Moving across the country is not easy, but moving across the country with kids is even harder. Not just physically hard, but the emotions of it were overwhelming to me. I liken the decision process we went through when making the choice to move our family across the country as very much like the five stages of grief:
- Denial
- Anger
- Bargaining
- Depression
- Acceptance
I’ve moved well over fifty times in my life, but I have never had one this stressful and I can assure you that having kids in the mix was a major factor. In top of that, the past year had been stressful enough that I didn’t need anymore stress in my life. And I just didn’t want to uproot my kids. I just didn’t. We were so comfortable in Houston with routines and friends and family all around.
At first, I was in denial – we didn’t really need to move. It was never going to happen, it was just too much work and we had so much on our plates already. I did my best to ignore it, hoping the subject would just disappear from our conversations.
Then I got angry about how much work it would take to pack, find a house, daycares, register the cars …
Soon after that I moved on to thoughts of how we could just continue to work in one state and live in another, or sell the house and one of us stay home full time while the other traveled constantly. Surely we could find a way for that to work? <insert sarcasm font>
Then I got sad. Would Ava make friends? Would she be bullied? Would we find a happy and safe place for Evan during the day? I cried daily for several weeks.
Finally, I just gave in to it. It was happening and that was that. It was the right thing to do for our family at this point in our lives.
Through it all, what worried me most ended up being the easiest part – the kids. When they say kids are resilient, it’s no lie. My kids are the poster children for resilience. Evan is so little that, after a short bout of shyness, he fit right into his new little crew at daycare. And the teachers love him. Ava struggled with the new curriculum for about a week and made friends instantly from her first day in her new classroom. Chuck and I aren’t terribly fond of the house we settled on, so who knows what we will do. But we are making friends of our own and spending as much time with the kids as we can since we don’t travel so much anymore.
All of the angst of the decision process, which you can read more about here, was worth it in the end. We are all adjusting well, I think. And while we still miss Texas, we know one thing for sure – we sure as hell aren’t moving again any time soon.
Love reading your stuff.