It’s Saturday morning at 6:15 a.m. My husband and I leave our house to drive to a U-Haul pickup location in Seattle. It’s the last weekend of April, and we’re betting that rental truck businesses will be busy since people tend to move at the end of the month. We are not professional movers, but then again, we know something about this stuff.
Over the years, we’ve helped our children move many times. Today we’re helping our middle son move out of his apartment and into his girlfriend’s. This move is a cinch. Just pick up a bed, a dresser, an extra television, and a couple of end tables that won’t fit into his new digs. Some of the stuff will go to our house, and I will donate others. The move is a well-executed drill, and we’re in and out of the south Lake Union area of Seattle before most of its young adult inhabitants are awake.
A friend of mine, hearing my plans to help with the move, praised me for being such a great mom. She doesn’t understand. There’s practically nothing I love more than even peripheral involvement in something as consequential as relocating. The opportunities to help our young, talented, and independent children get fewer and far between; it’s like gradually slowing down on a highway and watching the mileposts become less and less frequent.
The memories of other moves are lodged in my mind. We accompanied our son and daughter-in-law in a cross-country road trip with two cars and four dogs. I helped our middle son move out of college housing into an off-campus studio apartment that was so small he affectionally referred to it as his kennel. I assisted our youngest son in his Los Angeles to Seattle move, a two-day adventure in which we stopped only to sleep, fill gas tanks, and buy mini-mart pepperoni sticks and bottled water. The going-away-to-college moves were some of the most poignant: an airplane trip with a couple of large suitcases, putting sheets on a dormitory bunkbed, attending orientation, and then parting, and watching the barely discernable softening in our son’s eyes.
Every family-member move lodges itself in my memory at the confluence of sweetness and wistfulness. I happily witness excited energy and renewal; however, I am concretely reminded that my children’s lives, like mine, are inextricably marching forward.
Like every major life event, even the happy ones, I weather it with the comforting backdrop of exercise. The physical act of moving is, by itself, enough to check the exercise box for the day: climbing in and out of rental trucks, lifting heavy wooden furniture, and navigating bumpy terrane while carrying awkwardly shaped objects. It’s a great counterpart to overly repetitious exercise routines.
Saturday is a touching and bittersweet day for me; moving out and moving forward is, quite simply, moving.