A Moving Experience

A mother learns to lean on her daughter as they pack up two decades of family history

It was a fairly simple real estate transaction, as these things go: Price set and met. Nice young buyers all lined up, mortgage approval in hand. Attorneys but no Realtors and, thus, no open houses or other stressful shenanigans. So why did selling the house feel as if I were aboard a scary thrill ride without a safety strap? Why was it hard to sleep? Why was my Weight Watchers group leader, of all people, cautioning me to put some of those shed pounds back on?

Maybe the answer is that there are no simple real estate transactions, not really. But I think the likelier explanation is the doorjamb.

Our kitchen was painted yellow and white. On one doorpost, we'd marked our daughter's height since the month we moved in, an ascending column of inked notations. Emma, pint size at 3, leggy at 8. Emma growing past the mark labeled "Mommy." (When Mommy is 5-foot-1, this is not such a big deal, but we made a fuss anyway.) Then that big jump at 14, after spinal surgery left her suddenly two inches taller.

The record grew spottier from there, teenagers being less inclined to stand against a door while a parent musses their hair with a ruler, but continued past high school graduation to her college commencement. She'd just turned 23 when Jon and I decided that we'd really like to let someone else come up with $15,000 for that overdue new roof. "Gutter cleaning" and "housing bubble" had become two of our least favorite phrases. It was time to sell.

"A doorjamb is easy to replace," friends advised when I confided that the undertaking was making me teary, angst-y, overwhelmed by the lengthening lists and notes in my red spiral notebook labeled HOUSE. "You can just pick up a doorjamb at Home Depot and take the old one with you."

But I didn't really want to transport the thing to our new apartment. The idea of what we were leaving, not the chunk of wood or even the house itself, was the achey part. We were walking away from the place where Jon and I had raised our child and grown into middle age, the only house Em could recall, the repository of 20 years' worth of history and memory and a staggering amount of stuff that had once seemed important. We were selling the family home.

Leaving it proved more than a daunting amount of work; it packed an emotional wallop. At times, with the family scattered, the old house emptying and the new apartment mostly an idea, I couldn't figure out where home was. At others, something unexpected happened, the start of that role reversal that will probably culminate at an assisted living facility in another 20 years: The child who'd depended on us for so long became an ally and helper, the one assuring me it would all be okay.

It was a comfy old house, a clapboard colonial built around 1920. From the first, we liked the big oaks that shaded the front porch, the stained-glass window on the stairway landing, the yard we could fence for kid and dogs. So what if there were no doors on the garage and the kitchen needed a major upgrade? It felt like home.

We painted and puttered, fenced the yard, set up our home offices with these newfangled things called computers. We swapped our daughter's crib for a big-girl bed.

Even the junk had associations. That border of hot-pink palm trees that the buyer will no doubt strip from the bedroom wall? It's what Emma, at 7, thought cool. The black trunk in the basement that no one had used for years? She took it to sleep-away camp in Vermont, along with the adjacent backpack that no one had used for years, either.

Year after year, we'd celebrated holidays and birthdays, hosted sleepovers, acquired a succession of gerbils and cats, retrievers and border collies. I kept, out of dopey sentimentality, some of their collars and name tags.

The house took better care of us (just two frozen pipes in two decades; not a bad record) than we took of it, however. Drained financially by career shifts and college bills, plus the purchase of a rural retreat a few hours away, we never really embarked on major renovations. Next year, we told ourselves, concentrating meanwhile on repairing things that might invite lawsuits, such as rotting front steps. After a while, we stopped saying next year. Jon wanted to spend more time on the farm in Upstate New York; Emma had moved into the city; I was often alone in too much house that was growing too dilapidated. Time to pay off the mortgage(s) and move on.