Moving Out and Moving On

Five years ago we bought this house with the dream that it would be our forever home. A place with enough space for our family to grow and stretch out. We had hopes of our daughters running and playing in the backyard. We imagined teaching Presley and Finley and our future Hadley to ride their bikes in the cul de sac. Finley would run down the stairs to tattle on her older sister. The girls would congregate around the table to drink hot chocolate after an afternoon of building snowmen. As they got older, they would watch movies in the basement with their friends and have bonfires in the backyard.  Those were the dreams, but fate had another idea.

Four months after we purchased our home, Finley was diagnosed with Pitt Hopkins Syndrome. While we didn’t know exactly what our lives would look like in the future, we knew that it wouldn’t even remotely resemble what we had imagined for ourselves. Five years later, and we have adjusted to what our day to day lives will be, and our house no longer fits in our future.

We have had some amazing moments in this house. Bringing home our little Hadley, first and last days of school, trick or treating around our neighborhood, holidays hosting family, laughing and crying with my best friend the weekend she spent with us, my sister swearing she was locked out of the house because she was trying to slide a non-sliding door, birthdays, Christmases. These are the memories we will hang onto.Although leaving our home for the last five years is hard, we have the opportunity to say goodbye to some of the hardest days of our lives, to those somber memories that still linger in the rooms. Goodbye to where we sat as we worried for our 6 month old baby, where we scheduled appointment after appointment in a hunt for answers to what was plaguing her body. Goodbye to the stairs I collapsed onto when the genetic counselor explained to me the severity of the diagnosis she had just handed us. Goodbye to the foyer I was standing in when I learned my best friend had passed. Goodbye to the rooms that held so much sadness, anger, denial and broken dreams. With the closing of this chapter, we are finally able let go of what was supposed to be and embrace what is.

Our new house is a fresh start, designed exactly for the needs of our family. We are not only building a new home, but a new life. While we have learned that you can never anticipate what the future may hold, we are planning for happiness and laughter and love, with the expectation that our worst days are behind us. We are not only moving out, we are moving on.