I Just Want You to Know_ Letters to My Kids on Love, Faith, and Family - Kate Gosselin [50]
My mind was not lacking in coming up with horrible scenarios. Since people were coming up and knocking on our door, what was to stop them from acting out my worst nightmare—abducting one of my kids? One adult in charge of eight kids was not good odds to be able to stop somebody. We needed to move immediately.
As we put the plan in motion to move that fall weekend, I realized that our circumstances had drastically changed. We moved in as a happy little family—okay, maybe not so little, but certainly naive—and moved out older and wiser.
We moved in with a U-Haul truck, but moved out with a security company and unmarked trucks so no one would know our new address—or that we were moving at all!
We moved in not thinking twice about giving out our email, cell, address, and other personal contact info, but moved out only sharing our post office box address with the outside world.
We moved in grateful and excited if someone dropped off a package on our doorstep, but moved out having been instructed by our security team not to open any unexpected items.
You can imagine that we did start to question our chosen profession with the increasing security issues. But any parent with a dangerous job has to make the same choices. Think about cops, fire-fighters, and military personnel. I’m not comparing skills, only the risks involved in any chosen career. Every job has its ups and downs, and we still saw this job as having far more benefits than risks: We were able to work at home with our kids, paychecks were coming in to pay our bills, our kids were able to travel and have experiences they wouldn’t have had otherwise.
What it really came down to, though, was that privacy infringement and security risks—which were the negatives of this job—would continue even if we stopped the show immediately, but without the positives.
So once again, we found ourselves in unusual territory. Our differences did not stop with having two sets of multiples. Everything about our lives felt weird and abnormal at that point. I still struggled to make life as normal as possible, but frankly, we never were normal—from the way we went about things to the places we went, the times of day, and the days of the week that we had to go anywhere.
Thankfully, the house we were moving into would let our kids have as much of a “normal” childhood as possible. They wouldn’t be locked indoors with the blinds closed anymore. Thank God!
When we went as a family to see the new house for the first time, Leah gasped and said, “Thank you, Mommy!” as we pulled up to the driveway. Seeing a four-year-old that appreciative is so rewarding. Those kinds of reactions are why I can keep going. When we opened the door, all eight kids began screaming and took off running in various directions throughout the house.
They love that house so much. In our old house in Elizabethtown, day in and day out, no one could get away from each other—no rest, no quiet, no privacy. Kids were in every nook and cranny—with no personal space except their own beds. Some of my first memories of the new house include seeing Aaden sitting on the couch, reading a book alone, without someone bothering him. I had never seen this happen in the old house. It was just too small. While it looked big on TV and served its purpose well, we really didn’t have enough room for everyone, and the kids didn’t have their own space.
Even though people now know where our new house is, it provides space and security. If our kids can’t always go out in the real world safely, at least they can run around protected in their own house and yard. And I’ve now learned the ropes of what to do to keep them out of harm’s way. Looking back, I see that I did not always handle situations well, and I probably