Winds of change.

So a friend posted tonight on her blog about change.  Oddly I had been thinking this post out in my head all day.  


I try to live without regrets.  I think everything is a learning experience and we change and grow because of change and growth.  But i'm struggling.


I really REALLY thought in moving to Texas we were doing what we were suppose to.  It felt right.  Even a few months after the move Craig and I would just look at each other and say "i love it here".  And we did.  Sure we missed our families and friends.  It was difficult having no one around to rely on or to even have an afternoon chat with, but we were excited about spreading our wings and felt that for the first time in our lives we were actually on our own.  It was very freeing and exciting.


In the 14 years we've been married we've overcome a lot of struggles.  The first place we lived in was a downright dump.  It was missing part of the ceiling upstairs and one bedroom was completely closed and locked off because it literally had no windows.  It ought to have been condemned (and was actually recently torn down).  We moved up from there, slowly, slowly.  Better pay, better home, better cars.  Until finally we bought our own home in 2003.  


Moving felt so right that we were happy to leave behind everything we had worked for and start new.   We were confident it would work out because we truly felt it was right.


Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't.


But tonight I find myself again living in someone else's home.  I've lost my home to forclosure now, a home that we had never had a late payment on in 7 years.  For the past 8 months we have struggled just to pay each bill as it came, a lot of the time not making that happen and bargaining with utilities to just give us one more week.  We sold most of the valuable things we owned to keep the lights on in Texas.  And then it got worse.


Things are looking up with our move back to Wisconsin, looking up very much.  Craig is making double what he was in Texas and our cost of living is less than half.  The CPS stuff has come to an end and it looks as though Austin will be home by this time next week.  Everything is falling into place effortlessly.  Showing us, I think, that it was very right for us to come back.


I can't help but wonder why we felt so led to a place that would threaten to tear our family apart?  That uprooted our kids from their friends, their schools not once but twice in one year.  My daughter commented yesterday that this will be her 3rd high school, and she's just starting 10th grade.  It makes me sad and the guilt I feel is overwhelming.  


And then there's the part of me that says it was worth it.  I had lived my entire live in a 2 county span.  I needed to see that the grass wasn't necessarily greener somewhere else.  We moved in an effort to give our kids a view of more of a world than they would ever see in northern Wisconsin, and we did that.  We moved to give Hailey a chance to realize her potential, she did that.  Hearing her say "mom, I know I can do good here, I'm not taking anything less than A's and B's this year, because now I know I'm not stupid" is priceless.  We needed to spread our wings and stand on our own two feet on unsteady ground to know where we belonged.  And we did that too.


No regrets.  I can't and I won't.  The past 9 months have been hard.  As odd as it may seem I would say they've been as hard as the 9 months following Alex's death, just a different kind of hard.  But we made it through that a stronger family, and I have to keep my faith that we will make it through all of this stronger yet.