The Journey of Parenthood…

Emily Luck

Growing up I always considered myself to have BAD luck but as I’ve become an adult and Christian and realize all the blessings I have in my life I now know that I don’t have bad luck. I have the kind of luck where things always work out in the end but it just takes lots of obstacles to get to that good luck ending. I’m used to it and I’ve accepted it and whenever I’m making plans or doing things in life I EXPECT things to go wrong while also having the confidence that it’ll all work out right 🙂

The past couple weeks have been living in a dream world. Everything was going so smoothly…so perfectly…too smoothly and perfectly. Zach and I both (as Zach has now married into my type of luck so he’s used to how things go) were waiting for something to go wrong. It had to at some point! But part of me just loved it all going so great. It felt good to keep getting good news after good news after good news with the house situation. Under contract with the 2nd person who looked at it, for close to our asking price, getting a lot at an amazing price, a pool at an amazing price, found a great builder, making our future home house plans, getting to live in our neighborhood, finding a temporary place to live for free while our house gets build, etc etc etc. I was living in the clouds! I was LOVING life and just didn’t want all the good to stop going.

Well, back to reality.

Last Tuesday night we had our girl’s night for Twilight and I was dead tired the next day. With Kye dropping the morning nap and me being so tired I broke my own rules and let him have the paci and monkey in our bed while we watched Lion King on VHS (no he didn’t SLEEP in our bed, that rule will never be broken!). It was the best two hours EVER. We had so much fun cuddling and being silly and enjoying the movie together.

Almost right when the credits rolled Zach called and I was pumped to rub it in his face what a good time we had been having! First thing he said when I answered was, “there is no good way to tell you this. our contract on our house fell through.” 

That day I was running on fumes being so tired and so I handled it really, really differently than I normally would. If any of you have ever seen me mega tired, I’m actually more easy going and fun and sweet (haha). I shrugged it off and figured it’d all work out and trusted that it was part of God’s plan and that it’d be fine. I even called Zach back and suggested that we just go along with our plans of moving into the trailer house and we could live there while we wait for our house to sell again. That way the house will be empty and dog-free and easier to show. How mature was I????

The next day I called ATT and Dish to set up our services to be moved over to the trailer. While on the phone with Dish the guy asked me if I wanted to make the trailer address our permanent billing address. I told him yeah I guess I should since I didn’t know how long we’d be living there. I mean hopefully our house sells quickly but in this economy who knows right? Well, that’s when it hit me. My plan was to never put the trailer address on anything since we could just have our mail forwarded there for the 4 months while our house gets built then forward it again to the new address. No biggie! Mail only gets forwarded for 6 months…and we don’t know when our house will sell…so that means if we moved to the trailer now that it could be a PERMANENT address!!! I started crying right there on the phone with the Dish guy (technically what brought on the tears was when they told me I couldn’t get Showtime for free for Big Brother After Dark but I was really crying because the move, I promise).

It was then that I realized I can’t move into the trailer now. I just can’t. I was SO upset with myself for feeling that way. I wish I could be the type of person who could move into that small of a living space in order to help my house sell, I wish I could. But I’m just not that person. Our friend Autumn (who does all of Kye’s pictures) and her husband lived in a tiny trailer for over a YEAR while they saved money to buy and practically rebuild a home. They did an AWESOME job saving money and I admire them so much. Now that I was faced with a similar situation I really am in awe of Autumn that she could do that. I’m not as strong or mature as she is for sure!!! I just know I’d be MISERABLE living out there (it’s in the country away from everything) in such a cramped space all day everyday with Zach working there some how too while still paying our mortgage here. I was planning on focusing on our new house while we lived there and reminding myself of the pool and the great things that were to come while we lived in those conditions. What positive would I have to focus on if we lived in now, before our house sells? It would depress me.

Not that being in this house is cheery. We stayed up until 2 am Friday morning (and turned around and left for St Augustine that day!) getting the house back in showing order. I know ALL of you are going to tell me what everyone else has said (and it’s driven me nuts hearing it)…we shouldn’t have moved stuff into storage until our house officially closed. But do you realize that that’s impossible? You HAVE to move stuff before closing because when you close on your house they own your house so you can’t really move after that ya know? Thankfully all the stuff we moved isn’t stuff we need to live. Our house is empty except for the things we planned on having at the trailer. So we’re basically living like we would in the trailer but we’re just in our house. There are no pictures on the walls, hardly any furniture, no decorations at all any where, no curtains, and only 2 lonely chairs at our dining room table. It’s so bare. And now it’s also so TAN. 

Since the people who were buying our house wanted us to paint over all the green and do a tan color we thought it’d sell better just by going ahead and painting it tan now. So Zach did ALL of it Thur night (with some help from Seth, such a good friend)! We HAD to get it ready to show so we had to get it painted before we left. I hate it. I mean I guess to outsiders it looks good and it’s very neutral and sell-friendly but to me it’s horrible. I am craving some COLOR. It’s so bland and so boring and it’s just not ME.

our house

this house now (notice Sadie is in both shots haha)

It’s hard living here now as I’m an emotional person and emotionally I cut this place off. I unattached myself from it and no longer consider it mine. And now it’s mine again but it (hopefully) won’t be for long so I don’t want to get re-attached ya know? It’s also so hard because we had such great things going and now they all stop. We are still buying the lot (as we are under contract so we have to but it’s also such a good deal we’d hate to lose it) but everything else will be on hold until the house sells (we cannot possibly afford two house payments!). And while my gut tells me it won’t take long, it could and that’s scary. I was so excited to be in our new house before Christmas and to have a pool for next summer. It makes me so, so angry at the people who were going to buy our house because while it was under contract with them we missed so many potential buyers! SEVERAL houses have sold on our street this past month and those people could have been living in our house instead 🙁

While I know I’m being immature about the whole thing, I just can’t help myself. I think my monthly visitor isn’t helping with those emotions! Deep down though I know I’m being childish. I think about all the things that other people are dealing with and I know my problems are very, very small in comparison. I know that all of this is part of some bigger master plan and that we just don’t know what that is yet. THAT drives me nuts! Hello God, all of this would be a lot easier to handle if you’d just go ahead and tell me the ending and the purpose, thanks!

I DO still 100% trust in God. I know that He is watching over us and I know that His will is what we want done. There IS a reason for all of this. I’ve been thinking about when I watch a movie or a tv show and a person gets in a car wreck and dies and how I always think about if they’d just taken one second longer to leave their house that it all wouldn’t have happened. By us living in this house longer it changes everything we’re doing. Instead of moving we’re going other places and doing other things so I like to think that maybe God is protecting us from something horrible that would have happened if our house would have sold. I know that’s being a bit dramatic about it but it makes me feel better about the whole thing 🙂 

I spent all of last Thursday beating myself up about my feelings. I hated that I am who I am and that I am very upset over something that isn’t that big of a deal. I hated that I’m not more mature, more strong, more emotionally stable haha. But in the end I realized that this is me. It’s who I am and that’s okay. It’s okay to be upset…it’s a crappy situation! I think it’s NORMAL to be upset. Yes, I wish I could be more positive about it, but I can’t right now and that’s okay. I’ll man up soon enough (probably after my “visitor” leaves…) and get over myself!

This time period of having the house on the market is tough because things are not in OUR hands. All we can do is keep the house as clean as possible and pray that interest rates don’t go up before we’re able to lock in. We can’t control who rides by our house. We can’t control who wants to look at it. We can’t control if anyone decides to buy it. It’s a waiting game and it’s an annoying one. But I have to keep reminding myself of ALL the MANY blessings I have in my life and that I know in the end it’ll all work out…because that’s how “Emily Luck” works. It sucks right now but this is just one of those obstacles we have to go through in order to have our happy ending. It’ll all be worth it in the end!

Thanks so much for still liking me even when I go on these little rants! I’ve been DYING to blog about this because I knew once I vented out all my feelings that I’d start feeling better about it, and it’s already helping. Of course it’d make me feel really great if some people would start coming to see our house…anyone interested? 

Emily Parker
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