Keila Tirado-Leist

I spent some time with Lucía in the meadow this past weekend taking photos and looking at how far we've come in this area. Years ago this space used to be a tennis court and when we moved in it was half an acre of short green grass. Apparently, the tennis court had been removed several years ago in the early  00's based on our assessment of the homes original architectural drafts. The house underwent one major remodel in the 90's and that's pretty much the same home we moved into about a year ago. Everything was preserved in excellent shape (minus the finished basement and a couple areas but more of that in another post), and we could see in those drafts that the tennis court was still there. When we first saw this area the snow was slowly melting and we knew that this piece of land was incredibly special. We immediately began bouncing ideas with each other and decided that we would make it into a garden of some sort.

Last night I met up with some friends (some that I hadn't seen in over a year because of the pandemic) to celebrate a belated birthday, and it felt so good to chat with other women at different stages of motherhood. These past few weeks I've been contemplating on the reality that has been this past year and a half. It isn't that I haven't thought about this time where we have all dramatically shifted our lives, because there has been no avoiding any of the pain or deep layers of uncertainty. But I have been avoiding the feelings of what it's meant. I know it's my own trauma response to navigate difficult periods of my life on a kind of numbing state to avoid feeling, but it's been some of my deepest healing work to allow myself to feel. And it's a scary thought to sit in what it means to have felt harm or fear, but as I've learned during years of therapy, acknowledging that is a necessary part in the path of healing. It's like, okay harm, I know I felt you and I know that it hurt, but now what? 

Before I go into writing more about our new home, I have to share how we found it! Firstly, I should mention that the market at the time we bought our home was nothing like it is right now. We weren't exactly in a buyers market but there definitely wasn't an issue finding homes that we could view. I knew that I didn't want to live in Wauwatosa where we lived for the past four years, even though we had made great connections there and loved our kiddos school! But we wanted more yard and space for us to grow into. And although we didn't want to live in the country, we wanted to feel further from the hustle of the city. We also had to keep in mind that Benjamin could not be more than 30 miles away from his new job in the city of Milwaukee because of call/and or emergencies.