I saw someone ask a question on Facebook recently that queried people on what “adulting” task they disliked most besides paying bills. My first thought was yard work, mostly because I am terrible at it, allergic to all the things outside, and it’s still summer in Missouri. Then I thought packing lunches for school, but that’s not all the time, nor will it last forever. I finally landed on dishes.
Ugh. Dishes. Never-ending, every day, multi-step, impossible to ignore. Maybe worse is when you do try to ignore it and then find that all of the leftover food bits have cemented themselves to the dish and no amount of elbow grease is enough to remove it, so you just have to let it soak, thwarting your efforts to complete the task. It’s a bit like what it sometimes feels like to cope with trauma.
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A little over two years. That’s how long it’s been since we relocated to Kansas City. I’m not going to rehash how it happened or why it happened or what it was like (you can find those posts here and here and here, yeah, I’ve written about it a lot), but I am going to admit that there are days when those feelings are just as fresh as the day we left Chicago. There’s this residual rawness that time has not yet erased. Of course, it occurs at the most inconvenient times. Like…the beginning of the semester of your last year of grad school. Good times.
It felt normal and right in those first few months, or even the first year, to talk about how much it hurt to move. Now? We’ve built a life here, a career, the better part of a degree, friends and meaningful relationships, organizational connections, a long term therapist, etc. etc. I keep thinking, “I should be fine!” And it is fine most of the time. But this business of moving doesn’t just wash away with a simple rinse. Loss isn’t a one for one trade. It doesn’t work to simply trade one job for another, one house for another, one friend, one experience, one home. Sure, we have made a new home, but it is still a loss. I have cultivated new friendships, but it was still a loss. I am able to complete my degree at a new school, but that is still a loss. This is not to say that the life I have created for myself in KCMO is not a good one. On the contrary. BUT, it is not the life I envisioned, and the loss of a dream is still a loss.
This trauma of being forced to relocate feels petty sometimes. People move ALL THE TIME. Why should this be any different? Because it is. Because that’s how I experienced it. Because every fucking time someone asks me, “Why did you move to Kansas City?” and I have to answer, “For my spouse’s job,” without being able to tell the full story, I am reminded of the residue that has stuck from the trauma. Because I never got to tell the people that caused it to happen what cowards they are. Because this reality is so closely tied to all those other times that someone said what I believed was wrong and because of that, I no longer belonged. And because I have no choice but to let it soak at the mercy of time, until someday the residual pain might cling a little less. I’ve done what I can for now.
You cannot scrub away heartache.