If my life becomes “stagnant”, I
may get an inkling to freshen it up.
Perhaps the grandest scheme and dream upon which I embarked was our move
to New Mexico after my husband retired in 1994. Our youngest son, Jeff, had graduated high
school, and I (erroneously) decided that all our children were now securely
“in place” with their lives.
So we could
therefore drastically change our lives, and their lives would fall happily into
place.....
....NOT.....
Even now, almost twenty-four years
later, I am still sorting out the reasons I so wanted this move, a decision
that I came to regret within the first year after we moved.
Milder weather was one factor….we had
experienced some typically cold and snowy Midwest winters, and I was usually
crazed by February with all the ice and cold and cloudy days.
A chance for a “fresh” start with a
pretty newly built home, in a place that we didn’t know at all….I suppose even
that had its appeal. I had tired of all
the social situations where I had “forced” my husband to attend, which he
increasingly merely tolerated in his typical stoic fashion. Of course, this fresh start meant that all my
family and friends were no longer a few miles away from me….since I never stopped
loving all those same social situations which he dreaded!
So we moved, with two out of our three
young adult children moving with us, to start college at the University of New
Mexico near our pretty new home in a suburb of Albuquerque. Within
one year, our youngest son Jeff had to move back to the Chicago area, because
he missed his friends. Our daughter Niki
was still fine in New Mexico, because she (like her Dad) really welcomed the complete
change.
Our oldest son Matt came to grieve our
move, but never could articulate this grief, except to painfully avoid talking
to me for some time after the move. He
had stayed behind, making his way through his college days in the Chicago area,
eventually moving in with my widowed mother…as did my youngest Jeff!
I began visiting my “sweet home
Chicago” within six months of our move; by two years out, I knew that I
regretted the decision. What surprised me, besides missing my access to a bounty of family and friends, was being "attached" to Chicago. I grew up there, and it was an anchor which I just took for granted....until it was replaced by (nice-enough but unremarkable) city like Albuquerque (I mean, who can even spell it?).
I really never
developed any special friendships in New Mexico, despite the part-time jobs
which Dave and I took up. Neighbor
attachments also eluded me. I see now
that my lifelong friends in the Chicago area, were often school chums, and in a
few cases, work chums….as well as my beloved siblings and their families. And I had so many years of closeness with them, which was always just, well, THERE
One of my friends who had to relocate early in her marriage (and never moved back) had warned me that you can never replace your oldest dearest friends....at best, you will substitute newer, but different ones. Now I know what she meant!
My “baby” sister married, and then
became pregnant while I was away---and that sealed it for me. I HAD to be with her when she had her baby,
which was three years after our move.
One year later, and four years after
our move, we returned to the Chicago area.
And we were once again saddled with a mortgage, which we had escaped
when we purchased our pretty Southwestern home.
Mortgages would continue to weigh me down, up to the last mortgage too
many, in 2009, when I was widowed and retired myself…..and had to “walk out” of
my condo home because I could not get the too-high mortgage refinanced.
My husband would
have stayed contentedly in New Mexico.
He never required close friends; I suppose he thought that my
“friendship” was enough.
But I moved back, and they
followed. And I am all these years
later, indeed an amazing twenty years later, still sorting out this huge
decision and all the false dreams upon which I based this decision.
I regret mostly the loss of money which
we could have giving our children to help them with college funds. They all had to take out student loans
because we were too “selfish” to stay put and help them out. I will NEVER stop regretting this sternest
repercussion resulting from our move.
My husband David loved his retirement
life in New Mexico—his part-time job was at a model railroad store in
Albuquerque. He had adored model trains
throughout his life, and always had a detailed layout wherever we lived. When we moved back to the Midwest, he “exploited”
his other expertise when he went to work for Ace Hardware part-time. He was the handiest of handy men, and so was
also perfect for that job too. He never
complained to me about our about-face moving back. It was not in him to complain or delve into
his psyche, or confide those feelings he MUST
have had about all this moving
about.
I’ll
never know—I couldn’t ask him and he couldn’t tell me.
