Packing Away My Dreams...

The last year or so has led up to facing today...packing our belongings and choosing what we will keep and what will go away.  Shawn, who has been working in California for over two years, has rediscovered his love for being near the ocean and the home that we bought together in the desert is no longer where he wants to be.  I have fought it - literally and figuratively - since it came up over a year ago, but I cannot afford to pay for our home myself, and I cannot ask Shawn to put his money into a place he has no love for and forego living his own dreams.  And because I love him I am trying to adjust to a new lifestyle away from everything else that I have held dear - my own home, being close to two of our three kids, having SPACE and privacy when I need it.  And someday I still want to have weekends when my grandkids will come over and spend the night, when the family will have dinners at each others' houses on weekends.  I feel suffocated in California - closed in by neighbor's houses and trees, people and traffic everywhere always.  No place where my dogs can run to their hearts' content because they have to be on a leash everywhere.  I have found one spot where I can let them loose and have some privacy, but they aren't really supposed to be there.  

Today is my beautiful daughter's 25th birthday.  Instead of putting the wine rack we bought in Spain into storage I am going to take it to her house so that she can make use of it.  Shawn has agreed to hold onto these mementos of our time overseas, but I don't know that I will ever have a place where I will be able to use them again.  As I began to remove the glasses and bottles, the marble shelves I started crying and had to stop. This has happened before when I have half-heartedly begun this inevitable task, but this was worse.  It is becoming too real, too fast - but it will always be too fast because I never wanted it in the first place.

Am I sad? Yes.  Depressed?  Hell yes.  Resentful?  You bet.  When one person's dreams change and the others don't you just pray that your love is enough to get you both through it.