What No One Tells You When You Move Out of Your Childhood Home

It has brought up some broken childhood dreams.

Photo by Josh Hild on Unsplash

The past few months, I’ve been going through an interesting transition, to say the least. At the beginning of this seemingly endless pandemic, my mom approached my older brother and me and told us since we were all in quarantine, we might as well be productive.

So, we got a dumpster and purged the shit out of our house.

We got rid of everything around our house we've been telling each other for years we’ve been wanting to get rid of. Anything that couldn’t be donated was dramatically thrown off our back porch into the giant rusty pit we rented for a few weeks. Looking back over a year later, that was just the first step of many we would take to eventually sell our family home.

Growing up, I had the illusion my parents were never going to separate or get a divorce. This seems like a common belief many kids have, regardless of how chaotic or toxic their parents’ relationship may be. But that illusion instantly disintegrated when I was nine, and my father sat down next to me on the couch, turned off the TV, and told me he was leaving. He didn’t say why he was leaving, all he said was he was staying “with a friend”.