Home

Dear Ellie,

Two nights ago, your mother and I went home and stayed the night for the first time in two and a half months.  It was a peculiar experience.  When we walked in, it felt like we were visiting some distant relative's house; a place we had been before but were not intimately familiar.  As we looked around, there were brief glimmers of our past, there.  Memories of laughter and sarcasm and our close, intimate friendship that is so rare in marriage... but also the dark cloud of childlessness that hung over every day.  For a moment, too, it appeared as it did the day we first walked in and decided to buy it.

The house on Palm Lake Drive was our first real home.  A place where we'd planned to put down some roots.  It had a nice yard, plenty of room, and a lovely little lake down the road.  Immediately after we purchased it, every room was already filled with visions of our future.  A nursery with warm light, you splashing in the bathtub, and the pitter patter of your tiny feet on the tile floor.  With those thoughts projecting themselves on every room, it immediately felt like home.  Your mother and I would often sit in the nursery and meditate with each other on what would be happening there, one day.  As time went by and we began to doubt that you would ever exist at all, the nursery became a dark place.  A place to avoid.  Some forbidden annex where all of the sad thoughts were buried so that they didn't flood the other happy places of our home.  No matter how hard we tried to avoid it, though, those sad thoughts seeped out from beneath the crack of the door and into our lives, anyway.              

The house on Palm Lake Drive will never become the place that we hoped it would be.  A little over a week ago, we put it up for sale.  When the reality of having a micro-preemie set in, we stoicly made the necessary adjustments to our future.  Since a micro-preemie will be so tremendously time consuming, we'll both be sharing the duties of childcare and work.  The first adjustment involved selling the house.  The new unexpected bills and tax on our time simply made it impractical to stay there.  We'll be leaving everything but the most important of our belongings.  In a way, we're starting over from scratch.    

Oddly, it hasn't upset me or your mother.  The house on Palm Lake Drive felt like a home, but only because that is where we imagined you'd be.