It's December 31, 2008 and the moving truck finished loading up most of our stuff yesterday. We are keeping the house in California, and renting it out lightly furnished to a couple from Pennsylvania who want to move out of a place where they experience four real seasons. I have retained a room for myself and some of my personal papers in the house and the couple moving in are, so far, understanding of my need to keep a stranglehold in California.
Having moved altogether over 10 times, and, for my husband's work 6 times, including several out-of-state moves, I should be a pro. At managing, or, at least, disguising my sinking feelings as the date nears for me to get myself and our 13-year-old Golden Retriever to Minnesota.
With earlier moves, I had one, then two, then three kids to pack and cajole out of their pre-move funk. I thought it was hard moving recalcitrant children. And, it was. But for those of you moving with children, consider this: These little people serve as your move-into-the-neighborhood icebreakers. Need some sugar (read: want to meet a neighbor?) send your eager seven-year old over and watch how long before an invitation arrives to get acquainted, or, equally important, to join a carpool.
Having spent the last five years, along with my sisters, tending ailing, and then dying parents, and getting our youngest off to college, the reasons I have employed--with some success---for not following my husband to his latest destination, no longer apply. And so, it's almost eleven months and counting and the fact is that we cannot justify, in this economy, two mortgage payments and our growing carbon footprint as we fly between the SF Bay Area and the Twin Cities to share conjugal, well, 30+ years' wedded, bliss.
Yes, I work full-time and have a position that I love, and have tried very hard, having obtained two graduate degrees and a great deal of experience, to procure and keep this position for a major university system, as layoff notices mount in my office. But let's face it: Every move, and every month taken off caring for displaced children, and then ill, and dying parents, means that my husband's income far exceeds my own. Even though I was a much better student in high school when we met. That was petty, but I just had to say it.
And so it is what it is. I will leave the San Francisco Bay Area, temperature by the way, today, New Years' Eve Day, a relatively balmy 54 degrees with full sunshine, and a job I love, and friends and family, many of whom I have known, and loved, since I arrived in California decades ago, to join my husband in Minneapolis. The temperature today in Minnesota? You want it before or after adding in the 'chill factor?'
Needless to say: I'm not moving for the climate.
But I've learned a thing or two over the years; one of the benefits of getting older, I guess, and that is that I'm very lucky to have a spouse that I still want to be with. A decent man, a wonderful father, a best friend. If that doesn't sound worthy of a Kate Hudson date movie, it is. Or, it should be. My parents were the same--still in love--which is why, I guess, none of my sisters or I were surprised that we lost her ten months ago--six months after we lost our dad. They would have been married 62 years last week. And, she hated moving, too. And she had an amazing career. She was even rather famous. First courtroom sketch artist in the country having started her career inadvertently--she was really a fine artist-- sketching the Joe McCarthy Senate Hearings, and selling her sketches to the Edward Murrow show as my father, falsely accused of being a "Fellow Traveler," was unable to work for several years.
Even with my father's memory fading as Alzheimer's robbed his ability to invent ways to tell my mother how much he loved her, he still was able--until he couldn't speak any longer--to tell her--though she was bald from the chemo she was taking for her lung cancer--how beautiful she was. So she followed him. Hating the moves, too, from Wisconsin to Maryland, and then on to California in the 60's when many of her bohemian artist and writer friends were discovering the sexual revolution and leaving their husbands, and families far behind.
And now, though I will try to telecommute from my Oakland office, the fact is that I'm following my husband back to the snowy midwest. Ironically, my father was born in Minnesota and near the time he died, though the uniquely West Coast smell of eucalyptus from a tree outside his room, clearly marked his final home--a Board and Care Facility for memory deficit patients--as situated in California and not in the midwest, when asked how he liked the weather, he remarked that he loved the smell of a Minnesota fall day. Didn't we? Kind of poetic. Or tragic. Or, if you believe in karma, maybe a sign I have a long way to go to learn something.
This economy is testing all of us in ways we will only understand months, or maybe years from now. Is it better to move for a job from a place that is your heart's home, than have no job at all? We were just running out of our COBRA health benefits when the job in Minnesota came up and though I had great health insurance through my work, the mandate to lay off hundreds more was in the back of our minds as I was the last one hired. And my husband's job is a good job. A previous employer who wanted him back and management for whom he has tremendous respect. If you work in the financial industry, and he does---you want to have colleagues that you respect and trust and for whom the words, 'integrity and decency,' merit more than space on advertising brochures He's worked for some banks where these concepts weren't, shall we say, fully appreciated.
Is it better to live together as husband and wife, after burying your parents who, though life was never easy, loved one another and were one another's best friends because, you know, in your heart of hearts, that they stayed together, even when it wasn't easy? But knowing that your California home was where they loved to come and you can't imagine not being in your home where you find momentoes everywhere of both your growing children and your lost parents, has to count too, doesn't it, when you roll out the pro and con tag board?
I also wonder if it is crazy in our boom years---to start all over again. I, for one, don't have the stomach to start driving on snowy or icy roads. I am simply too old to learn, or feel comfortable taking on this challenge. I tried it ten years ago--with a move, similarly unsought, this time, to Chicago, and ended up in a tailspin with an eight-year-old in the backseat who thought that was fun, Mommy, do it again.
Is there anyone else out there who's facing a move with similarly ambivalent feelings? I'd love to start a chat. And I know--I really know how lucky I am. My husband--and kids--are not in Iraq. We're not moving because our house is being foreclosed upon. We are both still healthy.
I've got three weeks to get it together and get myself and the dog to our new home and figure out as a decidedly Luddite technophobe how to use the technology I'm blessed with to stay in touch with my colleagues in California so I can at least attempt to hang onto my job.
I'll try to write every day. I'd love to hear from other reluctant movers as we take this journey 'together.'
