Did you know…this is the longest I have ever lived in one house since I was seventeen years old? In fact, since I was seventeen I have lived in three different states, countless cities, and 14 different houses/apartments, and none of them for more than two years.

We moved every few years as I was growing up, so I guess it’s just a concept that has stuck with me in my twenties and thirties. I would pick a place, settle, and then immediately start looking for the next best thing. The better college, the better city, the better apartment, the better opportunity. I always felt that I had to keep moving. To slow down was to get complacent. To slow down would cause me to really look at my self and face my unhappiness. Instead of looking for something new and better I would be forced to discover why “this moment in time” was not working for me. To slow down was to die.

When we picked this house, we did so in a hurry. My current situation was dangerous and the longer I stayed the more dangerous it became, not only for me for my the kids too. I was trying to stay for as long as I could, simply to help ease the transition for leaving, for all of us leaving. But as someone who was the only provider in a house of five for the past 8 years, someone with three small children, and someone who had nothing extra to offer, I had no where to go. That is until Joe stepped in and decided he would buy a house for us. Sure we had just started dating, but we knew my situation was dire.

We looked for a while but there was always something wrong with the house: schools weren’t good, not enough bedrooms, no dining room, too far of a drive. Until one day we were simply driving through one of my old neighborhoods in the rain. As we drove down the street, the sun came out and a rainbow appeared…at the same exact moment that we saw the for sale sign. We had looked online in this neighborhood so many times, but had never seen this house listed. Joe made an offer the next day and two months later, on another rainy day in August we moved in.

We furnished it with random odds and ends found in our basements, on facebook marketplace, and Ikea. for almost a month we didn’t even have a dining room table and the kids would sit and eat on the window seat in our dining room.

Slowly but surely we filled the house with furniture and books, pictures and toys, laughter and our own personalities. But as someone who was always waiting for the other shoe to drop, I never let myself really settle. I couldn’t “invest” in this house as my home yet. To invest would have been to be happy, and there were far too many unknowns.

Two and a half years later, when my divorce was finalized and my custody battle won, the house had fulfilled its purpose. It was my savior in a truly harmful situation. The calm from my storm. My safe haven in a sea of turmoil and doubt. It was the place I was able to rebuild my life and my family and start the long process of coming home to myself. So do we stay or do we go? Do we pick up and start over again, or begin the process of making this house a home?

“Home is wherever you leave everything you love and never question that it will be there when you return.”

Every single thing I love is here. I think we’ve made the right decision.