Moving Home

On Big decisions, Discernment, and Trusting God

Good morning, friends. A quick note before today’s essay. Two weeks ago, after I announced our pending move back to Steubenville, I received quite a few questions about our “why” and our discernment process. I’m answering those questions in today’s essay, both because I hope it’s helpful and because thoughts of our move are occupying every corner of my mind. I did hesitate before posting, though, mostly because I know things can go wrong right up until the moment papers are signed. So, please read this whole newsletter knowing it reflects our discernment process up to this very second and that prayers for smooth appraisals, inspections, mortgages, closings, and actual move days are needed and appreciated.

Also, this will be the last regular essay of 2023. Next month, as in Advents past, I’ll instead offer a mini Advent retreat for full subscribers. It really is mini, just four weekly written reflections tied in to the Sunday Gospel readings, accompanied by a series of questions for your week. It’s designed to be short, simple, and low key…because short, simple, and low-key are what I need during December and I know others do too. You don’t have to do anything special to get these reflections. They will automatically go out to all full subscribers every Sunday. If you’re reading this and not a full subscriber, this is a great time to become one

I couldn’t sleep last night. In part, because Becket woke up, then Ellie woke up, and even though Chris was on night duty, I don’t fall back asleep easily. More than that, my mind just couldn’t rest. It kept circling back to my to-do list for the next six weeks, which now includes not only making the stuffing for Thanksgiving and decorating the house for Christmas, but also securing a new mortgage, booking a moving company, and neatly packing the lives of five people into cardboard boxes.

All of which is to say, as of Sunday night, our house is officially under contract.

A half dozen things could still go wrong. Buyers who change their minds, a low appraisal, a bad inspection, or delayed paperwork could all derail or delay our move to Steubenville, but for now, God willing, the countdown to upheaval has begun. And I am so, so excited.

I am not excited about the process of moving. I’m dreading that like the plague. It’s also strange to think of anyone besides my family living in this house. I know other people lived in it for over a century before mine came along. But when we bought this place we remade every inch of it, renovating, repairing, and restoring all that 126 years of life had taken from it. There is not one corner of this house over which I didn’t labor. And now we’re walking away from it.

We’re also walking away from the nursery, where I rocked three miracle babies to sleep; from the dining room where friends laughed and ate; from all the rooms where marriage and parenthood, birth and death, friendships forged and friendships lost have transformed our lives. Through both the work done to this house and the life lived in it, we have made it utterly and completely our own. And I will miss it. I also will miss going to Mass every Sunday at the parish we adore. And I am not excited at all about the extra 40 minutes that will separate me from the dearest friends I’ve made here. But if I could pack up and go tomorrow, I would.

Why?

There are a dozen practical reasons. It’s more affordable in Ohio. Taxes are lower. Gas and food are cheaper. We will have more house and more yard than we ever could have in Pittsburgh. The two Catholic organizations with which I have worked most closely for the past twenty years—Franciscan University and the St. Paul Center—are based in Steubenville. The homeschooling laws are much less onerous. The state government is much more competent. Babysitters are easier to come by. Again, just lots of sensible reasons. But none of those alone or together are why we’re leaving a home and friends we love. So again, why? Why the move and how did we discern it was the right one?

A Foundation of Place

The answer to that question starts with our children.

Unlike some families who move to Steubenville, we’re not going because we think it will “keep our kids Catholic” or insulate them from all the harsh realities of a broken world. I spent 15 years living in Steubenville before Chris and I married, and I am under no illusions about what a Catholic community will and will not do for your kids. Trouble can find your family anywhere. Wherever humans abide, sin abides as well. So do annoyances, frustrations, casual cruelty, and petty feuds. Steubenville is not Heaven, and if someone moves there expecting it to be so, they will find themselves disappointed right quick.

We’re not expecting Heaven. We’re not moving to give our kids or ourselves a perfect Catholic life. But we are moving to give them a better life, a life where school isn’t 45 minutes away, Church isn’t 20 minutes away, and play dates never happen because coordinating social activities with families spread out across an entire metropolitan area takes more time than any mom with three littles has. Chris and I don’t want our kids spending their childhood in a car. We want them to spend it in their own neighborhood, running wild with friends who live in houses we can see from our kitchen window. And that’s what they’ll have in Steubenville.

The neighborhood in which we’ll live is not many people’s idea of a great neighborhood. You need to drive through what looks like a post-apocalyptic ghetto to get to our street. That ghetto is filled with crime, addiction, and poverty—deep, deep Appalachia meets Rust Belt poverty. It is both heartbreaking and grounding. You do not escape the world by living in this neighborhood. You drive through it daily. But, on the far side of this ghetto, on a bluff overlooking the Ohio River, is a street lined with big old houses and filled with kids. That street and the blocks adjacent to it are where many University professors, employees, and other Catholic families live. It’s where I lived for fifteen years before leaving. Everyone knows everyone. And the kids are everywhere—running through yards, riding on bikes, sledding down hills, just doing what kids used to do all the time, doing what Chris and I used to do when we were kids, both in his big city and my small one.

Kids don’t do that in our neighborhood in Pittsburgh, though. Here, the children leave early and come home late. School, sports, and parents’ work schedules keep this neighborhood empty of children (and moms) from sunup to sundown. It’s lonely for my kids, and I don’t like to see my kids lonely. I want to give them the closest thing I can to the childhood I had—a childhood filled with family and friends who lived within minutes of each other and where loved ones were always in and out of each other’s houses, not only for fancy dinner parties or occasional gatherings, but also for a quick chat over coffee, a glass of wine in the backyard, and impromptu dinners when the moms just couldn’t stop talking to each other.

I didn’t receive the best formation in the Faith as a child, but I received an incredible formation in friendship, hospitality, and community. That has made a tremendous difference in my life, and, I believe, it is one of the reasons I responded so easily to God’s gift of faith when He offered it. Grace builds on nature, and the natural foundation my parents gave me was a strong one. I want my children to have that same kind of foundation, so that even if they wander far from Jesus, they’ll have the natural foundation they need to more easily find their way back.

That’s the first reason we’re leaving: for the kids. The second reason is for me. Pittsburgh is wonderful. Our friends are wonderful. But this city has never been home. Home is cornfields, the Mississippi River, and men walking through the grocery store in John Deere hats. It’s also an old Ohio River town that has seen better days. I spent almost as much of my life in Steubenville as I did in Rock Island. It’s where my closest friendships were forged, where my writing career began, and where I fell in love with Chris. I lived a whole life in that small town, and my heart just about broke when we left it. The first night we spent in our current house, I cried for hours, sobbing the same words over and over again to Chris: “I want to go home.” I have felt that way ever since. And every time we went back to Steubenville, the tears would return. So, we didn’t go back often. It hurt too much.

I am both extrovert and introvert. I gain about as much energy from people as I lose. But I absolutely thrive in a close-knit community. I am happiest when I feel known, like l am part of something and belong. Which is why our parish has been such a great gift to me. I feel that way there. I feel at home. I don’t feel that way in the rest of Pittsburgh. I don’t feel that way in my own neighborhood. I mostly feel lost.

Again, I love our friends. But scheduling times to see those friends is as difficult as scheduling playdates. And I need community daily, not just on Sundays or once a month when someone hosts a party. I want to walk out my door, go on a walk, and run into five people I know. I want to go to the grocery store or coffee shop and get stuck for an hour because I get caught up in so many conversations with friends and neighbors that I lose track of time. I flourish best in a place where I feel deeply rooted—in a home, a street, a neighborhood, a city. I’m don’t feel that way here, and I am not as joyful as I want to be—as joyful as I used to be—because of that.

Answering a Call

The last reason we’re moving is simply because God opened the door for us. We weren’t seeking the move. We’d pretty much given up hope of getting back to Steubenville. Between Covid and Matt Fradd’s one man marketing blitz for the city, so many Catholic families have moved there in recent years that real estate prices have spiked and housing in the neighborhoods we like have become scarce. Steubenville no longer seemed like an option to us. So, for the last year, we have been praying about what should come next. Should we stay in our current home and keep trying to bloom where God had us? Move elsewhere in the city? Strike out for parts unknown? We didn’t know. We just knew something had to change.

“I don’t see a clear answer,” Chris said to me on September 16. “I feel like if God wants us to go somewhere, He will need to drop a house in our laps.”

Twenty-four hours later, God did just that.

We were getting ready for dinner with friends here, when my phone pinged. It was my friend Brittany. Seven years earlier, I had sold my beloved Steubenville home to Brittany and her husband Matt. They lived there with their children for three-and-a-half years, until they outgrew it, then sold it and bought a rambling old Tudor Revival home in the same neighborhood. We had assumed they planned to grow old in their new house, but, as her message informed me, they had other plans. They were looking at building in the country. If they got the property they wanted, would we want to buy their home?

You know the answer.

We did have to pray quite a bit about it first. In most ways, the home was perfect, beautiful, old, and full of character, just as I like them. It offered us a bigger yard for the kids, a view with more trees and fewer houses for me, and was on the exact street in Steubenville where we wanted to be. It also was the right price—less than what we knew we could get for our Pittsburgh home. But it was big. It is big, too big, so big that religious orders lived there for almost four decades before Brittany’s family bought it. Plus, it needed (needs!) a fair bit of work. Brittany and Matt have done a great deal to the house, but more work remains, and renovating another old home, this time with toddlers, was not on our list of things to do in 2024.

Yet, even with those challenges, it’s what we were praying for. And God did indeed drop it in our laps in the most beautiful and funniest of ways. So, we said yes, trusting that He has plans for it and for us that He will make known in time.

I’m excited to share pictures with you after we move in. It’s a beautiful home that comes with its own name: Visitation House, which we’ll keep. We are so excited to do what our friends have done these past three years and welcome others into it, ensuring that the house continues to live up to its name.

Which brings me to my last thought…which is really the point of this whole essay.

Points of Discernment

When I announced that we were moving, several of you asked how we were able to make the decision and feel peace in going forward with it. You said you were struggling with discerning your own possible big life change and hoped I could share something that might help. I don’t know if I can. Discernment is so personal and everyone’s circumstances are so different. But I’ll try.

The Church’s teachings on discernment hold that God’s will is made clear not just in Scripture and Tradition, but also in the movements of our heart and the circumstances of our lives. God is not a game show host in the sky, hoping we guess the right door so we can win some prize. He’s a loving Father, working in all circumstance to lead us to Him. Practically speaking, this means the three biggest questions of discernment are always desire, ability, and opportunity: do we have the desire to do something, the ability to do something (both practically and morally), and the opportunity to do something? When those three things align, we know we can move forward with hope, trusting that God walks with us always.

In this particular case, Chris and I had the desire to give our children a different life than what is possible for us in Pittsburgh. We also have a longstanding desire and commitment to serve God’s people through hospitality. We see that as particular charism and mission of our family. Being asked to buy a ridiculously big home called Visitation House feels like an invitation from God to up our hospitality game.

Along with having desires which the move to Steubenville could fulfill, we also have the ability to move there. It’s an easy 45 minute drive to Chris’ job, so he doesn’t have to quit school in the middle of the year. It’s still near enough to Chris’ elderly parents in Pittsburgh, so we’re not too far away if anything happens to them. And it definitely doesn’t require violating Scripture or Tradition. We are morally able to do it, as well as practically able to do it.

Finally, the last piece of the discernment process—opportunity—presented itself to us this fall. God opened a door for us. It was a door we wanted to walk through and which we could walk through. So, we started walking. As long as the door stays open (and please pray that it does), we’ll walk peacefully right on through to our new home.

This doesn’t mean the walking is easy. My husband hates change and disruption. Me relocating the sugar in the kitchen is a source of consternation for him, so moving our whole selves will be particularly tough on Chris.

Our peace in this decision also doesn’t mean we’re not sad. We are. There is much that we will miss about our life here in Pittsburgh. We’re not running from something bad. We’re walking to something good.

That distinction is important. When possible, it’s better to discern big life decisions from a place of calm, not upheaval. It’s easier to feel confidence in decisions when they really are decisions and not simply reactions.

It’s also easier to feel confidence in decisions when they are grounded in reality and come with realistic expectations. Chris and I are not expecting Steubenville to be perfect or for the move to fix all our problems. Many of the toughest parts of our life will move with us. We aren’t asking or expecting a move to do more for us than a move can do. So, we won’t be disappointed or feel like we heard God wrong when we move to Steubenville and still find ourselves struggling in various ways. We expect more struggles. That’s part of the package called life.

Another reason we have confidence in our discernment process is because we know we did our best to make a good life for our children and our family here in Pittsburgh. We have been hoping for years to move back to Steubenville, but when that move wasn’t possible we kept putting down roots here. We continued making friends and working on our house and serving at our parish. We lived life where God put us as fully as we could live it. We got attached and gave our hearts to this place. Which yes, makes it harder to leave. But it also makes it easier. We see our reasons more clearly for it. They haven’t changed, despite the beauty we found in our life here. And right now, as I stare down the barrel of work and packing and Christmas everything, that gives me an abiding peace in our decision…and even a semblance of calm (a very faint one).

So, that’s our story. We’ll see how it continues to unfold. A lot can go wrong in six weeks. But that’s the final reason we feel like we can move forward with confidence: God’s goodness can be found as much in what goes wrong as it can in what goes right. He isn’t standing apart from our decisions. He stands in them with us, holding us close, using every bit of the process to sanctify us and lead us to Him.

So, until He says otherwise, we’ll keep walking this way. We’ll also keep praying that someday, maybe, we’ll be able to welcome you to a rambling old Tudor, perched atop a hill, right where the long road with the beautiful view comes to a bend.

Five Things I’m Loving

1. Beautycounter’s Black Friday Sale goes through this Saturday, November 25. Save 20 percent side wide, earn free shipping on orders $50+, and get your choice of free gifts on orders of $150+. Feel free to reach out to me for help choosing the best skincare and makeup products for you or gifts for those you love.

2. Last Christmas, an inordinately kind friend bought us a Nespresso Creatista Pro. It was a wildly generous gift and truly the nicest material gift I have ever been given. It makes amazing espresso (and more than a half dozen other drinks) quickly and easily, and has made my 4:30 a.m. wakeups immeasurably easier. This machine goes on sale once a year and that once a year is now. So, if you are in the market for an incredibly high quality and easy to use espresso machine, this is your chance.

3. If you are looking for gifts for a toddler or preschooler, my top pick is a Tonie Box. We bought one for Toby two years ago, and it has been our kids’ most used and most loved gift ever. If you have never heard of these, it’s a soft, square speaker box that will play different stories for your children. The stories themselves come in the form of figurines, which the kids themselves can place on the box. We have collected probably 20 Tonie figurines by now, and our favorites include Peter Rabbit, John Henry, Pinocchio, and the Broadway version of Beauty and the Beast. We’re getting the kids The Velvetine Rabbit this Christmas. Many of the stories are narrated by gifted actors (Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, Imelda Staunton, Tim Curry, Meryl Streep), and they are just delightful. This has truly been a game changer for naptime, quiet time, and bedtime, so it travels with us wherever we go. Definitely worth the money if you are buying for little children this Christmas.

4. If you are looking for dripless 100 percent beeswax Advent candles, Mother and Home has them, and they are beautiful.

5. If you don’t already have the cookbook I wrote to help fund Becket and Ellie’s adoption, you can download it right now for free. This is my way of saying thank you for all the wonderful ways you support my work and help my family, including through your prayers, subscribing to this newsletter, and shopping Beautycounter with me. You can download your free copy of Around the Catholic Table: 77 Recipes for Easy Hospitality through this Thursday.

Did you know you can give a gift subscription to this newsletter? If not, here you go: