Not too long ago my husband – Dave – and I would often talk about the life we want to lead as soon as our kids are grown. We had this dream of living all over the world. A year here, a year there. He’d be a consultant and a teacher; I’d volunteer and write. Maybe start with Uruguay, then move on to Hong Kong; spend a year in Spain, a year in Botswana. Why not? Without the kids, the world is our oyster.
I haven’t said anything to Dave about this yet, but man… I don’t know about this migratory life any more. Moving countries is exhausting! There are countless things to do, to remember, to check off at the right time, in the right order. Going through the laundry list of my tasks would be traumatizing for me and boring for you, so I won’t bother to list everything. I’m not even sure I could boil it down to a bullet point list. More than a list, it’s an Escheresque journey with many starts and ends and starts again.
I just have to trust that eventually the dust will settle and I will go back to leading a normal life again. One where I go on hikes, have dinner parties and meet friends for happy hours. Until then it’s all about the boxes, playing phone tag with contractors, parting with huge chunks of cash and the never-ending email strains about visa applications.
We met a nice American couple when we were over in Copenhagen, back in February. They moved over there three years ago. They gave us a piece of advice. They said: “don’t focus so much on the move. We thought that would be the hard part. We agonized over it. The move isn’t the hard part. Getting settled is the hard part.”
I’m sure they were just trying to scare us.
Post-Amerikan 