If you're wondering where I am

I am vacuuming. I am planting mums. I am mulching like the world's supply of mulch is almost gone. I am polishing the faucets. I am organizing the shit out of my house. My closets are spectacular. My kitchen cabinets would bring you to tears. Meanwhile, Scott is replacing the shutters and painting the trim and the radiators and all the scuffed corners of the house. Our house is looking increasingly spectacular by the day. Why didn't we do this before? Because we weren't selling our house before. That would be why.

More later about why and where we're going. Just know that I am thinking of you, as I fluff the towels and bleach the grout. Thinking of you, and wishing you had a tall ladder and a fervent desire to wash my windows.

The answers! My god, the answers!

Never let it be said that you people don’t have opinions. And my word, how much you’ve all moved. I must be unusual in my fondness for remaining in one place. If I moved to a new apartment in Brooklyn, I had to break out the smelling salts and spread myself across my fainting couch for at least the first month. But you, you adventurous types! You’re all when I lived in Tanzania I also felt some ennui and the first few months in Bangladesh were fairly tough. And here I am, living FORTY MINUTES (gasp!) from my old hometown, and weeping into my neckerchief over it.

First of all, I apologize for writing a post like that, which captured my feelings at that exact moment, feelings which changed fifteen minutes later and why don’t I wait an hour or so before posting something? It’s lovely, the way I puke all over the Internet, and all you nice people come rushing to clean me up. (Not that fifteen minutes later I decided I loved it here and we would never move—but as the day wore on, the need to GET OUT certainly felt far less desperate.)

That said, your insight was quite valuable, and you are all fine citizens of the Internet. The comments fell squarely into two camps: 1) We should give this place a year, and then reassess, and 2) We should move right now because life is too short to be miserable. Then there was the occasional “get over yourself” comment, which okay no one actually SAID, but I know some of you were thinking it. I know this because I can read your thoughts. Right now you’re thinking about dinner. You’re going to have chicken.

At first the comments that shrieked GET OUT! filled me with delight. Yes! We’re city folk! Back to the city we go! I still have my library card! And the comments that urged us to wait and weigh the pros and cons and give it time --oh, how they chafed. How tiresome, I thought. You sensible people are a total bummer.

But then this morning I re-read the comments, and the “wait it out” party all of a sudden sounded far more appealing. Because honestly? We’re not utterly miserable. We’re not surrounded by rednecks, as some of you seem to be. (And for this I am sorry.) We have nice neighbors. There’s, like, culture, and stuff. I suspect we can find ways of making ourselves feel better, here and now. (Not spending a sunny Saturday arguing in Home Depot, for instance.)

Then, of course, there’s Henry, and his school is all set for next year. Pulling him out of school a month early this spring near to killed me, and he loves his camp (which will hopefully become his school in the fall if someone pulls out and we get off the waitlist, oh please oh please), and I’m not taking that away from him.

So: we’re going to continue on this rollercoaster ride of adjustment. It’s a decidedly undramatic decision, but on the other hand it doesn’t entail buying multiple rolls of bubble wrap. Meanwhile, we’ll act as if we’re moving back, we’ll get prices on rentals, maybe we’ll even look at a few. And come spring, if we’re still feeling like Brooklyn is home, then we know what to do.

Or we’ll be just as clueless as we are now, and I’ll be back here, begging you for more advice.

Questions, questions.

How can you tell if a place just isn’t right for you?

When do you decide you’ve had enough?

At what point do you tell yourself, I’ve given this a fair shake, and I don’t like it, and at least now I know?

We don’t like it here. We just don’t. It’s not the house. We love the house. It’s everything else.

We’re terrible homeowners. The constant deterioration of one’s home and the resulting need for regular maintenance fills us with panic. We resent the weekends being used up by trips to Home Depot or the nursery.

We’re farther from both our families. Our days of getting free babysitting from the grandparents are over. Henry misses them.

I never realized how much I would hate not being able to walk to something.

There’s so much else. But in the end what it comes down to is: it’s not Brooklyn. Which I knew, moving in! Didn’t I know that? Why am I so surprised? I suppose because I lived in the suburbs growing up, and thought I knew what I was getting myself into.

We’re thinking of returning to Brooklyn and renting. Finding a place we can afford in a good school district may actually be impossible for us, but we’re looking into it.

I feel like a failure. We will undoubtedly take a loss on this place. All I can think is, why did we move? Why did we listen to everyone else telling us we had to leave the city, and not to ourselves?

Or are we being premature? Should we tough it out? When do you really know something isn’t right?

There’s too many cars round here

When we moved I was worried about Henry’s transition to the new neighborhood. I was so sure he would miss Brooklyn like crazy. What sane child wouldn’t? When he has friends in his building and delicious muffins available for purchase at every corner? Not to mention Frompy? But everyone said I was being silly. “He’s going to forget all about Brooklyn like that,” they said, and snapped their elegant, manicured fingers. (I only solicit opinions from the manicured. For obvious reasons.) My mom, and I’m not exaggerating when I say this, took my head and plunged it into an enormous bowl of rice pudding, while shrieking, “He’ll be fine! Listen to me!” I don’t know why she carries around the rice pudding. I’ve begged her not to.

It turned out this was a lie. Not about the rice pudding because THAT PART IS TRUE—about him not missing his old hometown. During those first few weeks, every time he enjoyed a contemplative moment, his lower lip would quiver and he would turn to me and sob, “I miss Brooklyn.” And the tears, they would flow like the stinky Gowanus, if the Gowanus flowed, which if you ask me it does not. What did he miss? I asked, which was a mistake, because he inevitably replied, “My friends,” and then I would start in and we’d be clutching each other and weeping until my husband got home, six hours later.

But the weeping fits began to afflict him in a less regular fashion, and he started to accumulate lots of happy mornings and afternoons. He remembered how that friend he really missed bit him that one time and also he was kind of a jerk (I added that part, about him being a jerk, because I know he was only four but still, kind of a jerk), and we talked about how nice it is to have a backyard (okay, I talked about it, but he agreed) and when, back in Brooklyn, did he ever spend an afternoon splashing around a neighbor's kiddy pool in his Incredible Hulk underpants? Almost never, that’s when!

Still, though, the ennui, it lingers. The other day “Cars and Parties” made its appearance in the iPod shuffle, and he looked at me with his brimming eyes and whispered, “You have to turn this off. My heart is closing down.” (And someone hit this child? you’re thinking. It's unbearable, yet true.) My own heart broken into teeny tiny shards and flew out through my eye sockets, blinding me as I ran for the stereo and shut it all down. I held him for a while and he was better, but then, damn it, it’s a catchy song, and I kept singing it! All night! And he would look at me with these enormous saucer eyes (which I could only sense because I was blind) and he would say, “What do you think you’re doing?” Or maybe he just screamed and threw an X-wing at me. Either way, I got the message.