have been through this multiple times now, knowing it’s always going to end this way. Or whether it’s worse being tense from the beginning, knowing it’s always going to end this way. One thing we did decide: If we didn’t have a piano and a giant desk, we’d sure as hell still be moving ourselves instead of relying on such a crooked industry. Meanwhile, add A&E Movers of Eatontown, NJ, to your list of disreputable moving companies. (If you actually have a list of reputable moving companies, let us know.)

Day 3: This is the day that kills you. The last day of the lease. All outside help gone, husband back at work. You calculate that you have a few more hours of packing small stuff in the empty apartment, running bags to goodwill, then cleaning thoroughly. You drop the preschooler at daycare and imagine you’ll fit it all in before picking her up. (It’s a bit dicey dropping her off: On your first day driving to school from the new place, you aren’t sure how much time to leave, and everyone is very tired and slept late. You don’t have any food in the house for either breakfast or her lunch, and you can’t find any shoes for her to wear. So you load her into the car barefoot and stop for a muffin en route, resolving that this won’t become a habit, then go by the old apartment to dig through goodwill bags for a pair of old shoes. You drop her off, marginally fed but dressed and shod, three minutes before the deadline, avoiding the fine, and promise to bring her lunch before noon.)

Then back to the apartment to get to work. By 10am it’s clear you’re probably not going to finish before daycare is over for the day, and you call the neighbors to ask if they would be willing to watch the preschooler during the evening hours, just in case you’re not done. It will probably take until 7 or so, you realize.

By noon there are still piles of junk sitting everywhere, you’re still packing, you haven’t started cleaning, your feet are hurting, and you realize you probably can’t finish this today without help. When your husband calls after vacation Bible school to check in before he starts interviewing youth pastor candidates, you let a note of irritated desperation creep into your voice. He picks up on it and promises to come for the afternoon to help. (It’s not his fault: The man has eked out as many hours of moving work as he possibly can while still doing his job.)

When he arrives, he is a source of renewed energy and remarkable physical strength. He gets two more loads shuttled over to the house.

Nevertheless, by 5pm you’re secretly despairing, as your feet and hips are aching and it seems that no matter how much you pack and move, the remaining piles of junk aren’t shrinking and the final irksome tasks—like finding stepladder to get the Dora piñata down from the preschooler’s bedroom ceiling—are still hanging over you. But your husband is excited—he’s sure you’re close to finished. Unfortunately he has to return to work to teach an evening adult ed class, but he’ll be back by 9:30 to pick you up.

You hobble down the street to get the preschooler from school. On the door is a sign notifying parents that daycare will be closed for teacher training the first week in September. The first week in September you have three days of 8am-5pm teacher training of your own, followed by your dissertation defense on Friday. You were not expecting this.

The preschooler is now extremely volatile: She runs to meet you at the door, excited to tell you about the game she has been playing, then starts screaming that she you’re not listening to her, her tummy hurts, and she’s having a rough day. The other parents back away. Unfortunately, you don’t have the reserves left for effective preschooler emotion management. You start to cry. The alarmed preschooler stops thrashing and screaming and gives you a tender kiss. You try to reassure her. The teachers try to reassure you.

You start to hobble home. The preschooler has made a gift for daddy, a glass jar with layers of multicolored sand in it. She is swinging it around and trying to balance it on her head. You warn her that if she drops it it will break, and you encourage her to carry it carefully. She’s touch-and-go and right now pretends not to hear you. Halfway down the block she accidentally drops the jar and it shatters. She looks at you, and her lip trembles. She leans over and tries to scrape together the sand, and you tell her she can’t touch it because it’s likely full of shards of glass. She has to leave it there. Her lip trembles more, but she’s determined not to cry. Your heart goes out to her at the same time that you’re irritated. You’re not sure who is going to cry first.

The neighbors come out to offer to take the preschooler out to dinner with them, but it’s clear that being handed off from mommy after just twenty minutes contact is going to make her snap. You thank them and resolve to try to do some packing with her there in the apartment, even though there are no toys left to play with. You warn her that this is the state of things and encourage her to be your helper. She says yes—then runs away to the playground, as you hobble after her to bring her back. You carry her home from the playground kicking and sobbing.

Inside she calms downs for a picnic dinner of toaster waffles in the middle of the floor, then “helps” by washing dishes. The neighbors return from their dinner and invite her over to play with Thomas trains. She goes willingly. Your husband calls and asks you to promise not to pack the stuff on the top shelf—he has visions of you pregnant and exhausted on top of a stepladder with an angry preschooler rolling around at its foot, fainting or losing balance in looking down to negotiate with the preschooler. You promise. The stuff on the top shelf keeps catching your eye the rest of the evening.

The sun goes down. You’re cutting piece after piece of bubble wrap for the last handful breakable items in the kitchen, the dishes, glasses, and knives you’ve been eating with for the past few days. There are half-full boxes of things that don’t pack well lining the hall—the knife block, the clock, the Brita pitcher. You can’t think how to pack them effectively. You take a break to spackle some nail holes. You go back to packing. You take a break to clean the stove. You go back to packing.

At 9pm you take a trip to the dumpster with recycling. It takes about ten minutes to hobble there and back. You get back to the apartment and have to lie down on the floor. You remember your midwife saying back at the beginning of the week that you are free to participate in a move, you just have to listen to your body. Your body is now screaming—but you don’t have much of a choice about listening to it.

When your cell phone rings at 9:10, you crawl over to it. Your husband hears your voice, orders you to stop working for the night, and says he’ll be there right away. He’s coming to take you and the preschooler to bed, after which he’ll finish up. You tell him he’ll be there all night. He says it won’t take any time at all. His class went well, and he’s energized.

Good thing. Because after he drops you off—you get the preschooler to sleep by 11:15—he winds up working on the final few tasks most of the night, as you anticipated. He comes in around 4am. Now he’s spent, physically and emotionally. There’s no shower curtain, so he can’t bathe, if one even knew where the soap was.

Day 4: At 7am you’re all up to walk the dog, find clothes, find food, and make it to daycare and vacation Bible school on time. After VBS your husband has to help conduct a funeral. At this point he wishes it were his own.

Today you get to daycare four minutes after the deadline, but the fine for being tardy seems like the least of your worries. You return to the apartment one last time to clean out the final items in the basement, which your husband left there at 3am, calculating that the staff wouldn’t be checking first thing the morning after you moved out. Wrong. You run into the maintenance man making a sweep; he asks if the pile of cleaning supplies and laundry detergent sitting on the breakfast table near the bikes is yours. You affirm that they are, as is the table, then play the poor-pregnant-woman-moving-alone card. He is sympathetic. He doesn’t take your name. You pack up the cleaning supplies and table and lug them to the car. Some time this weekend you will return for the bikes and be really, truly done.

Except for setting up house.