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It was a year that just about killed me. It was the year I moved not once, not twice, not three times, but four times. I didn’t just move within my city. Or province. Or time zone. Or country. I moved to places I had never been to before. To places I had no interest in moving to, or even visiting. And I did so on short notice. I had no say in the matter. I was a hockey wife — and it just about killed me.

For a spell, I was married to NHL veteran Kirk McLean. He was a lovely guy who had a long and stable career as a net-minder. He’d proposed, I’d said yes, but within the week he’d been traded. I’d presumed that life would have continued as the courtship had: a predictable program of practices, games and road trips with the team for which he’d become a marquee player. I was wrong. I learned that life in the NHL is like being in a faulty witness protection program. I learned what NHL really stands for: No Home Life.

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And so it came to pass that we moved to a rental in Florida, then bought a house, then sold that house, then returned to Vancouver where we were renovating a house, then headed off to New York to look for a house, then buying a house after determining that apartment life in Manhattan was an adjustment we didn’t want to make. All this took place within 11 months. I was still settling the loss and damage claims from the first move while we were embarking on the third move. And the losses and damages were astonishing. On the New York move, the movers misplaced all our possessions. Everything. For a month. In the interim, we ordered mattresses from 1-800-Mattress and used toilet paper rolls for pillows, believing that our stuff would arrive any day.