It's possibly our last night here.
Me and my kids have been staying in our second hotel, the second place we've had to make a home out of a hotel room. This one has been the longest. Five weeks.
Five weeks of trying to make a temporary place feel like somewhere we belong. Five weeks of our things finding their places, of figuring out how to live here, of making the best of what we have because that's what we've had to do.
And somehow, we did.
We made this room our home the best way we knew how.
Tonight, the kids are sleeping while I'm packing our things up.
They're sleeping, and I'm awake, surrounded by the pieces of our life that I'm trying to put back into bags and boxes. Things that have been scattered around this room for five weeks, things that became part of our little routine, things that made this unfamiliar place feel familiar.
And I'm filled with so many emotions that it hurts. Deeply. Badly.
I don't even know if I have the right words for everything I'm feeling right now. There's the sadness of leaving. The exhaustion of having to keep going. The weight of not knowing what comes next. And something about doing all of this while my babies sleep, knowing that when they wake up, things might be different again.
Five weeks.
That's how long we got to settle into this particular place. Long enough for it to become our normal, even though it was never supposed to be our permanent home.
I think that's one of the hardest parts of this life right now. Having to keep making temporary places feel safe. Having to unpack, settle in, arrange our things, and let ourselves breathe a little, only to face the possibility of packing everything back up again.
We are not just packing our belongings. We are leaving another place where we've been trying to live our lives in the middle of everything that's happening.
And tonight, I need to acknowledge how much that hurts.
I don't want this night to disappear into the blur of everything we've been through. I don't want to look back someday and remember only that we stayed in hotels, that we had to move, that things were hard.
I want to remember this exact part, too.
The kids sleeping.
Me packing.
Five weeks behind us.
The room that we made ours.
The feelings that are so big I can barely explain them.
I want to remember that even in a hotel room, even in a situation I never wanted for us, I was still their mom. I was still trying to make a home for my children. I was still doing the little things that make a place feel like ours.
And whatever happens next, those five weeks were part of our lives. We lived them. We made memories here. We slept here, woke up here, kept going here.
This was where we were for a while.
And tonight, it hurts to leave.
I don't have to pretend that I'm okay with that. I don't have to turn it into something positive before I'm allowed to feel it. I don't have to know what comes next to admit that this moment is breaking my heart.
Tonight, I'm just a mom packing up the place where she's been trying to make a home for her kids.
And I want to remember her, too.