moving, part one
Originally written June 7, 2022
According to US Census data, the average American moves about 11 times over their lifetime. I felt like an anomaly as a kid—I grew up in the same house my mom did and we didn’t move once. I headed East for college (my one condition for college was that it was as far away from home as possible). After I graduated from college, I moved West for a brief summer in Bellingham, Washington before settling in Portland. I lived there for 15 years, getting married, renting a few different places between 2005 and 2009, but eventually settling into a home we bought with an enormous amount of what I recognize is access to generational wealth and privilege during the bottom of the recession in 2009.
Even then, housing prices in Portland were higher than the rest of the country and on their way up. It felt, though, like the next responsible step in adulting. However conflicted we may have felt about the inequities of the housing market (and let’s be honest, at that time, it wasn’t at the forefront of our minds), it’s the accepted path to financial security in a white supremicist, capitalist society: build equity by buying into a system that was designed from the ground up to shut out poor people of color.
When my family and I moved to Tacoma in the summer of 2020 for a new job (for me), it was a big, big deal. We had been living in the same house for nearly ten years, in the same city for 15 (nearly 20 years for my husband). We had built an 800 sq ft ADU in our backyard that our friends lived in. We had our own mini co-housing community, parenting our sons together. We were settled in what we thought was going to be our Forever House. But the lure of the Dream Job was too great, so we packed it all up, sold the house, and headed north.
That first move was brutal. We had 1700 sq ft of stuff to sort through, accumulated over nearly 20 years. My husband and I are both avid readers and we had sizable book collections. He’s also a gamer and lover of sci-fi/fantasy and comic books. Did I mention the miniatures? And the shelf just filled with National Geographic and Scientific American magazines dating back to the 90’s? I was a knitter and had just gotten into sewing, so it’s not like I could roll my eyes too hard—they’d instantly have bumped up against a growing collection of yarn and designer fabrics. We had an almost five year-old who loved trains and Legos and dinosaurs.
We had SO. Much. Stuff. It was embarrasing. It was so typically American. And we didn’t even had a basement or garage (although, in full transparency, for a few years while we were building the ADU we rented a storage unit).
The house we ended up renting in Tacoma was even bigger—only because it was what was available on short-notice. We took it and made a promise to not add too much more stuff. I think we did ok, but a year later we had to move again, this time downsizing to save money on rent. The Dream Job turned out to not be at all dreamy and I had left to start my own midwifery practice. We couldn’t afford the rent, so we moved from a 2400 sq ft house to a 1400 sq ft duplex. We had a huge yard sale and still ended up needing to rent some of the storage units in our new duplex’s basement to fit everything. The stress of trying to get rid of everything in those final days was a humbling mix of adrenaline and shame that we had managed to somehow collect all this stuff we didn’t need in a time when housing inequities were even more disparate.
Now we’re moving again, for the third time in three years, back home to Portland. And this time we’re moving into a 750 sq ft, 2 bedroom apartment. Partly it’s the affordable rent. I don’t work for a big clinic anymore and my husband is self-employed. The housing market in Portland is unfathomably unaffordable. We will likely not ever be able to afford to buy a house in Portland again. But there’s a larger shift at play, which is a major re-evaluation of what’s important to us.
This move is by far the longest, most drawn-out move we’ve done. Because we wanted our son to be able to finish the school year in Tacoma, we opted to not move until June. But the perfect apartment popped up in mid-April and we knew it wouldn’t last, so we signed the lease. I’ve spent the following 8 weeks driving car loads of stuff down from Tacoma, coming down once or sometimes even twice a week in my Honda CRV—now sold, thank goodness, since we don’t need two cars in Portland. Living in Tacoma, a decidedly not bike-friendly city, was tough in that regard.
Moving slowly like this has been such an illuminating experience. I’ve been forced to touch nearly every object that made it into a box that was then driven down to our new place. Marie Kondo is a household name now and there’s a plethora of blogs and Instagram influencers touting the benefits of minimalism and decluttering. But however tidily it’s portrayed on social media, it’s no joke of a process. Confronting my relationship with my stuff has demanded a willingness to rethink my identity, my values, and my aspirations. It has forced me to come to terms with my relationship with money, shopping as a process (aka retail therapy), and the ways I participate in the global economy as a consumer—a word I loathe and yet can’t deny.
