Home is wherever I’m with you
This has been a long time coming.
It’s with very excited, tired, hopeful hearts that Mike and I announce we are leaving Maryland, and returning to Michigan. Our tentative plan is to be there by the end of July (!!). We will return to Fraser for a bit, and then head to our next adventure in Grand Rapids before school starts for the kids in September.
We have had our family on this beautiful east coast for 10 years now. We’ve spent every anniversary, birthday, nearly every holiday here. We have been away from my (Vickie’s) family and friends for a very, very long time. During the last 10 years we have weathered more storms than I’ve been able to keep count of. We are weary- of the housing prices, of the lack of a village to raise our kids with, of the Eastern Shore in general. We’ve established ourselves in our careers well here, and that makes it all the more difficult to leave. But over the last year, we have come to realize that life is so, so incredibly short, and it should be lived wholehearted. We aren’t happy here anymore- not for any specific reason, but we feel God’s call to go somewhere different. We feel the call to go somewhere new, where we can start over, that will be full of people we love dearly.
There is no way to describe the homesickness I’ve spent the last 10 years nursing. There were days that I did not believe I could do it anymore, but I continued on. There were so many times I called someone I loved back in Michigan and said, “it’s time, we’re coming home”, but we didn’t. Every visit over the last 5 years has been both of us longing to be there full time, but never having the courage to make the jump. Now it feels as though we’ve waited too long, but I know this is perfect timing. Our plan is hardly ever aligned with God’s plan. God’s plan is always perfect, though.
Before things fall together, it typically falls apart. Over the last two weeks, we’ve had car troubles, job troubles, money troubles and kid troubles. We’ve felt like we were on our last straw, that the camel’s back was about to break. But our marriage is strong and our love for our kids is even stronger, so we kept persisting. Finally, I sat down with a calendar and asked Mike to pick a date. He looked at me for a long time, and said, “yes, let’s do it”. We have no idea how this will all work out, and we could, of course, fail epically. But at the very least, we would know we tried.
Back when Mike and I first moved in together, we lived in a very tiny studio apartment above a stranger’s garage in his parent’s neighborhood. We rolled into the driveway with a nail in the tire, $25 to our name, and next to nothing in the back seat. We had no stove, no appliances besides a small fridge and an even smaller toaster oven. Our kitchen supplies consisted of a buck knife Mike used for hunting, and a Mickey Mouse spatula I received as a gift. We hadn’t had my bridal shower yet, and we lived like that for an entire month. We slept on an air mattress that deflated through the night, so we would continually wake up on the floor. The thing about that month, though, is that it toughened us up. We didn’t know it then, but it showed us a glimpse of the life we would be enduring the next ten years. There have been so many ups and many, many downs. We have not had it easy in many ways. But here we are — persisting — more than a decade later. There is so much you can do with love, with laughter, with time. We now have established ourselves much more than that, and I’m proud to say I haven’t had to use a buck knife in the kitchen since then.
If you find yourselves in a spot where you feel dragged down, defeated, and unsteady on your feet, a little adventure goes a long way.
We will miss the Atlantic. We will miss Mike’s family, our nieces, the life we have lived here. The cattails and the crabs and the humid summers will be hard to beat, but we know, home is where we are together.
Here we come, Grand Rapids! ❤
