Sorry it has taken this long to post this..... i forgot!!
At the end of March Adele and I jointly decided that we would both pack up our lives and move to Qld. She was always going to go if her application to join Tas Ambulance Service was unsuccessful. It was, unfortunately, so i was faced with the prospect of farewelling my beautiful daughter, moving house and dealing with the empty nest syndrome!! I decided to do the unthinkable and join her in Queensland! I say 'unthinkable' because i am not one who likes change. I like the security of a home, friends and family around me. So this was a huge decision for me!!
Once the decision was made, Adele booked the tickets on the Spirit of Tas so we couldn't back out! We had a little less than 6 weeks to pack up our lives, sell our stuff, pack what we were keeping into our cars, say goodbye to our friends, and hit the road! We planned to drive to Qld - Adele's final destination would be Brisbane, Mine a further 400kms up the road at Hervey Bay. 6 weeks, 2 people, ADVENTURE!!!
All was going according to plan until i was hospitalised with the worst migraine I've ever suffered. 11 days later i was home and eager to get packing - we had 3 weeks til the boat sailed!! Alas, a bad bout of flu hit me and i was again bedridden. I was however, headache free after weeks of a continuous throb so i was grateful for that. After a few more days in bed i was finally able to tackle the mammoth task of finishing off the packing!!
We sold most of our furniture and assorted items at a garage sale, gave a lot of things away and threw a lot of stuff out. I was limited in what i could keep as i didn't want to clutter up my friend's garage after his kind offer to store a few items. By far the hardest thing to do was to go thru all the childhood stuff of Adele's i had kept and which provided me with many memories. Photos and a few very special items were kept, much to Adele's disgust!!! She was horrified to find i had saved all of her baby teeth!!! She was okay with the first haircut, and then huge ponytail i had saved from her first major chop when she was 11, but the fact i had her teeth was beyond belief to her!! But she reminisced about losing her first tooth, the letters from the tooth fairy written in the tiniest handwriting, how the tooth fairy forgot to come when she was away with one weekend and lost a tooth.... then she counted them and discovered there were only 19!! There should have been 20 she said, so I had been careless and lost one!! I then reminded her that she still had a baby molar as there was no adult tooth under it!! After a lot of laughs stemming from tooth related memories, Adele assumed i was gonna throw the teeth away as she still thought it was disgusting. She thinks i did. I didn't. They are in the memory box still. I did tell her that she was lucky she was a girl as a friend kept her son's foreskin from his circumcision and presented it to him on his 21st birthday!!!
Other items i kept were Adele's first pair of ballet shoes. Again we laughed and remembered the nights she wore them and her ballet leotard and skirt to bed; how she would walk on her tiptoes around the house pretending to be 'en pointe'; how she would hang over the front fence gazing adoringly at all the little girls going into ballet class for a year before she was old enough to join; how the ballet teacher finally relented a year early and let a 3 yr old Adele into her kinder class; how we had to order her shoes from Bloch as her feet were so tiny!!
Some things we just had to get rid of, like Adele's extensive Barbie doll collection and associated vehicles, furniture and accessories. Whilst packing these up we remembered the days when a 5 yo Adele would spend a whole day assembling everything til it was perfect, right down to the little details such as having the cutlery set correctly on the dining table! She would then admire this for days - not really playing just rearranging stuff and NEVER letting anyone else play with it as she was worried they would wreck it. This included me!!! I was worried she had OCD!! Later, in her teen years, i began to wish the obsessiveness with order in the Barbie Kingdom had carried over to the real world!! Her room often resembled a tip!! The Barbies found a new home with four young sisters who cried when they received them. We know they are well loved and looked after.
Packing was one of the hardest tasks i have ever had to do. Deciding what to keep, what to sell, what to give to whom, was stressful, and as i didn't have much time, i had to make decisions quickly. I cried when saying goodbye to some things, and was glad to see the back end of others..... the last 15 years of paperwork i finally sorted and burned!! In a sense i felt like i was clearing out my life, getting rid of the clutter. It felt cathartic in the end and i don't regret it. To me it was just STUFF. Yes there are memories attached to the STUFF but because i have thrown out the STUFF doesnt mean i need to throw away the memories! i will always have the memories. Unless of course i get dementia!!!
Anyway, we made the deadline - just - packed our cars, repacked them, threw out some more stuff, repacked and finally left our home for the past 8.5 years with sadness in our hearts, but also with excitement ahead of us as we embarked on this big adventure!!
May 10th we sailed out of Devonport, even though Adele's car decided it didn't want to leave and broke down in the queue to board the ferry!! 5 days later we arrived in QLD!!! I'll leave the roadtrip stories for a later date!!
