A moving story: Why Mom should have been riding herd during California adventure
I excel at few things in the world, but if I am going to toot my own horn I will say packing, moving, unpacking and cleaning would be top on my list.
This is why I was a little sad as I dropped off my husband and daughter at the airport on Memorial Day weekend. They were flying out to California to move my daughter out of one house and into another. Then, after all that was completed, the duo would be driving her car back to Kansas.
My husband and I had just gotten over being more than a little miffed that this whole move thing even had to happen. This is because when we moved our daughter into a house last summer for her junior year in college, we had been assured she would live in the house until she graduated.
Well, of course, my daughter and her beloved roommates found a “better, newer, cuter” place to live for their senior year and that meant here we go again. Except I wouldn’t be a part of that “we.” Unfortunately for everyone concerned, I had to stay home with our beagle.
Yes, beagle usurps daughter because the dog needs me more. He just had surgery to both of his back legs so basically I was his full-time nurse. This meant I would be sitting this move out.
That’s not to say I wasn’t involved. I had graciously made out a timetable for them and a breakdown on how the packing and moving should proceed for optimum efficiency. I would also be in constant text communication with them to ensure that they were staying on schedule.
It turns out they needed more than my wise words shared via text. Their move out/move in probably could have benefited from an exorcism. It all started with musical chairs being played out in U-Hauls, peaked with a sofa that wouldn’t fit through the door of the new house and ended with an overbooked hotel and my daughter confessing that she might be, if not a hoarder than a hoarder in training.
I experienced all this being played out in text, Snapchat and a few frantic phone calls interspersed with photos from my husband of all the traffic on the freeways. (Seriously, it’s like he forgets that Southern California is jammed with humanity.)
My favorite phone call was the one I received from my husband as I was using two large bags of frozen peas to ice down our dog’s back legs. The emergency was that our daughter has “way too much crap” and “something needs to be done about it.”
That right there is why I should have been in California riding herd on the move. My daughter saves everything and the key is to do a mandatory forced purge before any relocation takes place. I told this to my husband and his reply was, “I don’t have that superpower.”
Meanwhile, my daughter is texting me that she thinks “dad is going to stroke out getting the sofa through the door.”
A frenzied 20 hours after they left Kansas City this father and daughter duo finally had completed the move, cleaned the other house, and got everything set up in the new place. This was communicated to me by a picture from my husband of the almost 20,000 steps he had taken that day.
I, always looking on the bright side, texted that “driving 1,600 miles home will now seem like a vacation.” I’m going to take a pass on sharing the emoji that he sent back to me.
Reach Sherry Kuehl at snarkyinthesuburbs@gmail.com, on Facebook at Snarky in the Suburbs, on Twitter at @snarkynsuburbs on Instagram @snarky.in.the.suburbs, and snarkyinthesuburbs.com.
