Missing

So we’ve been packing up our house to put it on the market. Or, should I say, I’ve been packing up our house. Scott is buried in a project at work.

But it’s okay, because I’m really good at packing and though his talents are numerous, organizing a move isn’t one of them. The last time we moved, he’d come home and see that I’d packed a box.

“What’s in there?” he’d ask, the anxiety giving his words an edge.

“Your college textbooks,” I would reply. We were in our late thirties at the time.

“But what if I need those?” he’d say.

“Then I’ll unpack them,” I’d reply evenly.

We’d been in that place, a one-bedroom, for seven years. We’d meant to be there for one year, which turned into two and then three before real inertia began to set in. But finally a dearth of space and a positive pregnancy test meant we had to go.

“Are you going to miss your old place?” my dad asked me at the time.

I thought for a moment.

“Not really,” I said. “But I will probably miss who we were when we lived here.”

And to be sure, Scott and I had the world by the tail back then. We were so free. We both had jobs, of course, but on Saturday afternoon, you could find me napping on the couch. All afternoon. You could find Scott driving around in his two-seater Mercedes, purchased with income he didn’t need to share with a wife and two children. We cooked elaborate meals that required a list of ingredients as long as your forearm, not one of which was chicken nuggets.

:::

“Kai,” I said. “Do you want to move to a new house?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” he said.

He was thoughtful for a moment.

“But what about our stuff?”

“Oh, we’ll take that with us.”

“Can I take my two blankets?”

“Kai, we’re taking everything. We’ll take your two blankets, we’ll take Elliott, we’ll take Henry Fish, we’ll take Ryan. We’ll all be in a new house.”

After that, he was on board 100%. He's been telling everyone that his new room will be decorated with rainbows.

:::

I thought I would be more sentimental as I packed up a house I’d welcomed two babies into, but space in our condo has required me to be pragmatic about the kids’ stuff, so it’s not like I’m suddenly having to throw away tiny booties or the outfit we brought Ryan home from the hospital in.

My most sentimental moment wasn’t related to the kids at all, and “sentimental” probably doesn’t describe it. I was packing up my cookbooks when a piece of paper fluttered out of one of them. I picked it up and my breath caught in my throat. It was a check my grandmother had written to me for Christmas eight weeks before I gave birth to my son.

And thirteen weeks before she died.

I closed myself into the bathroom and cried and cried. I wondered if I’d remembered to send her a thank you note, and wished I’d picked up the phone to call her instead of writing a stupid note. And I wished she’d met Kai and Ryan, who she would have loved tremendously.

:::

Yesterday I was sitting in a doctor’s office. The lady next to me was nursing a baby under a cover.

The baby was flexing her pink toes outside of the blanket. Judging from the size of her feet, she couldn’t have been a month old.

I flipped through Facebook for a minute or two, before putting my phone down to listen to the baby, who could barely be contained under her cover. She slurped and hiccupped and cooed and sighed as she ate, sounds as familiar as they were foreign. My babies once made sounds like that when they ate. Now they just demand more ketchup.

There are not a lot of things I’m going to miss about this place. I certainly won't miss the centipedes, for instance. Plus, we need more room. The kids can’t go play outside unsupervised. We have a neighbor that doesn’t like the people in our building. He used to be Mayor Daley’s speechwriter and therefore had the ability to make garbage collection a big problem for us. Sometimes we’d go outside and our trash cans were gone.

But listening to that baby nurse happily, with her sweet baby sounds and her sweet pink toes, I knew that I would miss one thing.

I would miss who we were when we lived here.