A guide for women standing at the edge of a big move
The practical and the honest, from a woman who's actually done it
The Wisdom Lane
Welcome
Part One — Before You Decide
Part Two — The Practical Middle
Part Three — The Part Nobody Warns You About
Closing
My name is Ros.
In July of 2021 — right in the middle of COVID — my husband and I packed up a house we'd lived in for twenty years and drove to Texas in a big yellow moving truck, with our two little dogs riding along in the cab between us.
I had researched everything before we went. Cost of living, tax rates, neighborhoods, weather patterns. I had spreadsheets. I could have told you anything you wanted to know about property values in three different zip codes.
I had not asked myself a single one of the questions in this book.
Those turned out to be the ones that mattered.
This isn't a moving company's checklist, though there's a little bit of that in here too, because some things really are just worth having in place before you go. But mostly, this is what I wish somebody had told me. The parts that aren't about boxes or trucks at all.
Whatever your move is — across the country, out of a job, into a smaller house, or out of a season you've simply outgrown — I hope this helps you go into it with your eyes open, and your heart a little more ready than mine was.
Take your time with it. Write in the margins. Skip nothing, especially the parts you want to skip.
Let's go.
— Ros
Before You Decide
Chapter One
When somebody tells me they're thinking about a big move, they usually start with the wrong questions first. Where should we go. What will it cost. How are the schools, the weather, the taxes.
Those aren't bad questions. They're just not the ones that decide whether you'll be glad you went.
I found that out the hard way. I had an answer for every practical question before we left California, and I still ended up sitting in my car crying so hard I couldn't see the stoplights, because I hadn't asked myself a single thing that actually mattered.
So before we get to the logistics — and we will get there, I promise you — I want to hand you the ten questions I wish somebody had handed me. Answer them honestly. Nobody has to see this page but you, and the ones you want to skip are usually the ones with something in them.
Not what it will change on paper. What you're quietly hoping will be different about your life once you're on the other side of it. Say the real hope, even if it sounds like too much to ask.
There's usually one thing you haven't told anybody. A doubt, a hope, a reason that isn't the reason you give people. Write it here. This page isn't going to repeat it.
Our whole family was supposed to move with us. We wouldn't have gone otherwise. Then jobs changed and people fell in love, and it was just the two of us. Answer this one carefully. It's the question I got wrong.
Look at the boxes you haven't opened in five years. It isn't clutter. Every one of them has somebody in it. That's why you haven't touched them, and that's worth knowing before somebody makes you hurry.
Some things travel and some don't. Sunday dinners. A person who knows what you looked like at nineteen. The friend who shows up without calling first. Name them now, honestly, so the loss doesn't ambush you later.
Some of that is fine. Love moves people across the country all the time. But you should know the number, because it's going to come up on a hard day.
It will get hard. Not maybe. Decide right now what the true thing is that you'll say to yourself at two in the morning, and write it where you can find it again.
This one surprised me. Wherever you've been, people know what you're good at. In a new place, nobody does. You arrive with no reputation at all — which is heavier than it sounds, and freer than it sounds.
Not look like. Feel like. Quiet? Busy? Close to family? Full of new people? You get more say in this than you think, but only if you decide it on purpose.
This is the one nobody asks, and it's the one that will find you. The move ends. The unpacking ends. And then it's an ordinary Tuesday and nobody needs anything from you by nine in the morning. Take your time here.
Chapter Two
Our whole family was supposed to move with us to Texas. That was the plan, and I want to be honest with you — we wouldn't have left otherwise. It wasn't really a move. It was supposed to be a relocation of everybody, and my husband and I just happened to be the ones going first.
But you know how it goes with younger people. Jobs change. Situations change. Somebody falls in love. And one by one, it turned into just the two of us going.
By then our house was already sold. We had already bought in Dallas. You cannot unsell a house, and you cannot un-buy the other one. There is a point of no return in a move like this, and it is not noble or peaceful when you arrive at it. There was grief in it, real grief, and it did not stay quiet.
I drove to my daughter's house one afternoon wailing in the car by myself, barely able to see the stoplights through the tears. Everybody I loved, everything that brought me joy, my entire life — all of it about to be a fifteen-hundred-mile drive away, and none of it going with me the way I'd planned.
My daughter followed us all the way to the Arizona state line the day we finally left. Then her blinker came on, and she turned around to go home. Home. I still tear up telling that part, five years later. It's been five years, and she visits every few months, and I still feel that turn signal in my chest sometimes.
Here's what I want to hand you, in case your own plan has any other people leaning against it the way mine did.
A plan that depends on somebody else's plan is not really a plan. It's a hope wearing a plan's clothes. And hopes are lovely things — but they cannot be the only thing holding up a decision this size.
That doesn't mean don't hope. It means build the version of your plan that survives even if the people around you change theirs. Ask yourself plainly: if it ends up being just me, do I still want to go? If the answer is yes, you have a plan. If the answer is no, that is worth knowing before you sell the house, not after.
And one more thing, since I promised you this book would be honest. The thing I sobbed about in that car came true anyway. My granddaughter and four of my great-grandchildren live in Texas now. Just late, and not on the schedule I'd cried about losing. Sometimes what falls apart in the planning finds its own way back together, on its own time. You don't get to control when. You just have to be willing to go without the guarantee.
The Practical Middle
Chapter Three
I had only seen our house in person one time before we bought it. We were in a hurry, honestly — mostly to make sure we wouldn't end up homeless once our California house sold — so some parts of it I genuinely couldn't remember. I stood at that front door the day we arrived, worried it wouldn't live up to the memory I'd been carrying.
Then I walked through, and it all came back. I remembered exactly why we'd chosen it. A full acre of land. A circular driveway. A backyard so beautiful you could practically live out there, not fancy, just full of trees as far as we could see. Neighbors close, but not close enough to feel crowded. And no fences between any of the yards — every property separate, but somehow connected, which was different from anything I'd known, and it never once felt wrong.
Some of the sadness I'd been carrying just melted away, standing in that doorway.
If you're thinking about buying a house in a place you haven't really lived yet, here's what I'd tell you, in plain language.
Walk it in person if you possibly can, even just once. A video call is not the same as standing in a room. It cannot tell you what a house feels like.
If you truly cannot walk it yourself, send somebody you trust to walk it for you. Have them video call you room by room. Ask them to open every closet and look up at every ceiling, not just the pretty parts.
Don't skip the inspection because you're in a hurry. We were in a hurry too. Get the inspection anyway. A hurried decision and a blind decision don't have to be the same thing.
Ask about the neighborhood the way you'd ask about a person you're about to marry. What's it like at night? On a Sunday? In the worst month of the year, weather-wise? Nobody tells you these things unless you ask directly.
Get everything in writing, and read what you're signing even when everyone around you is rushing you to sign it. Especially then.
And know this, because it's the truest thing I can tell you about the whole experience: sometimes the decision you made in a panic turns out to be exactly right anyway. Ours was. Give your decision a chance to prove itself before you decide too early that it was a mistake.
Chapter Four
I stood in my driveway in California and watched a dump truck pull away with things I loved on the back of it. Not things I'd decided to get rid of. Things I never got to look at one more time. We couldn't go through everything, because the truck had been sent two hours earlier than planned, and the movers couldn't wait for us and couldn't come back. We were leaving the next morning. There was no other day.
So I stood there with my whole life in front of me and about twenty minutes to decide what came to Texas. Do you know what your brain does in a situation like that? Nothing useful. I was just grabbing at things.
I watched that truck drive down my street until it turned the corner, and then I went inside and fell apart, because it wasn't furniture going down the road. It was twenty years.
I believed, without ever saying it out loud, that those things were the memories. Not that they reminded me of things — that they held them. That if the boxes went, the years went with them. That's why I'd never gone through any of it in the years before. It felt like deciding what parts of my life to erase.
I grieved that loss for weeks.
Here's when it turned. A few months into the new house, I sat down and tried to write out a list of everything that had been on that truck, mostly so I could properly mourn it. I could not do it. I got a few things down, and then nothing came. I had cried for weeks over that truck, and I could not tell you what was on it.
My mother is not gone. Those twenty years in that house are not gone. I can still tell you exactly what that kitchen smelled like. Every memory I was afraid of losing was still sitting right there where it had always been. The things were never the memories. They were only where I'd been storing them.
And here's the part that's a little uncomfortable to admit. If I'd gotten my careful afternoon to sort through everything — the one I thought I wanted — I'd have kept almost all of it. I know I would have. I would have loaded my entire old life onto that truck and set it down in the middle of my brand new house.
That purge wasn't done gently. But it was done. And I got to walk into Texas lighter than I ever would have chosen to be on my own.
I won't tell you I don't miss anything. There are one or two things I'd still take back if I could. But losing things cost me about a tenth of what I'd braced myself for, and I think that's true almost every time, for almost everybody.
Here's a small assignment, if you want to test this for yourself before your own move forces the question on you.
I'll tell you right now what the answer's going to be. You won't think about it much at all. The dread of losing something is almost always bigger than the living without it.
Chapter Five
We asked the moving company for a good, reliable truck for the drive to Texas. What they gave us instead was one of their newer ones.
Somewhere in the middle of Texas, which felt like it would never end, something went wrong with the steering. It was about one in the morning. When we called it in, the man on the phone said, "Oh yeah, we've had some problems with that going out on our newer trucks." You're kidding, right? He was not kidding.
They couldn't get to us until eight the next morning. We had pulled over, fortunately, at a tiny little gas station — not a big travel plaza, one of those places you'd miss completely if you weren't looking for it. We spent the night in that uncomfortable truck cab. Us, and our two little dogs.
When help finally arrived, they declared the truck undrivable. We knew that. What we didn't expect was that they wouldn't simply give us a different truck. Instead, they unpacked everything we had so carefully and meticulously packed, and loaded it onto another truck — which couldn't happen until the following day. So we found ourselves getting a hotel room near the rental truck location, with everything we owned sitting in a parking lot somewhere behind us.
You can just imagine.
I tell that story for the laugh now, because it earned one eventually. But it also taught me something small and practical: something will go wrong on moving day. Not might. Will. So keep a few things close, in the car with you, not buried on the truck.
Chapter Six
Everything up to this point has been about the heart of a move. This chapter is different on purpose. If you're past deciding and you just want to know what to have in place, here it is — the plain, practical list, without the forty-point spreadsheet a moving company would hand you. Just what's actually worth having ready.
None of this has to be perfect. It just has to be somewhere you can find it on the worst possible day — because there's usually one of those in the first week.
The Part Nobody Warns You About
Chapter Seven
Everybody prepares you for moving day. Nobody prepares you for the Tuesday after.
The boxes get unpacked eventually. The pictures go up on the wall. The kitchen starts to feel like yours instead of like somebody else's kitchen you're borrowing for a while.
And then, one ordinary morning, you wake up and realize nobody needs anything from you by nine o'clock.
That's the part nobody warns you about. It isn't sad, exactly. It's just quiet in a way you don't have any practice with — especially if you spent decades with somebody needing something from you by nine, whether that was a job, or children, or both at once.
I want to say something plainly here, because I wish somebody had said it to me: peace and being finished are not the same thing. You can be perfectly content in a beautiful, quiet house and still not be done. You can love your life exactly as it is and still want something in it that belongs only to you.
Those two things can sit at the same table.
If the quiet catches you off guard once you're settled, you are not doing anything wrong. You're simply standing at the edge of the next question, which is usually this one: now that it's quiet, what do I want my days to be for?
You don't have to answer that today. But it's worth knowing the question is coming, so it doesn't ambush you the way it ambushed me.
Chapter Eight
There's a particular kind of blessing in moving toward family, and a particular kind of strange in it too, and I don't think anybody talks about the second part enough.
I have family here in Texas that I love completely. But loving them is not the same as them knowing what I looked like at nineteen. Family you love and family you grew up with are not the same thing, and it took me a while to stop expecting the first kind to feel exactly like the second kind.
Our first big family gathering here, there were about forty people in my house. Every single one of them family. I had left an immediate family of under ten people back in California, and I walked into forty, and I genuinely did not know what to do with myself. I brought out my good dishes — the pretty ones. My family here looked at me like I'd lost my mind. Girl, put those up, use the paper plates. Who's washing all that? I mentioned I had a dishwasher. Didn't matter one bit. Five years later, I still bring out the paper plates.
That's a small story, but it taught me something real. Fitting into a family you didn't grow up in sometimes means letting them correct you, and laughing about it, instead of holding tight to how you've always done things.
The closeness came slowly, and then all at once. It wasn't one big moment. It was school pickups. It was ballgames. It was ordinary Tuesdays with my granddaughter and my great-grandbabies, who live here now too. And then one day, the children started saying yes ma'am and no ma'am to me, and something in me went — oh. We are onto something good here.
If you're moving toward family, give it more time than you think you should have to give it. Closeness with people who didn't raise you and didn't grow up alongside you gets built the exact same way anything real gets built — slowly, out of ordinary days, not out of one good visit.
Chapter Nine
Nobody tells you how strange it feels to want a friend again at this age.
You've spent decades collecting people without really trying — coworkers, neighbors, other parents at school pickup, people from church you saw every single week for twenty years. Friendship used to just happen to you, built out of proximity and repetition, without you ever having to go looking for it on purpose.
Then you move, and all of a sudden you're looking for it deliberately, almost like a job application, and it feels a little bit ridiculous to be doing that at this stage of life.
Here's what I've come to believe about it, even before I finish telling you my own version. One repeated place beats ten one-time events. You'll meet more people at the same Tuesday morning class for six months than you will at ten different one-off gatherings you never go back to. Familiarity is what turns a stranger into a friend, and familiarity needs repetition far more than it needs a great first impression.
So pick one thing. Not five things — one. A class, a group, a volunteer shift, a standing coffee with somebody you barely know yet. Go back even when the first few times feel awkward, because they will feel awkward. Give it long enough to become familiar, not just long enough to decide whether you like it.
It is not too late to make a new best friend. It's just going to take longer than it used to, and it's going to require you to do on purpose what used to simply happen to you.
Chapter Ten
So. You've made the move, or you're standing at the edge of making it. Either way, here's the thing I want to leave you with.
The move ends. The unpacking ends. The boxes get flattened and put out for recycling, and one ordinary day you look up and realize you live here now. This is simply your life.
And that's when the bigger question shows up — the one that isn't really about a house or a state at all. What are you going to do with the life you still have left?
Here's what I've learned since I first asked myself that. You are not starting over. Whatever you've lived — the jobs, the mistakes, the things you figured out the hard way, the rooms you walked into scared and handled anyway — all of that came with you. Every bit of it fit in the truck.
What you know can go one of three ways. You can speak it, out loud, to people who need to hear it from somebody who has actually lived it. You can write it, so it keeps traveling long after you've left the room. Or you can teach it, and shorten somebody else's road by years.
That's what I do now, at The Wisdom Lane. I'm on YouTube most weeks, figuring all of this out in public — the fumbling parts included — and I would love for you to come sit with me a while.
If you're not sure yet which of the three is yours, I built a short quiz that sorts it out in about five minutes: [QUIZ LINK]
And you can find the channel right here: [YOUTUBE LINK]
Life is too short to keep your wisdom to yourself.
Come on. There's more road ahead.
— Ros