So to quote Mr. Cranky Fibro Girl, it’s been a helluva year.
It all started this time last year when Tigger, my baby, my heart, my soulmate, was diagnosed with renal cancer. We did chemotherapy and got four more months with him, but even though the cancer was going away the treatment was just too much for his little body, and so we let him go and my heart broke into a million billion pieces. And even though that was one of my worst nightmares, to my surprise, I survived.
The next few months after that were pretty much about going back to the “chop wood, carry water” basics of self-care, and then when I was finally able to come up for some air it was time to plan the summer.
It just so happens that both my parents, my in-laws, Mr. Cranky Fibro Girl and I, and my brother and his wife all got married in years that end in “6”. So this summer was both my parents’ and my husband’s parent’s 50th wedding anniversaries, our 20th, and my brother and sister-in-law’s 10th. And of course we planned some major extravaganza-paloozas to celebrate, the preparations for which took up the next few months until mid-July, when the party took place.
So we took a deep breath and thought, OK, now we can relax. Which of course meant that just two weeks after the party we found out that my husband was being transferred to North Carolina. And oh, by the way, they needed him there in two months. Eight weeks (and a bit). 62 days. To pack up 22 years of life in Georgia, 17 of which we’d spent living in the only house we’d ever owned. To sell said house and buy another one. To sort through Every. Single. One. of our earthly possessions, MULTIPLE times (still not done with this one). To declutter and donate and discard and decide and delegate (again, a work in progress). To pack it all up and then go baby, go!
I’m pretty sure that I have touched every piece of paper that has ever existed since the beginning of time itself. You should all check your own filing cabinets, because it’s entirely possible that I’ve decluttered and organized all of your papers too. I had no idea it was even possible for so much paper to EXIST.
And of course, it was all our own doing. I found papers from when I was in Pre-K, which I believe was back in 1974. We had every single tax return we’d ever filed, all the way back to my husband’s first one from 1989. I had all of my students’ exams from the 2 years I was a TA in graduate school 22 years ago. We’d saved every check register we’d ever had. We had boxes and boxes of files full of papers from companies that no longer exist anymore. Why did we ever think we would need these things again?
And that was just the papers. It was like that with everything: furniture, boxes, books, tools, paint-don’t even get me started on the paint. I can’t tell you how many cans of old paint we found when cleaning out all the corners of our property, because numbers don’t go that high.
Now, in the interest of full disclosure I will tell you that we received one of the best relocation packages I’ve ever heard of. Plus, we’ve actually been working on moving back to North Carolina for the past four years. So it was good that we sort of rested up, because after four years of living in limbo with absolutely no movement we suddenly had to move at what seemed to me like superhuman speed. (My husband will tell you that he totally expected things to be that way, but even he had that glassy-eyed, overwhelmed look of someone who’d just survived a train wreck with an enormous brick wall by move-in day.)
Meanwhile, regular life continued apace.
We spent a week at the beach with my brother, sister-in-law, and two nephews.
My blog made Healthline’s Best Fibro Blogs list for the 4th time in 5 years,
The website The Mighty ran my post on what it’s really like to live with chronic pain.
My husband went to work every day.
And I still had fibromyalgia.
But here we finally are, on the other end; somehow, we did it. We’ve transported ourselves, the cats, and all our worldly goods to our new state. I’m still having periodic meltdowns as all our worldly goods are currently strewn across ALL the flat spaces in our house. And we do sometimes go for long periods without any actual cat sightings, just trace evidence of their existence. But we’re here, and yay, us.
Here’s to great new experiences and many fun stories ahead.
