CHAPTER 2: LIFE IS A MOVEABLE FEAST
I got one of those moving circulars in the mail the other day – you know, a local company promising to make my next move “as pleasant and affordable as possible.” Pleasant and affordable, my eye! In my opinion, there’s no such thing.
At the risk of sounding like a crank, you should know that I speak from experience, having moved twenty-seven times in all. Twenty-seven moves, and those are only the ones I remember. There’s a faded snapshot of me in a carriage outside what appears to be the rooming house where my parents lived when I was born, but I don’t remember living there. I know I took part in a half-dozen or so experiments in communal living when I was at university, and I don’t remember much about those either. Generally they lasted a month or two, depending on the noise level and/or sanitary standards of my roommates, at which point I’d roll up my Mucha posters, reclaim my clay baker, and move home. Home being the home of my father, whose door was always open to his daughters, their friends and their boyfriends. (To be truthful, the man was a saint – were I to wake up to a living-room full of sleeping bags and strangers, I’d be tempted to call the police. Not my father; “mi casa es su casa,” that was my dad.)
Dad was always pleased to have me back – well, initially, that is. The mutual thrill of it all tended to wear off within a couple of weeks, and I’d be casting about for new digs, as they say, getting ready to pack up my things and make another move.
The thing is, in all those comings and goings, I don’t remember ever – not once – asking my father to help me move. He didn’t so much as lift a shoebox. And why would he? I was the one who was moving, not him. It would simply not have occurred to me to ask him to help me move – and anyway, sweet man though he was, he wouldn’t have done it. Moving, like mowing the lawn and clearing out the garage, was what boyfriends were for. You didn’t expect your parents to engage in that kind of manual labour – they were too old!
So here I am, at least ten years older than my father was when I was going to school, and in the past decade I have helped my daughter move nine times. Nine times. Are you doing the math? Add that to the twenty-seven I told you about and the others I said I couldn’t remember and you have a ridiculous amount of time spent shifting people around. With all that moving of beds and books and kitchen utensils, it’s hard to imagine finding time to do anything else. Think of the books I could have written had I not been packing and unpacking boxes all my life! It explains a lot.
I’m not alone in this, I know. Half the parents I know do this on a semi-regular basis; the other half have kids who’ve never left home, which will be discussed at length further on in this book. (If you’re dying to find out what I think of perfectly healthy adults being allowed to live, rent-free, in their parents’ basements, stay tuned for Chapter 6, “Two’s Company, Three is Just Plain Wrong!”)
I have yet to meet anyone, young or old, who likes moving. People like to have moved – they like to be settled in a new city, a new country – even a new apartment. But nobody, I think, likes moving. It’s like flying – we look forward to leaving the snow and gloom of winter for tropical sunny beaches and some of us even like being on the airplane, but can anyone say, especially these days, that they enjoy the process of driving to the airport, lining up at the ticket counter, and going through security? We do it because we have to.
So why do we continue to move our children? (Now, I know that at least some of you right now are shaking your heads in that faintly reproving way you have, and saying, “Ridiculous! I haven’t helped my son/daughter move since he/she was eighteen! It’s your own fault, Taylor – you’ve brought this on yourself and I have no sympathy for you and your spineless, wishy-washy ilk!” And all I can say to that is, Yes, you’re right, of course, but that’s the kind of column this is and if you feel that way, you probably shouldn’t be reading it in the first place - it's only going to upset you.)
There is a reason, I think, why we continue to move our children long past the time when we should physically be doing so: it’s because all their lives we’ve fed them this myth that we are ageless. That, unlike our parents, and our parents’ parents, WE WILL NOT GET OLD. We have fed them this myth because, on some weird, inexplicable level, we believe it. In some part of our post-World War II, hippy-dippy brains we think we’re still the Who generation, hoping to die before we get old. We think that by telling our kids we’re not up to hauling sofas down three flights of stairs we’re somehow giving in to Old Father Time.
Well, here’s a news flash, boomers: WE’RE OLD. Not ancient. Not necessarily decrepit. But old. Older than we were, not as old as, with any luck, we will be. Too old to move our kids. Take a look at the generation we’ve raised. Thanks to unprecedented dental care, skin creams, and better nutrition, they’re probably the healthiest generation of young people the world has ever seen. They’re taller than us, they’re stronger than us, and they’re fitter than us. They have equally tall, strong, fit friends who owe them favours dating back to junior high. THEY CAN MOVE THEMSELVES. (Sorry about all the capital letters but I seem to have got into a bit of a flow.) SO LET THEM DO IT. (Okay, that’s it, I promise. It worked, though, didn’t it? You got the point.)
Brave talk, I know, especially from one who is notoriously spineless and wishy-washy. (Still smarting from that comment, but determined to rise above it.) But I’ll have a chance very soon to try out my new resolve. My daughter has plans to move again next spring. Her lease is up in April and they’re raising the rent. It’s a bit of a blow to her father and me, I have to admit. When we moved her in last year, we had hopes that this might be it – for one thing, her apartment has storage space, which means we’ve been able to unload several boxes of her assorted memorabilia, including 4,000 Archie comics she plans to sell on eBay. Some day. For the first time in years, there’s actually room in the garage for the car.
Now she’s talking about moving into a smaller place, where she’ll be lucky to have room for herself and the dog, let alone her stuff.
Well, as Marie Antoinette said to the peasants, “Sorry, hon, not my problem.” I’m taking a hard line approach here – it’s the new me. Tough – no nonsense – firm as the Rock of Gibraltar. We Taylors are made of stern stuff, after all – we didn’t survive the Siege of Exeter by letting our kids push us around. “Stock up on bubble wrap, darling,” I’ll tell her. “The torch has been passed. Give me a call when you’re settled and I’ll pop by with a plant. Toodle-oo!”
Harsh words, perhaps, but they must be said. I figure I have one more move left in me, and I’m saving it for the condo in Florida. The one with the private elevator, ocean views and tennis court. And not an Archie comic in sight.
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