M and I are sitting across from each other at the table right now, both of us on our laptops, both of us supposedly working, and I know we’re both just thinking about places we could go in the U.S., before we’ve even looked at a single number. Neither of us has typed a real sentence in about ten minutes. We’re back on the thing we keep circling and never landing on: whether we should just pack up and move the girls back.
It started a few days ago, if I’m honest about where the thought actually came from. I wrote here about the invasion news out of Spain and the grounding technique that talked me down from an eleven p.m. spiral over it. What I didn’t say in that post is that the spiral didn’t really end that night. It just went quiet and moved into the back of my head, where it’s been sitting ever since, showing up at random moments — in line for groceries, mid-shower, right now, apparently, instead of writing. The same three words, over and over: maybe we should. And then, every single time, the same wall of reasons why it’s nowhere near that simple.
My coffee’s gone cold next to my laptop, which is how I know it’s been a while since either of us said anything useful out loud. At one point M looked up and said, “We don’t have to decide anything today,” which is true and also the exact sentence that’s been keeping this whole thing alive instead of letting it die down — because he’s right, we don’t have to decide today, so we don’t, and then it just carries over to tomorrow, still undecided, still taking up the same amount of room in my head.
Why This Might Be the Hardest Decision I’ve Ever Tried to Make as a Parent
I want to be upfront that this isn’t a post where I land somewhere tidy by the end. Big, hard decisions as a parent rarely resolve in one sitting, and this one hasn’t resolved at all — it’s just sitting here, half-considered, taking up space I don’t really have to spare. But I’ve been turning the same three reasons over so many times this week that writing them down feels like the only way to actually see them clearly instead of just feeling them at eleven p.m.
The first reason is the one I think about the least out loud and the most in private: I’m still an oncological patient. I’ll be an oncological patient for the rest of my life, technically, even on the best possible version of that life, the one where everything stays clean scan after clean scan forever. That means checkups. Bloodwork. Scans on a schedule I don’t get to skip or forget about, not really, not if I want to catch anything early the way we caught it the first time. Right now, that’s just part of how my year is shaped — an appointment here, a follow-up there, nothing I have to think twice about affording. We all know how healthcare works in the States. I don’t say that to start an argument about it, I say it because it’s just true for us, on our income, with our numbers: we can’t afford to gamble my follow-up care on a system we’d be starting from zero in, with a preexisting condition that isn’t going anywhere. That one reason alone does a lot of the work of talking me back down most nights.
What Moving a Family Abroad — Or Back — Actually Requires
The second reason is the girls, and it’s not the same reason it would have been five years ago. We already did this to them once. We moved them out of their comfort zone, their language, their school, their neighborhood, their whole sense of normal, almost five years ago now, and it was manageable — genuinely manageable, not just survivable — because the oldest was seven. Seven-year-olds are portable in a way that almost-twelve-year-olds are not. You try telling a kid who is about to start her last year of primary school, who has a group text with actual inside jokes in it, who has a best friend she has known since she was seven, that we’re leaving her school and her friends and her language behind again, and see what happens. I don’t have to guess what would happen. I know exactly what would happen, and it would not be manageable. It would be the kind of hard that leaves a mark, and I’m not willing to hand that to her a second time unless I’m completely sure there’s no other option.
And even if I were willing — even if the calculus somehow tipped that far — there’s a third problem sitting right behind it: where would we even go? Not back to Denver. I don’t have good memories tied to the safety of the neighborhood we used to live in there, and I’m not interested in relitigating that here, but it’s a hard no, not a maybe. So then what? Somewhere else entirely, a place we’ve never lived, based on what — a map, a vibe, a list I found on a relocation blog? M joked that we should just throw a dart at a map and ask ChatGPT to fill in the details, and I laughed because it’s funny, and then I stopped laughing because some tired, sleep-deprived part of me actually considered it for a second, which tells you exactly how worn down this particular decision has gotten me. If it were just the two of us, M and I, or if the girls didn’t have their whole group of friends and family here, I’d say yes to that kind of leap without blinking. We did something close to it once already, five years ago, and it turned into this whole life. But it isn’t just the two of us anymore, and the girls do have all of that here. With three girls, blindly picking a new country and hoping it works out isn’t romantic to me anymore. It’s just reckless, and I’m too tired and too responsible for the three of them to pretend otherwise. At minimum, we’d need to actually go somewhere first — a couple of weeks, see if we even like it, before uprooting anyone’s entire life over a feeling.
And even that “just go visit for a couple of weeks” plan, which sounds so reasonable typed out like that, is a bigger operation than it sounds like when it’s three kids instead of two adults with backpacks. It’s flights for five instead of two. It’s coordinating around a school calendar that doesn’t leave a lot of open weeks in the first place. It’s figuring out whether we can actually afford five round-trip tickets on top of everything else we’re already stretching to cover this year. Somewhere in the back of my mind I’ve got the responsible-adult checklist running anyway, the one every relocation blog tells you to fill out before you move a family anywhere — cost of living, school options, whether the neighborhood is actually safe and not just safe-sounding on a map. I know how to run that checklist. I’ve done it before. What I don’t have yet is a place to run it against, and until I do, it’s just a list with nothing on it.
The Homeschooling Wildcard
There’s a fourth thing sitting underneath all of this that I haven’t even mentioned yet, which is that if we did go back, the girls would almost certainly end up homeschooled, at least at first, while we figured out where we were actually staying and got them into a school system that wasn’t going to take half a year to sort out. I’ve done the homeschooling thing before, during the pandemic, and I want to be clear that I fully support it as a choice — it’s not the part that scares me. The part that scares me is that back then, they didn’t know anything different. Now they know exactly what they’d be losing: a school they like, a rhythm they’re used to, friends down the hall instead of a screen. Try homeschooling a kid who has tasted the alternative and misses it every day, and I promise you, they would absolutely end me. Not metaphorically. I would not survive that particular version of this plan with my sanity intact.
So here we are. Not deciding. Just circling, laptops open, both of us quietly searching for ways to bring in a little more money so we can at least keep our heads above water while we figure out what to do next — which is its own kind of exhausting, trying to plan a hypothetical move you might never make while also trying to afford the actual life you’re already living. M’s got a tab open with weekend freelance dev listings he keeps refreshing, half hoping something better shows up than what’s currently there. I’ve got the blog’s ad numbers pulled up in another tab, doing the kind of math that never quite adds up to “we’re fine” no matter how many times I run it.
The girls left for the pool about twenty minutes ago, towels and goggles and one abandoned floatie that didn’t fit in the bag stuffed under someone’s arm, all three of them talking over each other the second my mom got here. She’s staying with us for a few days right now, and honestly, God bless her for it, because it means M and I get an entire uninterrupted stretch of morning to stare at spreadsheets and each other and not solve anything, which is somehow still better than trying to have this exact conversation with three kids underfoot asking what’s for lunch every four minutes.
What Nobody Tells You About Being an Adult
I never thought being an adult was going to be this complicated. Growing up, the whole plan sounded so simple when other people described it to you: get married, buy a house, have kids, work until you retire, done. Nobody mentioned that your particular stretch of adulthood might come with a pandemic in the middle of it, a war close enough to home that it changes how you plan a Tuesday, a cancer diagnosis of your own to manage on top of everyone else’s plans, an entire industry deciding your job could be done by AI instead — twice, once for me and once for M — and now, apparently, an invasion scare thrown in for good measure, the kind that has you quietly pricing flights at your kitchen table on a Saturday morning instead of just working.
Our adulthood has actually been good, all things considered. I want to say that clearly, because I don’t want this to read like a complaint dressed up as a life update. We have three healthy, loud, occasionally feral girls. We have each other. We have a mom — my mom — who gets on a train to come sit with us during hard stretches, and a father-in-law fifteen minutes away who does the same. But good has not once meant easy, not for one single year of it, and some mornings, sitting here not-deciding anything with M, all I actually want, underneath every real, adult, responsible reason we’re staying put, is something almost embarrassingly small. I want a place with some chickens. That’s it. That’s the whole fantasy. I want monotony.
That’s all I had to say today 🙂
Thank you so much for spending ten minutes here with me today. If you think someone in your life could use a little story-time break, or if any of this resonated with you, I’d love it if you shared it with them. Thanks a lot for your support.
— L
Related Reading
The STOP Technique Talked Me Down Last Night (Barely) — where this whole spiral actually started.
Some Days Just Aren’t Good Days, and Signs From the Universe That Help — on the uncertainty that comes with living on the other side of a health scare.
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