Sectional Healing 6/25: Home

No links today, just writing because this week, we move back home to Tennessee.

I’ve been wanting to write about this for a few weeks now but for a few reasons, I’ve been unable to. For one, because moving is exhausting. Did you know when you move, you have to move, like, everything? All the godless junk you “accumulate”¹ has to be wrapped, boxed, and taped? I know we *know* that but unless you’ve done it recently, you don’t understand the molecular brutality of such a thing.

My low point this week was gas station hopping at 2:30am while wearing a single solo croc (croci??) and a single solo flip flop because I’d already packed all of my shoes. Tragically, I’d run out of packing tape and with the movers arriving early the next morning, I had to find a solution. With Walmart closed, I finally found a gas station that sold baby sized rolls of duct tape and I bought their entire inventory.

When I dropped all the travel-sized rolls of duct tape on the counter, the clerk looked at me and I looked at the clerk, both of us aware of how serial killer adjacent this made me look. He clocked me in case he had to be interviewed by a True Crime podcast in the future, and I did not bristle at this because being type-cast as a weirdly shoed murderer is the tax I must pay for poor tape planning.

The second reason I wasn’t sure what to write was this overwhelming feeling of “Does anyone really care?” My suspicion is that talking about why you are moving is a little like talking about your fantasy football team / gambling exploits, your astrological sign or the dream you had last night; these are all artifices we hope somehow makes us more interesting than we actually are.

All that being said and even though I’m not even sure that this is particularly interesting to anyone outside of myself or Ashley, I’m STILL somehow writing about this. The line between ‘indulgent’ and ‘informatively applicable’ is so very, very thin.

---

The billboard of this decision is that after three years, we really, really missed home. We miss our families, we miss our friends, and we miss the comforts associated with the places we’ve known our whole life.

But, we always knew that would be the case. It’s not like we didn’t care for those things when we left. But there were three swirling anxieties we realized we had to resolve, which led to our move.

1. We needed a hard reset as a family. Not for any tawdry or scandalous reason. It was just very important for Ash and I to start things over and revise our entirely core family dynamic instead of just flying by the seat of our pants, which is what had been happening.

   I’ve never seen We Bought a Zoo but I imagine a similar vibe in terms of wiping the slate clean so that you might redefine the entire thing.

   

   I’m 40% sure that’s the plot of We Bought A Zoo but for all I know, Matt Damon might just be a Zoo fiend or like that really shady Jeff guy from Tiger King who looked 60 but dressed like a 20 year old.

Or honestly if we really want to go through the looking glass, We Bought A Zoo could actually be like some kind of earnest prequel to the Madagascar series where we understand who zookeepers the zookeepers.

ANYWAYS, the point is, if We Bought A Zoo is about a hard reset for a family, that’s what we were doing, except minus the animals and ScarJo. Other than those two major points, PERFECT ANALOGY.

2. We wanted to shake up the rhythms and trajectories of our kids, which makes it sound like all of our kids were like Ryan from Chino before he was welcomed to the OC. To be clear, they were not. (Except for Marlowe. Jury is still out on her.) There’s just a sixth-sense (not seeing dead people) aspect about parenting when you know your kids require something different than the situation you have them in.

3. We wanted to see if my moving to Birmingham would clarify whether the PMG was a successful hobby OR if it could be a business with things like budgets and a balance sheet.

Having resolved those things and having felt the extreme isolation and loneliness of the pandemic, it felt like we were ok to move back. THUS HERE WE ARE.

---

Some FAQs I’ve been getting about all this:

You’re moving…again??

I know. Glutton for punishment, etc. That’s a TN to AL move in 2018, a pandemic move in 2020, and this move back home. All only financially possible because Ashley is ELITE at renovating and staging homes.

How is this going to affect The Popcast?

Nothing changes. We're still dishing the hot takes in perpetuity.

But it will be different now.

No, it won’t.

But you won’t be recording in the same room.

Of our 400+ episodes, over 300 of them were not recorded in the same room. We’ve been doing this show for just under eight years and for six (6) of them, we have not been in the same room.

But that just makes me sad.

I accept your feelings and I’m flattered that you feel anything positive about the work we do at the PMG. But moving home will make me and my family happy so sad + happy = even?

In all seriousness, The PMG is something I helped build and I LOVE my work there and I love all the people I get to do that work with. My family comes first in all things but this is a situation where the decision to move was so easy because of the nature of my work with the PMG. I’ll still travel to Birmingham regularly to record and we have the best of the best in terms of recording set-ups so it’s the best of both worlds.

---

Writing now the night before we leave for good, I’m in a wistful and nostalgic mood. I’m so excited to go back, but I’m sad to leave this place that has been so formative for Ash and I, for our kids, for myself, and for the PMG.

I’m sad to be leaving our house which has been my favorite house I’ve ever lived in.

I’m sad to be leaving Alabama’s affinity and commitment to barbecue and college football.

I’m sad to be leaving the traffic and medieval condition of all the roadways because getting home every day made it feel like my own personal Mad Max: Fury Road.

I’m sad to be leaving the handful of families who took us under their wings when they didn’t have to and looked out for us and our kids. Being kind and good to Ash and I is one thing. But the people who invested and cared for our kids? That’s a debt for life situation and those people are the REAL MVPs of this experience.

Three years ago, I didn’t think we would ever go back. There was a sense of leaving home that felt like an escape. Not from the place or any people, but an escape of self. Of who I was and how I was.

I / we needed to leave so that we could wander a bit. To find ourselves in a new place with new people. To grow up. To struggle. To find new failures but also new successes.

And then Easter weekend, while sitting in the kitchen, Ash and I realized we’d both felt permission to go home. We’d had this conversation many times together in the preceding three years, but it was always one of us feeling like we couldn’t leave yet.

But on that specific night, we both finally agreed that it felt like we had earned the right to go home because we were all different in ways that felt more aligned with who we wanted to be and more worthy of the place and people we call home.

And I guess that’s how it works sometimes: the place you want to escape from becomes the place you are desperate to escape to.

1. “mindlessly buy at Target just so you can FEEL SOMETHING”