Making a list and checking it twice, three times, four times...

So the weekly blog-post thing isn't off to a great start... but equally, I won't beat myself up over that, because I have been getting other stuff done, and when I'm not doing the To Do List, I should try to have fun. To be fun. My long-suffering children are putting up with a very withdrawn mother right now.

After some revisions on one piece of coursework, I finally got the results back for my Montessori Diploma this week. I got the distinction I wanted, so I'm over the moon about that. (I kind of wish I could have saved all my academic stage of life for this age—my work ethic is so much better than at eighteen!) It's a shallow validation, but it is a validation.


That's a side issue for now as I've been jumping through the hoops of getting two international moving quotes, as required by my husband's employer (they're paying for our move.)  This has meant making firm decisions on what I'm taking with me and what I'm leaving behind.

The separation of his belongings and mine has been done by degrees. When he moved out, he took a minimum with him, picking up a few more things when he needed them. The rest stayed exactly where it was... After a while, I boxed up the most visible items and put them away so I wouldn't have the reminders.

Over the summer, our water heater sprung a leak and we had to move almost everything out of the house while the damage was repaired. The insurance company paid for a professional packing service, but I unpacked it myself. Being forced to sort through the years of accumulated clutter gave me a second, harder, pass at separating out his things in September. I packed them back into boxes, labeled them, and put them in the attic.

(As I'm not staying in the house permanently, I never felt there was much point in making him take his things. We have plenty of storage space, and he's paying the mortgage. He might as well use it until we sell.)

Now the moving companies need an inventory. A year on from the separation, we have to actually divide our material goods and agree on who gets what.

I was a little apprehensive about this, flashing back to the scene in When Harry Met Sally where Carrie Fisher promises Bruno Kirby that she will never fight him for the wagon wheel coffee table. But the kids' dad came over for a walk-through and had no problem with any of the things I wanted to take.

Realistically speaking, most of our things we got when we were married, and now after getting through the small children stage, it needs an upgrade. There are a few bits and pieces that predate us getting together: some of it came down from his family, so I definitely can't and won't take it, but he told me to take some student-era shelving—with the kids, I'll always need the storage.

There's something sad about the fact he doesn't want 'our' things. I'm glad we're not fighting over it, and I'm glad I don't have to part with the memorabilia... but it's also painful to think he won't keep those mementos... Or maybe my overly-sensitive brain just wants another thing to be sad about it.

The cats were surprisingly underwhelmed by last year's Box-topia.

The boxing up of last summer was a surprisingly handy trial run for the move, giving both the kids and the cats some experience in packing and unpacking our lives, and giving us an organisational head-start—and heaven knows, I need all the help I can get with that.

One moving company sent somebody over to take an inventory of what would be moved; the other asked me to fill out my own inventory online. The webform for this was absolutely soul-destroying: Not intuitive, not easy to keep track of, and it glitched up when I tried to submit it. But I had saved (collapsed and stored flat) all of the boxes labeled: "LEGO", "Books", "Toys" and "Games"—all things we have masses of. I literally counted those boxes when I needed to calculate quantities.

Otherwise, it's been a lot of walking around the house with the laptop, trying to make sure I've accounted for everything, double-checking which electrical items will and won't work, and also realising that this, that and the other have been in the attic since we moved into this house, so maybe there's not a lot of point in taking them across the Atlantic with us.

De-cluttering goes hand-in-hand with the inventory-taking. Like everybody who's ever moved, I'm resolved to get rid of things beforehand... and like everybody who's ever moved, I won't get rid of half of what I mean to. However, for the past couple of weeks, going through cupboards / drawers and turfing things into the thrift box or the trash has been 75% of the to-do list lately.

To-do-lists and inventories... easy things to get lost in. Safe things to get lost in. I've been having a crisis of confidence about our new lives lately: that fear of "I can't do this."

Of course, I can do this, because I have to. One way or the other, we will be in England and I will be responsible adult and I will hold it together because I've lived through several transatlantic moves before. But there's a difference between scraping by and thriving. I'm afraid we're always going to be scraping by on an emotional level... that I'll never quite be happy, that the anxiety and depression are here to stay. That's not what I want for my family.

I need to have faith in myself that if I am scraping by, I will find a way to change it up, to move us into that thriving state. I'm going to the UK for a bit of a recon in a few weeks, and perhaps that will help me feel more secure. Until then, it's safer to tidy my life into spreadsheets.