MWF ISO LTR w/ Normalcy

There is only one rental house on our cul de sac and it happened to be available at the time of our fire. The rental house is, amazingly enough, diagonal from our home. This has its advantages (availability and convenience during reconstruction) and its drawbacks (constant reminders of a sad and scary day).

Last night as I was walking from the rental house to Mo’s, I stopped in the street and just looked at our home for a while. I was tempted to go sit on the lawn for a spell and just visit with it. I told Mo “I feel sorry for my house”. She looked at me funny - but I genuinely feel badly for it. It sits there, all damaged and abandoned, alone in the dark. Our dear friend Baze has suggested that we have suffered a death of sorts. And even though (by the grace of all that is good in this world) we are not suffering that kind of tragedy, in some ways it does feel like a death to me. I mourn the spirit that our home had. It was a living, breathing part of our existence for 14+ years. It was a member of our family, a good old friend, with all of its quirks and charms. We loved it. It protected and sheltered us. It frustrated us and some days drove us near crazy. We transformed it from a house into a home. It had a soul, and I slowly see that slipping away. It makes me sad and I wish I could have done something to save it.

Our homes are such a huge part of the normalcy in our lives. They are our ultimate comfort zones – and to have that stripped away so unexpectedly and so suddenly is surreal. This whole experience has been surreal. Of course at the same time it is painfully, devastatingly real.

A few days after we moved in to the rental house (a virtual stranger, it felt uncomfortable and weird), Emmett had asked about spending the night at a friend’s house. At 16, they are a little beyond the “sleepover” phase and so we know that this is a thinly veiled attempt to shroud the fact that he wants to be curfew-free for the evening. This has always made us nervous, mostly because we remember what we were doing at that age. As our parents will attest, we were no angels. Of course, as much as we may be tempted from time to time, we cannot keep our children locked up through these trying years. Kids this age take all sorts of stupid risks and as their parents our job is to somehow give them the tools to calculate and balance their stupidity vs. the risk vs. the adventure - and come out without harming themselves or others. So far, so good. But in the aftermath so soon after the fire, I was just not up to the added anxiety and stress so I gently refused his request. The conversation escalated. Emmett was frustrated by what he perceived to be overprotection. I was frustrated by what I perceived to be additional, and unnecessary, stress.

At one point, he turned to me and said “I just want things to be normal!” Oh….honey. I took a deep breath. My frustration made room for empathy. He had finally expressed what we all have been feeling. I said “Don’t you think we all want that? But we don’t have ‘normal’ any more. We need to build a new normal and we’re just not there yet.”

Whatever life you live, your normal undoubtedly feels comfortable. It’s your routine. And while choosing to trade your routine for adventure and risk can be exciting, it’s a very different feeling when it’s thrust upon you. Normal also isn’t a calculated state – in my experience it’s what happens as you go about living your life and it kind of builds upon itself and falls into place over the years, almost unnoticed. Trying to create a normal from nothing is probably a futile exercise. I mourn our ‘normal’. In a second, I would take it back – lumps, bumps, and all. I know we all would.

So we have to begin the task of creating a new normal for our family. But what *is* normal when you are in someone else’s house, wearing someone else’s clothing, sleeping in someone else’s bed? For me, starting from square one seems a monumental task. Our lives have changed, our relationships have changed – we have changed – as a result of this experience. Some of the changes are obvious and immediate, while others are revealing themselves as time moves us further from Christmas morning. We can’t go back to what was because, well, what was is not there anymore - both physically and emotionally. We’re not the same people for whom it was. These are uncharted waters. As much as we want to meet our new normal right now, instantly, embrace it and get to know it, I suspect time is the only thing that can reveal it.

For now, through the amazing love and support of so many people, we have patched together a creaky, limping façade of normalcy while we rebuild our lives and begin the journey of staking a claim to a new normal. Hang on, I keep telling myself – don’t look down and don’t hold your breath - it’s bound to be a rollercoaster of a ride.