This isn’t gonna be a fun post. But I feel like it’s a necessary post. I mentioned before that I became an avid reader of blogs about long term travel families and the one thing that I realize now having gone through it, is that they never touch on the really sh*##y stuff leading up to your trip. Sure sure, they mention that sometimes people won’t understand and that can be hurtful or that all of the planning can be stressful. But not one time in one blog have I ever read the truth: when you decide to unnecessarily uproot your family from everything they know and love, you will spend MANY nights crying as you second guess your decision.
Y’all, the months leading up to leaving are HARD! I remember whining to a friend about it all and she said, “Yeah, it’s like you’re being asked to pay for it all up front,” and you can’t imagine how true those words were.
I guess I should start with the obvious: There was a worldwide, deadly pandemic. No one saw this coming. I mentioned before that we started planning this trip several years ago. What I didn’t mention was that we didn’t tell anyone about our plans. It wasn’t that we were deliberately trying to keep a secret, it’s that there wasn’t much to tell. When you are three years out from a giant life changing move, there actually isn’t a lot that you can plan. I mean, we couldn’t look for housing, we couldn’t buy tickets, or quit jobs, or really do anything. We just started saving money and waiting for 2021 to get closer.
We did plan and book a trip to France for 2020. This was supposed to be our big scouting/planning trip. We figured after this trip, we would finally be able to let people in on our plan. Because we would actually have one. And then COVID hit. And the borders closed and we weren’t going anywhere. Honestly, our dreams of a French sabbatical were pretty much dashed. We didn’t talk about it for months. Honestly, I didn’t even think about it for the the majority of the pandemic. One day in late 2020, I asked Paul, “do we even still want to do this?” It wasn’t until he didn’t hesitate to respond that in fact, yes, yes we dis still want to make it happen, that I even started to consider it again.
So we waited and we watched and we waited and we watched. We had hopes that the borders might open in 2021, but we had no way of knowing. Which is why we felt like we had no way of telling. We didn’t want to tell our loved ones that we were leaving while it was still physically impossible to leave. We didn’t want to cause heartache and chaos and worry when we didn’t even know if we would actually be able to enter France.
All of this to say, leading up to our hopeful departure everything felt questionable. Nothing was solidified and the clock felt like it was ticking ticking ticking.
Sometime around April we finally decided things were looking like the borders MIGHT open so we started telling people what we had planned (which still wasn’t much, except that we were planning on leaving). This is when sh%t got real and it was real hard. First let me say, we are beyond lucky to have such amazingly supportive family and friends! Not once did anyone give us a hard time about our plan to leave. But don’t think that didn’t stop me from bawling every time we saw anyone. I couldn’t stop myself from all of the “last time” feelings.
I think here is where I need to talk about our special relationship with Nora’s nanny. Nanny is, at this point, family. She has spent every single day in our house raising our daughter for well over 5 years. We love our nanny. Telling her we were leaving was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Telling Nora she wasn’t going to see her Nanny for a year was even harder. At one point Nora came up with a plan to beg me to give her a sister or brother. She was in tears asking me to please have a baby. Which, of course, had me in tears. Later that day I found out she had devised the plan to ensure that Nanny would always be with us. Which, needless to say, sent me into more tears.
On top of all this, there was the stress of quitting my job (I was only able to do this with a shot of tequila and some handholding by my beautiful friend, Amy), packing our entire house, and moving out. I am not proud to admit there might have been more than one marital “tiff” during this period. And I’m really not proud to admit that most of those tiffs were caused by me and my emotional instability.
Keep in mind that during all of this, THE FRENCH BORDER WAS NOT OPEN! We were doing all of this without any surety that we would actually be able to move. It was brutal. Imagine making everyone you love nervous, anxious, and really sad over something that you can’t even guarantee will happen.
It would be a lie if I told you that I never doubted it would be worth it. I doubted it all day, every day. The only thing that kept me moving forward was this one thought: I very well could regret moving once we got to France, but I would without a doubt, one hundred percent, forever regret not trying.
So here we are.
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