Confronting a Midlife Move
Handling the Unknown with the Escalating Pressures of Home
This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here.
What Chapter Are You…
Leaving:
A familiar and comfortable home.
In:
Figuring out life in a new city.
Entering:
Parenting teens, caregiving for parents and midlife.
The phone call came on the last night of spring break, an unusually quiet Sunday in our normally bustling household of five.
We all seemed to be coasting on the relaxed energy of having just returned from time away. My husband and I were puttering around the kitchen while the kids sat at the counter, finishing crunchy bites of toast. I was wiping the last breadcrumbs from the countertops, about to start ushering everyone upstairs to bed, when my husband’s work phone gave a sharp ring, pulling us out of our respective reveries. When we saw the caller’s name, my husband and I looked at each other. We both knew it meant something significant.
Our world came to a standstill as we processed the news: my husband had been asked to accept a new role at work, one that required us to move to the other side of the country, to Toronto, a city more than 2,000 miles from our hometown.
My thoughts immediately turned to how our lives were about to be upended. Where we lived. Where my kids went to school. Finding new doctors, dentists, optometrists, hairdressers, pet sitters. Everything familiar was about to change.
In the days that followed, a master to-do list formed in my mind. It grew so long that it felt like the endless, old-timey scroll of names Santa maintains, the one that keeps spiraling in perpetuity. My list was, unfortunately, not of the magical variety, and I would have no superhuman elves assisting me. Instead, it was filled with tasks I was manically triaging in order to get us ready in five months.
After a brief, hyper-intense stint of trying to sort and control everything, I became overwhelmed and exhausted. I wanted an escape. I felt like crawling under a blanket and forgetting about all of it. My frantic preparations had left little time to process the emotional upheaval of our move. We would be leaving the only city my kids had ever called home and moving to a city where we hardly knew anyone. There were no action items on my list that would help us cope with our feelings.
Moves like this were not new to me. I had made similar cross-country journeys, but they’d happened when I was young and unencumbered. I had moved with little more than one suitcase in tow. Plus, I had always been moving toward something: an exciting opportunity or a promising job. This time, my husband was the one about to embark on a wonderful new opportunity. Not me.
The kids and I were thrilled for him, but we didn’t feel the same pull toward our new city. All they could see was what they were leaving behind: cousins, best friends, sports teams, a beloved school. This was a world in which we were not only full entrenched, but thrived.
In my new phase of denial and resistance, I started to hope for some insurmountable obstacle to derail our move. Perhaps we wouldn’t find schools we liked. Maybe the real estate market would be too crazy. I had grown weary from making phone calls to realtors, emailing schools, and figuring out how to transport two dogs and a temperature-sensitive lizard to a new city. I wanted someone else to make the decisions on my behalf. Really, I think I just wanted someone to tell me I could stay where I was comfortable.
Of course, life doesn’t work that way, so I kept chipping away at the to-do list, albeit with a kind of numb detachment. When it came time to take an exploratory trip to Toronto, I felt sick to my stomach as I boarded the plane.
I put on a brave face as we explored the city, its neighborhoods, and schools. We took the kids to a baseball game to get them excited for their new chapter. Tulips were blooming, and the city felt more lively and upbeat than our own. It felt almost promising.
Then we got another extraordinary phone call. This time, the news pulled us back toward home; my mom had received a cancer diagnosis. If I had still been looking for an escape, this could have been it, although not in the way I had imagined. By then, however, we were already mid-move. We had found great schools for our kids. We had found a home. We had bought tickets to upcoming basketball games and shows, leaning into a sense of possibility and adventure.
Meanwhile back home, my mother’s cancer became acute. She was hospitalized for what became a month-long stay. As the kids finished out their school year, I spent my time juggling caregiving with moving preparations from the hard vinyl guest chair in her hospital room. As I watched machines and doctors monitor my mom, the impossibility of what was on the horizon became painfully clear. How could I leave when I was needed here the most? But how could we not move when our livelihood depended on it, and when it was such an incredible opportunity? My kids were starting to dig in their heels as their final day of school approached. They were facing a big goodbye.
My eldest, a teenager about to enter high school, was the most upset. One night, I finally sat him down, one-on-one, to talk through it. He shared his concerns, and I unexpectedly found myself encouraging him to make the move, to take the leap. I told him that if we didn’t do this, we would always wonder where it might have led us, what we might have learned about ourselves, and what experiences we might have had. In that moment, I realized I was not simply telling him what I thought he needed to hear. I believed it myself.
There was still plenty of unpredictability, but I felt more at ease with it. We still had little clarity about my mom’s health or about many aspects of our new lives, but I did have clarity on what mattered most: we were making the right decision, together.
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