Whenever we announce that we are moving, I get asked a lot of questions. And a lot of them run along the same lines - "Doesn't it get old starting over every couple of years?", " Wouldn't you like to stay in one place and call it home?", " Aren't you afraid of disrupting your children's lives? And the biggest from the past couple of months - "But what are you going to DO there???". I have found that people usually ask these questions as a way of putting a voice to their biggest fears about moving. I get it. It would be the same as me asking someone "Don't you get bored living in the same place all the time?" Different strokes and all...
I know that the life I lead is not for all. It is trying and rewarding, it is exhausting and exciting but I also have found in moving as many times as I have (which is not nearly as many as others I know - including my parents) that there is a 90% rule. No matter where you live, approximately 90% of your life is lived exactly the same. Let me explain. My life in California went something like this: Get up at the ungodly hour of 6:30 (I am not a morning person and someone should have warned me that children are), feed Stinkerbell and MadHatter breakfast, run MadHatter to school/dance class/swimming depending on the day, run an errand/grocery shop, feed everyone lunch, home for afternoon naps (theirs, only sometimes mine) and once they are both awake I have about an hour or two before it is time to start dinner and then the bed time routine. (I'm exhausted just typing that). Throw in some play dates, get togethers with friends and trips to Disneyland and you have rounded out the week. Repeat every day. Repeat as a single mom about 50% of the time, since that is how often B travels. I know, it sounds boring, but it is the life of a mom when you have two small children. Compare that with my life in Chile...oh wait, it's EXACTLY the same. It doesn't change just because I moved to 6000 miles. My kids still wake up early, they still need to eat 3 meals a day and they probably need more baths than before because we now have a back yard that they get dirty in and a dog to get dirty with. The differences lie in that 10% of your time that you can call free time and even then the differences aren't huge. We still go on play dates at the park (I will grant you that the kids speak Spanish here), we still do dinner with friends and we still try to introduce the kids to new things and places. I think it is more about your age and stage of life, than it is about geographical location.
In my early 20's I lived in California, I can't remember much of my 10% but it probably involved good friends, a bar and sleeping late between working days. In my late 20's I moved to North Carolina and then Illinois. By my mid 30's I was back in California. In fact, we bought a house within 20 miles of where I lived at the beach in my 20's. But nothing about my two experiences in California were the same. Though the landscape was the same the rules of the game had changed. My mid-30's found B and I having 2 kids in 18 months. It meant a lot less travel, almost no eating out and my shopping was at Babies R Us. We didn't go to bars until the wee hours of the morning. Oh, we were up and bleary eyed at 3 am, but for very different reasons. We gravitated towards friends who had young children and kept the same schedule we did. Our 10% now consisted of taking the kids to Disneyland, or the zoo or an afternoon playdate at the park. It was a far cry from the type of playground I knew in my 20's...and yet, California had not changed, I had.
So it doesn't matter which hemisphere you live on but more which stage of life you are in. I am sure my experience here in Chile would be entirely different if I were single and in my 20's, and different even if I was married but had no kids, but that is not my life and I don't dwell on what it would be like if... I quite enjoy things this way. My kids give my life structure and sure, it can get repetative - and dare I say it, boring - but they also force me to get out and see new things because they truly want to soak in the world. And I love that we are seeing Chile together. All of us, for the first time, with childlike wonder and amazment. I think this is one of the great experiences of their life and in that, it becomes one of the greatest experiences in mine. And that is why I do it. It is why I don't dwell on the starting over with a new home and new friends. It is why we have disrupted their lives and ours, because in the general scheme of things, 90% of their lives are still the same. And the 10% that has changed? I am hoping that it opens their minds to other cultures, opens their hearts to new friends and opens their eyes to all of the beauty that is in the world.
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