Lamenting the Absence of "Stuff":

All the dust has settled. We are here and its quiet. We are moving through our days as we would anywhere else. Stefan goes off to work and I stay behind, watching him go, wishing he could stay because truthfully, now that the move is over and we are all settled in, I'm a little... bored. Hard to imagine that a mother of two small babies could ever be bored, but I think its one of my dysfunctions that I am not truly engaged unless there's some sort of major crisis going on.

I think if we knew where were we off to next, I wouldn't be bored because I would be able to obsess over that place and how to get there and what to bring and what things I could do to make that place home. I have been thinking a lot about the nesting process lately, probably because I can't really nest under our current circumstances and in the absence of being able to, I've realized just how much I need to.

My friend (and fellow blogger and trailing spouse) recently made a joke about how much she fears the presence of "government-issued furniture" in her home. For some reason, it took reading about her fears for me to fully realize my own. All these years, I have lovingly collected what I consider to be beautiful things for our home- furniture, vases, pot and pans, enamel dutch ovens, paintings, sculptures, photographs, rugs. And now, they all sit somewhere in rural Virginia in a storage unit. I feel like the rest of my family is locked up, out of reach, all alone, collecting dust.

It probably seems totally shallow (especially since I was inspired to write this post because of today's "Home and Garden" section in the NYT, which features about a hundred things I really, really must have), but it's not just about the stuff. Its about my identity and I really do believe that our homes are (or certainly "can be") an expression of who we are and how we view the world. (Is it at all ironic that as I write about how important my "stuff" is, there's an ad on TV for an upcoming episode of "Hoarding: Buried Alive"?).

What's the point of this post? I guess the point is, that every time I identify something exciting and wonderful (i.e. liberation from "stuff"), it's met with a new fear (i.e. liberation from "stuff"). While my husband is realizing his own dreams and identity, I am really struggling (hard) to find my own. It's like I have been stripped down to the barest, most basic version of myself. So while I have dealt with the separation from all my friends and family (reasonably well, if I do say so myself), I am still dealing with not being able to nest and make a home for myself, my children, my husband and my dogs and I am little scared... well, a lot scared... that I'm going to have to wait a really long time before I am able to do it again.