THE BLINDSIDE

One month ago we were excited to finally make a decision about moving to another city. It was the city that housed our dearest friends who once were our neighbors. We wanted to be neighbors again. The momma of that family is a sister to me and she’s a teacher too. You know what that means? Forced joint family fun all summer long! We would spend time together nearly every day, sometimes hours, sometimes the entire day. Sometimes I’d pack a bottle of wine in my purse and walk the block to her house after the kiddos went to bed. It was a pretty great set-up. So when they moved (against their wishes but to protect their son) it was heartbreaking to all of us. So a school year later, we decided to build. We checked out the new community, checked out nearby communities by the same builder, debated over floor plans and dreamed up what we would do in the new home. We sat down with the builder, picked our lot, designed the beginning stages of our home and went home with all our paperwork. Brandon went back with the checkbook. I called him on the way to say it felt like it was all moving really fast and that I thought we should wait. To be clear, this is not my nature. Once I’ve started with a plan, I like to follow it through and I never would imagine I would be doubting a brand new, shiny, every-finish-picked-by-us home. My soul was stirring though and my husband trusted that feeling and so we waited. A new phase was going up in the summer and we thought we’d wait until those lots were ready for purchasing and building upon. Even though I thought of every reason why it would be better to wait until phase 2 (the timing would be so much better with a summer move), it was a little disappointing not to be moving forward right now.

We went on with normal life but I was excited to continue the process in a few months. Then one regular ol’ day, the husband called to say that he had been contacted by his dream company. Let’s call it DreamJob for now. Humble brag: My husband is incredible at what he does. However, being in Minnesota left little opportunity for his dream job. He did land one very close though and built an app for a well-known finance publication. In his free time, he blogged about tech stuff and had a pretty solid social media following. All that said, he had never applied for a job with DreamJob and his contact info is pretty discreet online so the email came as a surprise. They ran an investigative online hunt for his contact information and sought him out. Long story short, they wanted him and he went through the interviewing process. Long story shorter, they offered him the job. DreamJob was in in Washington, half a country away from almost all of our favorite people, our village, our tribe. At this point, it was all a blur of numbers and emotions.

The time came to actually make a decision about this. Every concern we had was given a solution, making it very hard to say no when looking at the facts and numbers. We decided to wait, and pray, and wait, and then pray. I already knew the answer. You see, we’d been working very hard at getting into a prime position to build our new home. It felt so good but deep in my heart I felt this nagging that all this work we were doing was not actually for our dream home. I mentioned it several times to my husband.  I pushed it aside and down because I just couldn’t imagine something coming between us and our goal. The reality is, I could imagine, I just really didn’t want it to happen.