300 Miles

“You’re going to wind up back in Virginia, aren’t you? I just have a feeling. Idk.”

I hit send.

It’s the kind of text message you write because you need some kind of documentation, some official flag planted in the soil of “I’ve got an intuition and I’m not crazy and we’re going to look back at this and see that, I hope.”

Living alone now, trying to endure a separation I never wanted while still parenting where I could, I wasn’t privy to all the day-to-day discussions of what comes next for the family. And Jamie — the woman who is still technically-but-not-in-any-other-way my wife — was the only person to consult with about any of it.

When I wrote it, I was sitting in a supermarket parking lot in Wake Forest, watching a storm roll through a late July afternoon. A Costco order had taken me to that neck of the woods, and as I drove around, watching the dark clouds gather ominously, I had this overwhelming feeling that everything was about to change. But weirdly specifically, I felt that the change meant another move, to another state.

To the place where we’d started our family and that always seemed to call us back: Virginia.

I’m not usually the one who gets change feelings. That was always Jamie’s job. But this time, it was so strong and so precise, I had to say something about it. Whether I was wrong or right about whatever signal I was picking up on, I couldn’t just leave it inside my head.

When she responded, she gave me a litany of pragmatic reasons why she didn’t want Virginia to happen. Schools. Doctors. Therapists. A bunch of listings on the market. I listened. We exchanged messages on fairly wide-ranging topics over the course of the afternoon as I did my delivery drops.

Finally, I said:

“All I know is I got a big change feeling today, and I don’t usually get those…it’s why I asked about Virginia. Something is going on, and I can’t quite figure it out.”

The conversation more or less dead-ended there. But three days later, my daughter Sophie asked for my help. I hadn’t known how bad my family’s financial situation was, and I had nothing to spare, so I asked for help. People were so kind and generous, and a bunch of money came in. Just enough to pay off their back debts, secure a new lease, and pay for a move. At first, I thought they were staying in the old house. But Jamie told me they had to move somewhere cheaper. She couldn’t risk renewing a lease she couldn’t maintain.

She was looking locally. She found smaller houses with lower rent, but she’d gotten behind on bills and it had hurt her credit, and she couldn’t get an approval. Her listings weren’t selling despite her best efforts. She had one shot with the money I’d raised to get out of the predicament, and she didn’t want to blow it. There was even some discussion about going back to Arizona, where the charter schools offer good education for zero tuition. Everything was on the table.

She asked me to come over and talk it out with her.

I did.

I told her what I really believed, not what I wanted to say:

You’ve got two years of information about living here in Raleigh, and real estate isn’t working out for you despite the fact that it’s a growing city. I know you’ve worked as hard as you possibly can, and it’s not coming together. Arizona is the wrong move. I can just feel that it’s a dead end. You’ve always been successful in Virginia, for reasons I can’t fully explain, and I think you need to prioritize your efforts to find something there even though I don’t want the family to leave.

To her credit, she took my advice seriously. She admitted that it made sense. She kept applying for houses in both places, even as they packed up to go to an as-yet-unknown destination.

The weeks rolled by. I hesitated to ask what was going on, because even though I had to move out of my family home, my nervous system still lives there. Their struggles keep me up at night. My work to provide for my own survival is barely sufficient, leaving me feeling powerless to assist in any meaningful way. I found myself praying every night and every morning that the God I’ve struggled so much to trust would take care of them, because I couldn’t.

And then, at the last minute — literally, in the week they had to be out of the old house — she got an approval. Not in North Carolina, but in Virginia. The agent told her something along the lines of, “I wasn’t going to approve you, but Jesus told me to rent this house to you, so that’s what I’m going to do.” Jamie and the kids had been praying too, and this revelation left her speechless. She signed the lease before ever setting foot on the property. A leap of faith. The house is bigger than the one they were moving out of, but somehow almost a thousand dollars cheaper per month. We’d been reducing expenses for years, but homes for large families have remained prohibitively costly.

It was, quite literally, an answer to prayer.

But they still had to finish packing and get there by September 1st.

August turned out to be an unusually busy month for me, and I didn’t get to work my gig job nearly as much as I usually do. My parents came in from out of town, and I got to see them twice after a 7-year stretch without seeing them in person. My best friend and podcast co-host Kale Zelden came into town too. There were more visits with the family than usual. I took extra days off.

So when moving weekend arrived last week, I told my wife I needed to work. Weekends are my money-making days doing gig work, and already I’d missed a bunch of workdays and was short for the month. But she asked me to come supervise things while the moving help she hired was there. She didn’t want the kids alone in the house with men she didn’t know while she drove the first truck up to Virginia.

I couldn’t help but agree.

And as the logistics unfolded, I saw that she was drowning in all the tasks that needed to happen in a short window of time. There was just no way for one person to do everything. A team effort was necessary. And the part of me that still loves and wants to protect her, the part of me that wants to take care of the people I’ve been exiled from, couldn’t let that go. There were a bunch of logistics I won’t bore you with here, but with multiple U-Haul trucks and multiple personal vehicles that all needed to head north, and only Jamie and I able to handle driving large moving trucks, it wound up being a huge game of the fox, the chicken, and the sack of grain. Somehow, we had to get them all across the river without any of them being eaten by the others.

Fortunately, I’m pretty good at systematizing things, and I saw a way to do it all in a reasonable amount of time, with limited downside. A plan that worked for everyone.

It was going to suck, but it was going to work.

I offered to drive the next truck up last Saturday while she finished packing whatever was left in the house, then take the train back to Raleigh. The plan was to then drive the last truck up the next day, take the train back again, Uber to my car, and go home. The following Monday, we’d both come back, her to get the last car, me to stay in Raleigh while she went back to Virginia.

I showed up on Saturday morning at 5AM. My son Jude, who is 15, wanted to come with me. We took the big truck and headed out on the road, and talked for hours along the way. In the old days, I’d talk with Jude and Alex — my two high school boys — on the way to drop them off at school. This was like that, but more in-depth. What an incredible kid! We started out before sunrise and made it to the new house a little after 11AM. My mom, who also lives in Virginia, met us there, and immediately drove us the 74 miles to the Alexandria Amtrak station so we could head home on the last train out of Dodge.

There were delays. Jude and I got back late. Sophie, who was finishing packing up what was left, picked us up and brought us back to the house. We grabbed the last truck — a little 10-footer carrying last odds and ends that wouldn’t fit on the big ones — and headed back over to my place so we could leave from there first thing in the morning. We didn’t eat dinner until 10PM, after which both of us crashed, hard.

The next day, we took more time. We got up a little later, ate breakfast first, drove through sunshine and rain, talked for several more hours, then settled into silence. Somewhere near Delaplane, as we drove through the lush, green, rolling countryside of the Blue Ridge foothills, dark clouds dumped a torrent on our truck, and I wondered if it was also storming at our destination. Half an hour later, we got to the house just as everyone was unloading the second truck. It was hot. It was humid. It was threatening to rain. With no time to recover from the long drive, we jumped in to help out with emptying the trucks as soon as we got there, and kept going until the work was done. The rain had held off until that point, but just as the last boxes were coming inside, skies opened up, right before the pizzas arrived.

The new house was full of boxes, pretty much everywhere. The kids were exploring, trying to figure out room assignments and where to put their computer desks and all the things that go with a new place. They had arrived the night before, sight unseen. It was all completely new, and happening fast. My old statue of Our Lady, Seat of Wisdom, was already sitting on the mantle, next to the little Chinese ceramic jar full of rosaries, overlooking the mess. I’d had the sculpture since college, when a priest friend I’d been working for gave it to me after I found it in a closet in the rectory. I had asked Jamie to hold onto it since I had nowhere to put her, and now there she was, before anything else was unpacked, watching over my family for me. Doing what I could not.

My eyes welled up with tears and I turned to Jamie and said, “Okay, fine. You can keep her for a while longer.”

She was right where she belonged.

I’d been driving all day, then helping move, then talking some of the kids through big emotions from a move some of them were not at all enthusiastic about. I was wiped, but I’d been given an offer to stay the night. Most of the kids’ mattresses had gotten wet in the rain, even though they were bagged. They all had cots to sleep on, but I’m a giant and a side sleeper, and folding cots just don’t work for me if I want to get any rest at all. So Jamie offered to let me sleep on the mattress that used to be ours — the only one that stayed totally dry — while she took one of the cots.

It was the first time I slept in the same house with my family in almost a year. It felt both surreal and just like old times, all wrapped into one.

The next day, I awoke in a house full of my own children — although to be fair, most of the teenagers were exhausted and still asleep. Jamie and I ran some errands in the morning, then went over to the rental car agency where I’d made a reservation so we could make one last run back to Raleigh. When I got there, though, I found out they wouldn’t rent us a car without a credit card, because both of our licenses were from out of state. Neither of us had a credit card with room for both the rental and the large security deposit. We told them we could pay by cash or debit, but they wouldn’t take either.

Time to alter plans yet again.

And then I had an idea: if we roped Sophie into riding back with us in the large family SUV, she could drive the smaller car that we’d left at the old house back to Virginia, Jamie could drive the Suburban back home, and they could all stay the night in my tiny little place for the night. No rental car, no hotel room, just the cost of gas and food, and we could finish everything in one fell swoop.

So that’s what we did.

And because Sophie was with us on the trip, she did what she always does: played the role of DJ. She put on an endless supply of music, I drove the whole way, and Jamie got to take a passenger seat break after a frantic month of moving work. Eli, our youngest, came with us. It was like bringing bookends: my firstborn and my lastborn along for the ride, while everyone else stayed at the new house and began settling in.

We sang songs together. We laughed. We got coffee. We stopped at McDonald’s, where everyone but me got a Happy Meal, much to our collective amusement. For one day, it was just like old times. I’ve logged countless road trip miles with these people, and this felt no different, except when I remembered why it should.

At my place, we had a late dinner. Homemade hot pot, made with leftovers from the freezer at the old house. I went to the store for vegetables and mushrooms, and Jamie stood in my tiny kitchen, starting the broth. After we ate, we watched a nerdy podcast on YouTube for a while, and went to sleep. I didn’t know if that many people could fit in here, but with a cot and a couch it was cozy and worked out just fine.

In the morning, I made breakfast, and then Jamie headed out to close down our Post Office box and pick up final prescriptions while Sophie and Eli and I went out for coffee. Sophie and I had been trying to schedule regular coffee dates, and there was one place she’d really wanted to try that we hadn’t gotten around to visiting. So that’s where we went. We got iced blueberry lattes, and they were like girly coffee milkshakes, and I didn’t even care.

When Jamie got back, I took everyone out to eat at my favorite local taco shop. Birria, burritos, chips and guac. One final lunch together in the place we called home for the past two years. And then they headed back on the road to Virginia, and I was left here alone.

That was last Tuesday. Now, here I sit. Everyone I know and love in Raleigh is gone. 300 miles away, settling into a new life in a new place, forming new routines and new habits, while I’m stuck here in a lease that won’t be up until the end of the year.

I can feel that they’re gone. I can feel that I’m left here alone.

I was anxious about that day coming, but for now, at least, I’m surprisingly OK.

I’ll be going up to visit for a couple of kid birthdays in the next two months. It’s not that I won’t see them at all.

But after all this activity and all these people who were in my life almost every day for the last couple weeks, it’s kind of like getting dropped off a cliff into no-man’s-land.

As I’ve written before, I’ve come to love it here in Raleigh. It felt like we were called to be here at the time, but I don’t have any idea why in hindsight, and now I have to let it go. I’ve got to plan my own move over the next couple of months. It’ll be a lot easier — I have a bare minimum amount of stuff — but if I’m being honest, I’m not excited about going back to Virginia. We lived there for over a decade together and built so many memories before everything changed. We were married there. Most of our kids were born there. It feels so strange to go back to a place that was once home but no longer is. That said, it’s where I have to be if I want to be in the lives of my children more than once in a while, so I’m going.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

This month marks one year since I was forced to walk away from the family I love. Regular readers here have been with me as I’ve gone through most of it. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever endured. There were times when I wasn’t at all sure I really wanted to get to the other side of it. Times when I couldn’t see a future at all.

And if I’m being totally honest, I still can’t imagine a future that isn’t the one I thought I’d have.

But I’ve grown, despite myself. I’m confident, after nearly two months of near-constant emotional stability, that the worst of the grief has passed. It still shows up in unexpected ways and places now and again, but it’s not every day, all the time anymore. I’m calmer, more confident, more capable than I was when I left. I got through something I wasn’t at all sure I could survive. And yet, I’m still here, and I’ve come to unexpectedly rediscover the man I abandoned at the altar. By that I mean, the guy I stopped being when I set out in pursuit of being the man I thought she wanted me to be.

But that guy was never good enough — in part because he was never truly himself — and I like the guy I actually am a lot more than I thought. He’s kind of like he was at 25 — funny, interested in a ton of things, outgoing in ways he’d forgotten how to be over the years — but he’s also grown up a lot. He’s not angry anymore. He isn’t going through life with a chip on his shoulder. He’s a lot less sure about his supernatural beliefs, but he’s trying to find his way, and believes in practicing magnanimity. He’s still willing to own his rather large collection of genuine failings, but will no longer apologize for who he is at heart. And he now understands that he deserves love and respect for who he is, not just who he might become. He didn’t know that when he left last September.

And as change feelings go, I’ve got a new one. Less dramatic. Less specific. All I can say is that it has begun to feel as though I’m on the cusp of something new, and positive. Something I can’t quite see, that’s just around the corner. The next thing, whatever it is, that I’m supposed to do with my life. I can’t put my finger on it yet, but I feel an optimism that is both uncharacteristic and disconnected from the observable facts on the ground.

I’ve made it through the scouring. Now it’s time to rebuild the Shire. It’ll never be the same as it was, but it can still be something.

And it all feels like it’s happening for a reason. I can’t tell you what the reason is. I can’t even tell you if that perception is real. But ever since my dragonflies kept whispering, “keep going,” ever since Nolan’s Odyssey planted firmly in my mind the realization that I cannot control my fate this time, but must surrender to the storm, something deep within me has changed. Something inscrutable. I know now that I can only control what is within my power, and must leave the rest, as it were, to the gods.

A new chapter is beginning. Maybe even a new book. The people I love most are 300 miles away, but I can survive that for the time being, even if it will be hard.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how Fr. Joseph Krupp kept telling me, as I was preparing to leave his home in Michigan last December to return to Raleigh,

“Remember: you’re not the same man you were when you left.”

I think he was right, but he was just a little bit ahead of the game. I had already started to change, but the real growth happened after I arrived. The guy who got here last December was a tattered wreck. His nerves were on fire. His fears and grief were insurmountable. His pain kept him up at night. He couldn’t have handled another months-long separation from his kids, let alone all this uncertainty about both the present and the future, and a form of providence that feels more like a hurricane than heaven-sent.

But the guy who is sitting here writing this?

He can.

And he will.

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