Moving is Hard

I grew up in the same house all my young life—until I got married.  I married a guy in the Coast Guard, which means we move every two to four years.  I have loved our life, the changes, the new sceneries, and the adventure of it all.  However, in all the adventure, moving is hard!  Not just the physical stuff, but also all the emotional and spiritual change that comes with moving.  Each of our moves has brought us a different set of blessings as well as a different set of challenges.  Looking back at all of them, I can honestly say I wouldn’t change our lifestyle for anything in the world.  Our family has been blessed to see and live places we never could have imagined.  Our life experiences have made us the family we are, but it didn’t come without sacrifice and loss.

            When Steve and I got married I was so excited to move, even if it was just from Houston, TX to Port Arthur, TX.  Since I had never moved before this was all exciting and new.  We were still close enough to family to get to see them whenever we wanted, but far enough away to experience our own independence.  After three years we were blessed to move to Panama City Beach, Florida.  I was beyond excited with the news, but never stopped to think how hard it would be to live so far from family.  The first time realization hit was when I found out I was pregnant with Lance.  Suddenly the worry and fear set in that we were going to have this baby alone.  I had been blessed to be at the hospital to see all of my nieces after they were born.  The hospital room was full of family loving on the moms and babies…and confused dads.  This is something I knew I would never have, and it stung a bit.  However, since I was in labor so long my mom did make it from Houston to Florida in time to see Lance being born!  I have some precious, precious memories of that time.  We lived in Florida for four years and made so many friends that became like family to us.  It was a hard place to leave, and we still long to go back there someday for more than a vacation.

            From Florida we moved back to Houston.  Shortly after getting there, Steve received the call that he was accepted to Officer Candidate School (OCS) and would have to leave in four days to go to New London, Connecticut for 17 weeks.  I was fortunate enough to be able to live with my parents during that time.  Eight days after Steve left for OCS his father passed away.  While this was a difficult season, I consider it a blessing that I was able to spend his last days at his side.  God has a way of putting us right where we need to be at just the right time and I am eternally grateful for that.  Once Steve got back we moved to Corpus Christi, TX.  We were still in Texas, but four hours away from family and friends.  During our 18-months living there we adopted Tony.  Again, since we were not in Houston we missed having the family around to help us as we navigated the road of having two kids coupled with the aspect of adoption and the fact that he was a difficult baby.

            After Corpus Christi, we moved to Summerville, South Carolina; about 20 miles outside of Charleston.  That was the farthest I had ever been away from my family, and the farthest north I had ever been.  I could no longer get to them in a days drive and that was a scary thing for me.  At this point, moving didn’t affect the kids too much.  Lance seemed to like the adventure and Tony was too young to get it.  Though I missed my family and friends terribly The Lord blessed us with wonderful friends that became family--the Janikowski’s.  I still love and miss them everyday!  I am thankful for social media because I get to keep up with them and their lives.   After three years in South Carolina we moved to Pembroke, Massachusetts while Steve worked in Boston. This was like no other place we had ever been before, and that was again scary to me.  This move was a little more difficult for Lance because he had friends he was going to miss, but he was excited about snow.

            Many of you know that Steve and I are people who like people.  In fact, we love people.  We love to be surrounded by people we love and cherish and share life with.  We were short on people in Massachusetts.  We were cold, lonely, homesick, and struggling to find our purpose for being there.  God taught us a lot about ourselves while we were there for our three-year assignment.  From there we moved to Stafford, Virginia.  This move was a little hard for Lance at first, but once we got to Virginia he settled right in and found friends immediately.  The great thing about the Coast Guard being so small is that we frequently get to live near some of the same people.  One of those families is the Fair’s.  We moved to Virginia at the same time and they blessed us by introducing us to their family and friends immediately.  We really felt loved and felt like we belonged there.

            It was in Virginia that we decided to become foster parents.  The Lord blessed us with a church family that demonstrated a heart for orphans, foster care, and adoption.  While we loved our friends, there just isn’t any way to replace the absence of family when making big life changes.  We had a total of eight foster kids and most of them never met a single member of our family, which just feels weird.  It feels especially weird because we are so close with our family and want to share every moment with them, and we do, but just over the phone and through social media.  So when we got the news that we were coming back to Houston, we lost our minds!  We just knew that everyone was going to be as excited as we were.  However, our boys weren’t quite on the same page.

            We lived in Virginia for four years.  Lance went to all of middle school and was just finishing his freshman year.  He made the varsity football team his freshman year and struggled to understand the gravity of Texas football.   For those of you that know Texas, you know that Texas football is a whole other beast.  Lance had made life-long friends in Virginia and he simply wasn’t ready to leave them, even if it was to live closer to family.  Tony struggles with change in general and he was not happy about leaving his school and friends either.  Though Steve and I knew the move to Texas was what we had wanted and prayed for, we had feelings of sadness too when we considered leaving our church family.  We really connected to the people of The Mount and still miss them greatly.  Steve is doing all he can to talk some of them into moving to Texas!  This was the craziest mix of feelings we had experienced in all of our years of moving.  To be so excited and so sad was a new emotion for our family.

            Well, the great news is that we are here in Texas and it is wonderful.  We love being so close to family and friends.  Our hearts and lives are simply overflowing with abundant blessings.  However, along with all of the blessings came growing pains, loneliness, hardships, hurts, and struggles.  I feel like we have finally gotten in the groove of things here and found great relationships outside of our family.  As excited as we were to move here, I have to say that this has been our hardest move to date, yet also our best move.  Thank God we were coming to Texas, because I’m not so sure we would have made it anywhere else…well, except Panama City Beach, Florida!  I don’t know what God has planned for us from here, but I do know it will all be perfectly planned by Him, and imperfectly lived out by us.  So for now, we rest in the arms of Texas and relax the seatbelt for a while…