The making of me

My sweet fourth baby broke me and remade me into something new.

Sometimes it feels like I peaked as a mother of young children at three kids. I had myself the most together around that time in my life: the perfectly packed bag, juggling night shifts, nannies, pumpkin patches, and summer breaks like an absolute boss.

That season of mothering holds such a special place in my heart and in my soul. I was doing it alongside one of my favorite moms and favorite people, surrounded by a community of sweet chosen family. My kids were tablet-free, my bag held modeling clay and coloring crayons, and dollar theater snacks were safely hidden inside.

I don't know if my children will remember those years with the same fondness that I do. The morning movies, afternoons at the pool, and early evening cuddles with friends exhausted from sun and chlorine. But those memories live on in my mind and in family photos: little boys in Star Wars costumes or superhero capes, with a toddling princess chasing behind them.

There were afternoon Nerf battles and water gun fights. Iced coffee consumed amidst piles of laundry while communing with friends and planning easy summer dinners. It was magic in the purest sense of the word.

My fourth pregnancy came along four years after my third. A much larger gap than any of the others, and completely unexpected.

She was completion. She was desperately desired by me.

But she also broke some things that maybe were brittle to begin with.

It was a pregnancy marked by loneliness, isolation, and complete vulnerability. When I feel unsupported, I tend to retreat into a mindset best described as, "Fine. I'll do it myself." It is protective in its own way. Abandonment is something I find incredibly difficult to carry. I own that I shut out everything that felt to painful to manage because I could not figure out a way to make myself ok with doing it alone.

So I settled deep into myself, as though the only way to pay for the gift of a fourth baby was to earn her through loneliness and endless vomiting.

I cannot adequately express how much I puked.

I could barely make it through morning report and handover before my cold, dry trader joes pop-tarts were redeposited into the toilet. In the few photos I have from that time, I look flat and hollow, green around the edges and utterly exhausted.

The week before I was due to deliver, I realized I hadn't really processed enough to be ready for the act of birth itself. In a last-minute attempt to catch my mind up with my body, I audited a birth course at work.

Even then, when my OB sat across from me and said, "Today we call it. Today you look awful,  your labs and blood pressure are not improving," all I could do was sigh and nod in agreement.

I was well and truly done.

So along she came in what felt like the longest solitary labor for a fourth baby. Everyone assumes the fourth one will just rush right out. This one took her time.

I labored the way I gestated: alone, inside my own mental fortress.

And then came the fourth baby.

The baby I spent the most time with, thanks to six beautiful months of maternity leave through Baby & Co. I soaked up every drop of baby goodness. I smelled her head and her toes. I memorized her.

In so many ways, I gave more of myself to mothering her. I wasn't chasing a toddler. I wasn't in my twenties trying to figure out how to care for a newborn. And I was keenly aware of how fast and fleeting the baby stage is because I was simultaneously parenting children who were already nine, seven, and five.

Organizationally, however, this baby was simply along for the ride.

The ride of school runs, sports practices, and being the baby of a mother working at a start-up that offered both incredible flexibility and enormous demands on my emotional and mental space.

There were no perfectly packed diaper bags.

Sometimes there weren't even packed diapers.

To be the youngest of four children is to spend your life chasing the ones ahead of you.

I have grieved the missed phases of babyhood and the rushed maturity that comes with being the youngest. Watching movies above your age range because I cannot fully segregate you from your siblings, and they are absolutely going to watch Jurassic Park whether you are ready for it or not.

You will never experience holding a brand-new sibling or meeting a new baby brought home from the hospital.

But you have something different.

You have a team of memory keepers.

People who knew you from that very first hospital visit and remember every moment since. People who can tell stories about you before you can remember them yourself.

As for me, I am not a perfect mother.

But I am a more peaceful one than I used to be.

I know now to give every phase time because none of them last forever. So you still sleep in my bed at eight years old. And last autumn, we made our way to a pumpkin patch because I wanted to see the joy on your face as you explored it.

When you hold a grudge and tell me you hate me, I pause. I remind myself that I am your safe place to feel all of your feelings.

I am remaking myself too.

Learning that I deserve support and do not always have to be the one providing it.

Learning that sometimes it is okay to be alone.

Learning that I am not responsible for another person's unhappiness.

Learning that even if I am not liked, or loved, in every arena of my life, it does not mean I am not likable.

Or lovable.

Perhaps that is another gift my fourth baby gave me.

Not only the gift of knowing and loving her, but also the chance to know and love myself. Just as I am, and all the iterations of myself that I have been and continue to become. 

Burnout

I am in the midst of processing. Not the things I intended to work on, but instead an entire catalogue of events I didn't expect would surface when I started this journey.

I have been a nurse since I was 19 years old. If you don't feel like doing the maths, that makes 24 years.

I started thinking about medicine as a profession when I was 14. Initially, it wasn't because I dreamed of healthcare. It was because I wanted to work with abandoned children in Romania. Eventually, I had the opportunity to do exactly that. From there, I moved into postpartum care, caring for newborns and new mothers. That led me into labour and delivery, and years of sacred work in sacred spaces.

I hold two truths to be self evident.

The first is that nursing is a compassionate and beautiful calling. We are invited into some of the most intimate moments of a person's life. Often, we enter as complete strangers. If it is done well, and done right, it can be incredibly rewarding.

The second truth is that nursing is taxing, exhausting, and physically demanding. It is a profession I actively discourage my own children from pursuing. Not because it lacks meaning, but because it is underpaid and because compassion and calling are so often exploited.

There is a persistent implication that because nursing is a calling, you should allow yourself to be emotionally, physically, and mentally drained. That you should tolerate treatment that would be unacceptable in almost any other profession because somehow your commitment to caring should make you endlessly available.

It can be a calling AND I should also be treated professionally and compensated appropriately for the work I do.

This is not the first time in my 24 years that I have felt burned out and completely depleted. It is, however, the worst.

Part of that comes from managerial gaslighting, harassment, and the slow erosion of confidence that happens when concerns are dismissed often enough. The other part comes from the unseen toll of working in a clinic that is chronically understaffed, under-resourced, underpaid, and unsupported.

When I went through nursing school back in 2001, very little was said about mental health for healthcare professionals.

I received some minimal advice about what to do if a patient touched me inappropriately, because this was to be expected and anticipated, and unfortunately more than once I have had to deal with it. However, nobody told me what to do after a patient punched me in the face during a stroke crisis in my first six months as a nurse.

I was taught techniques to avoid being pinned down. Nobody explained what to do when I was unexpectedly grabbed from behind and held against a wall.

None of these events were treated as assaults.

Instead, I was taught the art of compartmentalisation.

Take what happened during your shift, leave it at the hospital door, and move on.

As though experiences somehow stay neatly contained within the walls where they occurred.

I still remember my drive home after losing my first baby during a delivery. I remember the conversation with my mentor on that drive. I remember arriving home feeling utterly broken.

And somehow I learned to shut it all down before walking through the front door.

I would go to bed and then return to work the next day.

I became very good at it.

My first apartment became my sanctuary. I lived alone and protected that space fiercely. Few people were ever invited inside. It was where I recovered, processed, and gathered myself before doing it all again.

Then life evolved.

A husband came along. Children followed. The quiet spaces disappeared.

The opportunities to process difficult things became fewer and farther between.

Over the years, I learned new skills. I learned how to hold space without giving all of my own away. I learned how to support bereaved families without carrying every emotion in the room home with me.

What I never mastered was coming home after thirteen hours of giving everything I had and still having enough left for the people waiting there.

Because nobody rescues you from the next two or three hours.

The moment you walk through the door, your family needs you too.

Children are like eager little adorable leeches. They have waited all day to soak you up the second you arrive home.

One of the great lies of parenthood is being told that the baby years are the hardest.

The teenage years are not for the faint of heart, they are beautiful and life changing, but incredibly draining.

The problem is sometimes the compartments get full, and if you never make the time to unlock the doors and work through it, it just sort of live in you and builds up. 

Two months ago, I started having panic attacks.

If I am being honest, I was probably having smaller ones last year and simply didn't recognise them for what they were.

I found myself unable to walk from the bus stop into the hospital without disappearing into a playlist and a pair of headphones. I needed something to disconnect from reality until the exact second I had to step into the clinic and begin my shift.

In a classic cliché, my first full-scale panic attack felt like a heart attack at the end of my shift. In true nurse fashion, I went home first, tried a hot shower and some Tylenol, when that didn't help I spent the night in the Emergency Department because I genuinely wasn't sure what else it could be.

I had seriously underestimated the chest pain component of panic. 

It is an experience.

So now I am taking some time to process and untangle things.

Time to work out what comes next.

Part of that work has been recognising something uncomfortable: no amount of personal growth, therapy, resilience, mindfulness, coping strategies, or self-reflection can compensate for a system that is fundamentally broken.

At some point, the problem stops being your ability to cope.

The problem becomes the environment itself.

Returning to a system that will not change, that continues to use people up and spit them out before moving on to the next new nurse, feels less and less like resilience and more and more like self-abandonment.

I don't know what comes next yet. I only know that after spending two decades teaching women to listen to their bodies, trust their instincts, and honour their limits, it might finally be time to take my own advice.

 

Somewhere Slower

A great many things are hanging in the balance these days. Sean and I have invested several years and countless hours to the places we work, and things are changing. Nashville is changing, our kids are growing, and we are no longer the family of three that we were when we moved here 10 years ago. We've doubled to a family of six. Nashville has always felt like a transition point, a staging ground for us to figure out what next. It was a compromise at best, but for both Sean and I it has not felt like a permanent home.

Phases in our marriage are changing too, we are leaving the phase of early marriage, pregnancy, newborn babies, and growing our family. Into maturing kids, school schedules, sports practices, and right around the corner our first three starting puberty one after the other. The past two years have been a refining of our wants and plans by intense fire, a phase that has been harder to weather than any other so far. One of facing the challenges of mental health and wellness for our kids and ourselves, an unexpected baby, followed by an unexpected major home renovation, followed by a foreclosure that we barely made our way out of without losing our home, and all the stress that those things bring on a marriage and a family. None of which we were emotionally or financially prepared for.

We both grew up moving often, and I never thought I would want that for my kids, but here we are looking for what might be next, where might our next home be. When we packed it all up and arrived in Tennessee we were proud that we took the plunge and were not afraid to move on from a place that was not working for both of us. I am eager to be on the other side of this phase and anticipating the start of a new one. In all of it we have landed on the same page with the same desires. Eager to be able to step back and enjoy our kids at the age they are, full of idealistic longings for a culture that values family time, and has the structure to support the raising of kids. Somewhere slower, where we can work to live not just survive.

The short list:

• Socialized Medicine

• Accessibility to travel 

• Good family support

• Free continued education

• Walk-able living (to become a car free family)

• Good free/affordable primary education

• English speaking, as I don't see being able to master a second language to work in health care

Surprisingly there are a few places that fit the bill and one in particular where we can access our current careers in a different setting. I have started the process of applying for my U.K. nursing license in hopes of taking a contract in Cambridge England. Even if it is a two year jaunt that ends in a return to America, we don't think it is one we will regret. It has been easy to feel downtrodden due to the changes coming our way and to the end of this current era, but I am choosing to view it as a release and a launching point pushing us into something that fits better and feels more like home.

More of Less

At the start of this month the word that kept coming up for me was more.  More of my kids,  more time with Sean, more of the things I find the most joy in.  What is becoming clearer is the way to more is less.
We have always been on top of releasing the clutter and keeping things cleaned out for the most part, but this also mean downsizing the amount of things we bring home or purchase. It has been easier to keep this perspective, even through the holidays for a few reasons. One being that we have been strapped financially so we were very conscious about having a small and meaningful Christmas with our kids and two I do not want to buy anything that we will have to sell or purge before moving, and we will likely take very little with us due to the cost of transporting things over seas. If we really want more of our kids, it means they will need to be surrounded by less and so will we. Less distractions with things to keep them playing with each other and interacting with us instead of their things.
As parents I think we are often told with more kids we need more space. Honestly, often I feel like we need more space, and the definition of more space increased when we moved to the South. Housing down here is much bigger! However, as we have moved and obtained more space, I have realized it did not change the amount of private or even quiet time we were able to find as parents. Our kids often do what I call herding, which means no matter what room Sean or I are in, they collect around us like a little herd. The smaller the room the more they seem to herd! I find myself standing in the middle of 3 medium and 1 tiny human at the bathroom sink more times that I care to count. More space has not really brought more happiness or more peace, instead it has often made both Sean and I feel lonely or sad and worried about our one kid whose room is at the opposite end of the house. As a mom, I have often felt the need to herd my little brood all together when the lights are out and we are at rest. Just this week, after feeling tearful over this very thing and talking it over with Sean we asked Archie if he liked being in his room alone farther away, and he said no, he doesn't like sleeping alone.  He said the rest of the family is all in one hall as a unit, and he is all by himself (cue more motherly tears), so we are moving him up to share some space with his sister and be in the fold with us. Last night as we all went to sleep along the same hall way it felt better, less lonely, right for us at night. We will need less space but likely more boundaries as we are trying to teach the small herd to respect when one of us steps away for a minute of quiet or alone time. I am not sad about the idea of moving into a small English cottage in Cambridgeshire or Bury St. Edwards. Instead as we are looking for more of the things that matter, I am looking forward to more quiet, more together, and less distraction.

 

Making a Change

I took my first trip overseas when I graduated high school. I was lucky enough to see England and France, and it forever changed my plans and perceptions. It immediately made me aware that venturing out was not only possible, but also much easier than I had realized. I returned on my own as soon as I was able and fell in love with the Eastern European way of living. I spent pretty much all my efforts throughout nursing school and after finding ways back to the city and work I fell in love with in Bucharest. I loved walking to work, taking public transportation, eating my meals from the corner market and picking up bread on my way back from the same bakery every day. When I settled back in the states I thought I was only going to be back for a short time to earn enough money to head back to Romania for as long as possible. In my time back I reconnected with my my very first love who I had not spoken to for years and in short order married him and had our first little one Hank. I looked for that same feel of living, hoping urban life would offer the same feel, and at times it does. I love living in cities with public transportation, trains to take, walkable neighborhoods, and good food.While I felt it might be possible to for us to travel the idea of living overseas seemed like a foregone conclusion.
Five years ago I started reading about families that take a gap year, it immediately called back all my longings for adventures, a different way of living, and a different experience for our kids. However, most families taking gap years seemed to either have assets that allowed for them to do so financially, or had careers that made it possible to work from the road. It wasn't until more recently the idea that moving towards a different way of living became something we really agreed and shared the same vision for, and all my old thoughts of how doable travel and living in other countries can be. There is no reason for us not to be a nurse and a paramedic in Cambridge instead of being a nurse and a paramedic in Nashville. Really one just has to start taking the steps to do it. I was only 17 when I took my first trek to England and France on a chaperoned trip with a rather intense southern baptist christian school, it was only 6 months before I made my second excursion by myself and fell fully in love with all the aspects of life in Bucharest, I immediately tried (unsuccessfully) to extend my trip and stay through Christmas, and soon felt I never wanted to leave. Taking the steps and working towards moving to Cambridge feels like answering the call to a part of myself that I had turned away from and in a sense given up on for now, but once pulled back out into the light, all my affection for this part of who I am is as strong as it ever was. All we have to do is take the steps to make the change in where we are to where we want to be.

 

In the wait

I haven’t written in weeks. Often I process anything big I am trying to wrap my heart and mind around through journaling or writing it all out, editing, and thinking it through, making a little space and time to set it in front of myself. I didn’t write much from 2017 to 2019 because we were in the middle of what felt like one of the hardest seasons we have gone through, and each time I felt we were beginning to crest the wave, another thing would crash down. It felt too big to process, too much to take in, too much to pen down on paper. I kept setting things aside and saving them to go through when we reached the other side. Now here we are, this is not the other side. Everyone is feeling the hard and trying to keep up with all the individual layers that are unique to each person. I think like most people I was eager to end 2019 even as Sean and I were both going through corporate takeovers in our careers that left us feeling incredibly uncertain about our future as a family and our job security moving forward. All we could do is wait. Wait to see how our jobs were going to land, wait to see if our efforts to exit foreclosure and keep our home would work out, wait to see if our toddler that I was spending nights fretting over was going to catch up developmentally. Waiting is not my strongest skill, but it is now something I have had to practice ad nauseam. Here are the things that are hard for me. I have been overly careful not to mention them because it feels like whining, when everyone is having a hard time and some are having a much more tragic and intense time than me. However, I can’t seem to move through what is feeling hard when I won’t acknowledge it. Before a pandemic hit the world one of the things that was keeping me going is the decisions we’ve made for our family moving forward. I was able to pour my efforts into our plans for relocating our family in Summer 2021. I have been applying for my UK RN license, working through the logistics of what it take to move a family of 6 to another country with little but suitcases and bins that we will check on a plane. I’ve been studying for exams, looking at housing, and it has been the plan that has kept me sane in the midst of everything else that has been falling away. I had planned on documenting this process step by step starting with how we came to this decision and what the nuts of and bolts of this process are. I was scheduled for my first part of a 2 part exam on March 23rd, when all the test centers closed the process of working towards this goal sort of ground to a halt. Of all the tings I have grieved in missing friends, worrying over missing therapy appointments for Frankie’s speech, our kids missing school, the halt of our plans to move have been the hardest for me. Possibly, because like everyone else, this part of the wait is something I wish I could just escape from. Right now so many parts of our life are on pause, and there is nothing but time to help move things forward. MIght as well start going through the pile of things I set to the side…

 

Checklist for Change

In January 2.5 long years of disconnect, intense emotional and financial stress and exhaustion came to a head. It wasn’t the foreclosure looming over our home, or the baby turned toddler that unexpectedly roughed up the edges of our marriage, the final straw was medical bills from a broken wrist in May from a fateful fall off the monkey bars at recess. In short, something that could have and should have been covered by the insurance policy we pay thousands of dollars for was going to cost more than I could wrap my head around; it was going to bleed over into another calendar year and continue to cost more out of pocket because of the lovely thing known as a deductible. I found myself pressuring orthopedists to make quicker decisions in December that were not able to be made because sometimes you just have to wait for bones to grow before you can decide what needs to be done with them. In a rare moment of clarity I expressed to Sean that I no longer wanted to do this. By this I meant work 4 jobs between two parents to make ends meet when one thing like a broken arm can take it all away. I meant I no longer wanted to work so much to support our kids that we didn’t get to see them or each other. I hate not having time to enjoy raising and watching them grow. For the first time in what felt like a long time, we both agreed, neither of us wanted to stay where we are, and both of us are aligned in our desire to make a change. We made a list, said list can be seen in an earlier post, “somewhere slower.” In the process of making a list I revisited a truth I have known and had to relearn many times, the first step in making something happen is simply to make the decision you are going to make a change. So many times I get stunted or stalled in the logic, but the truth is moving to another country is just a more complex algorithm of choosing to move to another state or even a new house. Once the decision is made, you just have to make a list of what needs to be done. For us that looked like figuring out how to work in another country as medical professionals including licensure, requirements, and researching the differences in roles. I am forever grateful to have found continental nurse in England as they have been holding my hand through the process of getting my UK nursing license. The second step was figuring out the type of visa that best suits our situation and needs. There are many reasons I feel lucky to be married to Sean, the newest one, his Commonwealth citizenship and the fact that I can ride his coattails into an ancestry visa since his sweet grandmother is from Scotland. Third, telling out children, let me just acknowledge the response was luke warm to frigid depending on the child, and the most excited one is really only in it because she is hoping for a pet bunny once we settle.

Our original pre pandemic timeline included allowing for the one unified request from our older three kids to finish out the school year. We have this year a grade 6, grade 4, and grade 2 school aged children as well as a toddler. As elementary school in our area ends at grade 4, it felt like a reasonable request and the process of acquiring my license is lengthy anyways. This was the plan before COVID 19. I started by opening a request with the Nursing and Midwifery Counsel and started begging the Tennessee board of nursing to communicate with them. This sometimes meant spending hours on the phone or sitting in the office refusing to leave until I was seen, but in the end it was all worked out and I scheduled to take the first half of my exam in March. Due to what we all now just lovingly call Corona Virus, my first exam was cancelled and rescheduled 4 times, but I finally took and passed my CBT exam in May. The last hurdle in being employable in the UK is to fly to England and take my OSCE exam. Currently, it feels like the world has changed a million ways since last January when we decided to start this process, in many ways it has only made me more prepared to go. My biggest concerns and fears have been around our children adjusting to a new place, new culture, and smaller more intimate spaces as homes are smaller there and they will for a time, only know each other. When we went into lock down it was like a mock trial run. I was relieved to watch them all lean in to each other. That is not to say there has not been sibling fights and high tensions, but I have watched them all band together, I know they can do this.

I am no longer sure when we will leave. Taking the OSCE will require me to fly in to the UK and quarantine 14 days before the exam, absorbing the cost of that trip as well as the cost of the exam is another hurdle we are trying to clear. I no longer feel we have to wait for school because our kids are not physically in school, but I do not want to break our work to our kids either. We are in the wait, and that is okay for right now. We have started to tick the boxes on our checklist for change.

 

Stepping Stones

I haven’t been able to think about what is next after this exam, nothing else can be done until this step is completed. Like many families right now, none of this looks like I wish it did. In my dreams I would have all of us here, taking a family adventure through Scotland and showing the kids around all my favourite places while finding new family favourites for us to return to after moving. Instead I am taking strange photos wishing I could show Archie the double decker bus he keeps talking about and knowing they would love the northern shore here. Sean has always wanted to visit Scotland and see his family here and hike around Scotland. Instead I am traveling solo and he is taking his vacation to hold down the fort at home with 4 kids, 2 who are just starting back to school and one toddler who is home all the time. I can tell you the one who is really doing the hard things is not me! I missed Archie’s first day back at school and will be missing Elsie’s last soccer games, Halloween, and Frankie’s 3rd birthday. While this feels exciting and like progress, it also feels very sad. I miss my kids and my husband. I have not been away from my kids this long ever and I haven’t been away from Sean this long since our long distance dating days. The last solo trip I took (other than trips to Canada when we were dating) was to Romania when I was 22. So it has been a bit since I navigated changing planes and trains (vastly easier when you don’t have a toddler in an ergo strapped to you). The stress of trying to remain COVID 19 free while traveling added some extra stressors to this venture and while wearing a mask for 21 hours on planes and trains was not my best life, I am grateful to have arrived here. Every glimpse of Scotland I’ve seen has felt like a privilege, so has the full night of sleep and the quiet day of studying. So whats next? When I complete quarantine here I will take the train to Northamptom England and take my nursing exam (also known as the OSCE) the next morning. Then the next day the train back to London for my morning flight home.

Partially due to COVID 19 and partially due to the massive process it is to move a family of 6 to another country, everything has been happening in agonizingly slow stages. I have had to re-frame it many times to avoid feeling frustrated. The next biggest step is securing my nursing license. The first half of testing I was able to take in the states, the second half has to be taken at a testing center in England. Originally I had planned to fly here for a week, take my test, and maybe explore a little as well as look at housing and neighborhoods in Cambridge. Then COVID 19 caused border shut downs, testing centers were closed, and it felt really uncertain when it would be a possibility to schedule things. Testing centers opened again in October and I was cleared for a November 3rd exam. Instead of a 1 week adventure, a two week quarantine was necessary before testing. I find myself in the incredibly lucky position of knowing a sweet friend in St. Andrews Scotland who offered me a room in her house for two weeks. I wish I was out exploring Scotland, I have always wanted to visit, instead I find myself studying training videos and watching the weather out the window. Here’s to completing next steps and hopping to the next stone.

 

Living with and

This year has been full of the need for constant “pivoting.” As a family we’ve had to move back and forth between digital learning and in person classes. What was supposed to be a year of soaking up time with our close friends, completing our time at Dan Mills Elementary, and enjoying time with our Nashville made family, quickly became heavy with decisions of social isolation, job changes, child care conundrums, and mental health challenges for myself and some of our kids as well. We are raising four kids all with individual strengths and needs in a pandemic. It has been hard to figure out if we should, stall, change course, or press on in plans we started making almost 2 years ago. We have come to grips with the fact that novel coronavirus is not going away quickly and that it will likely have long lasting impacts on the way most of us live for much longer than any of us want to acknowledge. So we are not only pivoting, but also pressing on. We’ve decided to change our timeline a bit and head to Seattle on a travel contract in hopes of being able to see and spend some time with our Canadian family before we leave for England in the Spring. This sudden shift feels incredibly right and I am energized, as I always have been, by a little bit of chaos. I feel I am often at my best when I am hanging half off a precipice of adventure. This quick change means selling our house sooner, and at a time when many people are not looking to buy, shifting our kids to online learning for the remainder of the year (something that would likely have happened even if we were not leaving town), and saying goodbye much sooner than we had planned to. This is where living with “and” comes in. I am excited for everything that we are starting. I feel in my very depths we are on the right path and we are aligned in our plans. I am fighting the feeling that to be excited to go is a betrayal of what we are leaving behind. There is joy and grief in these plans for our family. I cannot wait to go and I am so sad to be leaving. We have built a beautiful life full of beautiful friendships here in Nashville. By staying in this place for 11 years we have forged a family history for ourselves, built a tribe that we consider family; I believe all of us will grieve this in phases and stages that are not easy to get through. I’ve learned many lessons in this pandemic and tried so hard to put our kids at ease with this lesson the most, it is ok to have an “and” with your emotions. It is okay to love online learning and miss being in class with your friends. It is okay to be excited to go and sad to leave. We all hate this pandemic and we have had some incredibly beautiful family time that we would not have had without it. We miss our friends while in isolation and we will miss them differently and more when we are gone. We can feel all these things and feeling one thing is not a betrayal of the other.

Our updated timeline includes listing our home right after Christmas and heading on a cross country road trip to Seattle, Washington in February. There we will settle in to a small Airbnb to finish out the school year virtually with Sean at home with the kids while I work in the hospital and hopefully take frequent road trips to see our family. This allows our kids and Sean to quarantine and test before taking direct drives to visit family and friends we hope. Then we will head back to Nashville in the spring to ship our things overseas and say goodbye to friends here

Open hands, open plans.

The framework is in place but the materials for our plan seems to be ever changing. There have been so many twists and turns that the only approach that has kept us sane has been to hold to things loosely and press on allowing plans to change as needed. Instead of taking my already signed contract in Seattle for our last few months in the states, I am working a contract here in Nashville until May. Our house, now twice under contract, has finally sold. We find ourselves preparing to live in a small rental in town for a couple months so we can pack up and sell all our belongings. We are living in the in between that I lovingly call limbo. Limbo has never been a place that I thrive. I am an organizer, a planner, and this is requiring a lot of faith that we are on the right path for our family. Normally I would be working through school enrollment applications and planning our child care for after the summer. I would be having coffee and discussing our summer game plan for kiddo care and play time with Kim. Instead I find myself in this hazy unknown, not enrolling our kids because we are not supposed to be here after June, but also not having our visa’s or a firm work contract because this is the earliest we could apply in our timeline. I am breathing a prayer that all the small and large pieces begin to click into place over the next 90 days. I exhale holding my hands open and palms up as there really isn’t anything solid I can hold tightly too. Each next thing that needs to be done is in a queue that has to go in order, we need tickets, but can’t buy tickets until we have our Visa’s confirmed. I need a job, but the job depends on the visa, and the visa also depends on the job. It feels like all the next steps need to be taken in one final giant leap that has to be timed just right.

The logistical things I am doing to prepare, applying for jobs through my travel contracts as well as independently. Collecting all of our kids physicals and forms from pediatricians and doctors. Making sure everyone has had teeth cleanings and up to date appointments with therapists and any specialists (with four kids this includes orthopedics, orthodontists, psychiatrists, cardiologists, and speech pathologists) because we need to arrive with 90 days of any prescriptions we take as well as up to date treatment plans so we can schedule and continue speech therapy and mental health therapy when we get settled. I will also need to collect each kids end of the year school records so we can enroll in school when we arrive. One of our kids needs her passport renewed, appointment is scheduled for the 8th with hopes that it will arrive in time to leave. We all need Visa’s, so we are collecting all the documents to prove ancestry in the UK. Did you know if you have a grandparent born in the UK, you may have a path to an ancestry visa that allows you to live and work abroad! I have been diligently looking for housing and checking the school tracker for a perfect place that is located near a primary school for the little ones and a college for Hank (he’s not that advanced, anything after 6th grade there is listed as college). Thank goodness for the app Right Move, you can check for rentals as well as look at the school rankings in proximity to each neighborhood. I am packing painfully slow, cleaning out clothing and home goods, trying to save space by packing in vacuum cubes bags the things we will want when we arrive, including linen, some dishes and cookware, and of course every single stuffed animal my 7 year old cannot fathom parting with. The list of things I wish to take is long, and the space in which to take them is small. We are not taking any furniture, but we are taking records and hockey gear as well as sheets, blankets, maybe towels? Art and books for sure. Mostly, for each item we sell I move the money to our UK account in hopes that it will add up to the $10,000 list of furniture I have in my Ikea cart for when we arrive. My current plan, to purchase all the essentials in one huge order at ikea and then spend our two weeks in quarantine when we arrive putting together bed after bed, which reminds me, I should pack a few essential tools. In one of the best little tips, we were told we could ship a vehicle packed full of our things for just $1600. So, instead of shipping over a pallet like we had planned, we are shipping over our Toyota hatch back filled with our boxes and home goods. If we plan it right, hopefully it will arrive shortly after we do. Just in case it is delayed each kid will have a set of sheets and a towel in their suitcase. I will talk more in the next few weeks about what we have done over this year to prepare our kids for this big leap we are about to take. For now, I have a night shift to work and only a short amount of time to catch a nap before I need to go pick up all my kids. Here’s to plans unfolding as they should and finding solid footing when we take this next big leap of faith.

Next to nothing and IKEA

Family Travel

I can't update here often enough to keep up with the pace of how quickly things are changing. For so long it has felt like holding patterns, in the wait of this process of moving over seas there were large stretches of just that, waiting. Waiting for borders to open and exam slots to be scheduled, waiting to apply for positions, waiting to sell our home, and waiting to apply for visa's. Suddenly we are thrust out of the wait and into the current of change. Last week we sold our house and pretty much everything in it and moved into a sweet little furnished rental on the east side, one of my favourite areas in Nashville. We are soaking it up in this perfectly laid out house trying to get in as much friend time as possible. I am frantically applying for and interviewing online (at all sorts of strange hours due to the time change) for jobs in both England and Scotland. I am plodding through the immense amount of paperwork and applications for Visa's x 6 with a couple added stressors like limited biometric appointments and a pending passport for my third baby that will hopefully arrive any day now. This is everything we knew was coming, and try as I might, some of it was impossible to plan for. How do you plan to move a family of 6 to another country and what do you do about all of the things? Along the way the most often asked question has been around our stuff, what will we take, how are our kids coping with limited space for items, what will we do when we arrive. The basic answer is we're taking next to nothing and IKEA.

The past year I have been slowly weeding through, cleaning out, and minimizing our belongings. 6 months ago I tried pretty hard to put a halt on purchasing anything that would not be coming with us and in December we focused hard on directing the kids towards things that would be transportable. This looked different depending on age. Our older two, who are mostly out of the toy phase and into electronics (which are mostly portable) haven not had too hard of a time with this. For our youngest I started guiding her towards small collections of things, in particular these adorable little Maileg mice that she can easily stow in her backpack along with a few other treasures (thanks to @thegetalong for helping me outfit her with the smallest cutest things). For my 7 year old this has proved to be the hardest challenge, she is by far taking the most space because if I donate one more stuffed animal it may just push her over the emotional edge. Part of the solution for this is vacuum bags (seriously thank the godesses for vacuum bags) luckily all her little stuffies fit into one and the suction down pretty well, however I have put a strict ban on the purchase of any more until we are relocated!

Each family member gets a large checked bag, a carry on, and a back pack for this journey. Our checked bags include all clothing and shoes as well as a set of sheets and a towel for each person. Carry on bags are reserved for treasured must have items when we arrive, for the boys this is gaming equipment, for Frances this is all her magnet tiles and Maileg toys; for Elsie, you guessed it, more stuffed animals. For me I have my scrubs and all my things I need for a new job (stethoscope, clogs, etc...) and for Sean, well what he packs is what I am officially calling not my problem, I have to pack all the other bags, he's on his own for carry on items. We looked at various modes of transport including options for shipping a pallet for items like books, art, records, and kitchen things. In the end, on the best advice from @happilycuratedchaos, we decided to ship Sean's Toyota matrix over because it is shockingly affordable and allows us to pack it full of all our things. Mostly it will be filled with books, records, kitchen items that are expensive to replace like utensils and dishes, bake ware, and things I know I will want to set up our house like comforters, down pillows, sheets, coats and bulkier items we wont need right away. I am pretty sure Sean's box of keepsakes and some hockey gear made the list as well. While slowly selling every piece of furniture we own, I have have been compiling an extensive IKEA list of items to start with for furnishing our new place, wherever that is. I am not ready to commit to a furnished home with used mattresses, I have seen what we do to a mattress at our house, and I just cannot even with a strangers mattress. We will need to quarantine for 2 weeks when we arrive, this will likely take place at an air bnb, I am hoping to have a large IKEA order delivered and to spend that two weeks putting together a lot of furniture (while drinking whiskey and trying not to kill each other).

In addition to packing the list of important tasks for me has been obtaining extra copies of birth certificates, checking all passports and documents we will need, getting the most up to date medical records for each family member, and ensuring we can each get a 90 day supply of our prescriptions right before we leave so that we have time to set up care when we arrive. Trying to trouble shoot getting our school records because there is a chance we would need to leave 1-2 weeks before the school year ends, and I have no idea what I will need to enroll them in school once we arrive. It is a lot! Up to this point most the to do list was things that needed to wait, and now it is time to do it all at once. It is equal parts exciting and terrifying to be un moored with 4 kids, no secured job yet, and no house, but what is an adventure without a bit of risk (insert me vomiting from anxiety here)?

This post brought to you from the 1 hour waiting room time of my oldest child’s therapy session.

 

Releasing the ties that bind

I have been adding tattoos, which kind of feels like a stress reliever. Most recent one pictured by Zane at Sunrise Tattoo I wanted to get done before we left. To say I am a bit overwhelmed would be a gross understatement. The layers and levels of things that are happening right now are many and varied! We are still living in this pandemic, I found myself having a visceral reaction to the report of a possible fourth wave rise in COVID 19 numbers, I thought I might vomit, and everything that it entails for us at work, as a family, and as we are preparing to travel in abroad in 4 weeks. I want to see our friends and spend time with everyone we will miss before we go, and I have a hard time being present in those moments because it can feel easier to detach early and start making distance so that goodbye will not be as painful. I am watching our kids struggle with this as well, encouraging them to stay engaged at school and not to avoid time with friends because it feels sad and hard. It is sad and hard! I find other people are able to be more enthusiastic for us right now than I am able to muster. I think this is a two fold thing for me. I feel incredibly anxious that our visa’s are not going to go through and we will not be able to leave, so that has me in knots and really cautious about allowing myself to be excited right now. I also struggle with a deep rooted belief that I wont get or don’t deserve the things I want most, kind of like a bit of imposter syndrome mixed with intense self deprecating doubt. I don’t want to want this too badly, even though I totally want this so much it is terrifying. At this stage in the game we have released all the ties that bind us in the states. Choosing this phrasing over, “we have blow up our lives in the states.” We’ve sold our home, quit our jobs, withdrawn our kids from school, and I have no B plan for what to do if things don’t go through. It feels like a precarious edge to be walking on. I feel sick and anxious about it on a daily basis.

I am still working full time, and will be up until we leave. My last shift is on the 15th and we fly out on the 18th, nothing like cutting it close and living with a little more chaos! Sean is preparing to give notice at work as well, and all of this feels intimidating in the shadow of still not having received our visa’s. We have all gone through biometrics, 6 applications are pending, and none of us have received our passports or paperwork back. I am second guessing not using a lawyer to prepare our paperwork and not paying extra for expedited applications. Paying for six 5 year visa applications was not what one would call affordable. We used a large portion of the profit from the sale of our house to make this a possible, it is a big loss if they are denied and will require a lawyer and appeals process, which means likely our exit date of May 18th would need to be on hold and I have committed to a job starting June 1st. No pressure right. I keep telling myself I will use the 10 days of quarantine when we arrive to get in the headspace of starting a new job in a new field with entirely new coworkers, systems, charting etc…

There are many more things to do, but today on the docket:

• fill out another FBI criminal background check because mine is more than a year old.

• Finish packing, itemizing, and labeling our pallets so they can be picked up and shipped. This is something I had hoped to have done 2 weeks ago so that our things would arrive around the time we did, but we are just going to have to make due without our stuff for a few weeks. We are using a company called www.Upakweship.com because our friends had a good experience using them last year, so I am hoping we don’t lose all our things (but also buying the insurance in case we do!)

• Clean out house, it is in sore need of it.

• Attempt to source scrubs and uniform items I will need for my new job so I wont have to worry about it when we arrive.

• Call about a rental that I am crushing on hard and hope they will take my work contract and pending visa application as proof to abode. I desperately want to have a place to arrive at when we get there!

 

Away We Go (almost) and thoughts from mothers day

All the emotions feel big this past few months. Holding the space for them for four very different small humans in this family has felt hard and has required stepping out of my comfort zone and making decisions to check in with myself and what my inner child needs before responding. Let me first say I am not the best at this, and I have responded in stress and anger more times than I want to acknowledge. I have had to check back in with my kids and apologize, reviewing how I wish I had responded differently many times. As mothers day came and went I reflected a lot on the thought that the most important work I did as their mom this year was the work of parenting myself. Before EMDR I was unaware of how often my own inner triggers were driving my response to my children, especially when it comes to dealing with big and dramatic tearful feelings. Unfortunately I have found holding space for the big feelings that my 7 year old has always had is the hardest challenge. I am forever grateful for a session that helped me realize this was rooted in a need to stop and acknowledge how I wish I had been responded to as a child. This is work that likely we all need to do, and not meant to be doled out with judgement. For me it was a realization that overly tearful emotions in my children have always been hard for me to sit with, and working through having grace and affection for my childhood self has allowed me to sit and be much more present with my kids big emotions.

This has come in clutch the last couple months. If you want to trigger a series of varied big emotions simply tell your children that you are uprooting their current life and moving them out of the country. Cue tears, tempers, and anxieties. Each of our children have blossomed beautiful friendships here in Nashville and it feels harsh to break them apart. They have needed all the space to stretch their emotional legs and feel seen and heard. So much of this move sounds like a fairy tale, moving to a quaint little town into a sweet little cottage and simplifying all the things, but the truth in the details is that it is hard. The hard is also beautiful. I am endlessly grateful for the gift of mothering my 4 kids and how it has helped me to mother myself.

This move has required all of me in the midst of this pandemic. I have felt stretched to my max between mothering, working full time, never seeing my husband (never having time to check in with him and his needs), and planning then planning again finding time to check in with myself has been the hardest thing. Recently I was able to step away and sit at the beach with friends. Sean took over all the things and all the kids for the weekend and made time for me to sit alone for the first time in a long time. In that space of time I processed as much anxiety and pressure as I could and it was the most needed thing I could have done. So much of this process has been planning, walking into the made plan, having it all fall apart, and then planning it again. It has required open hands on all things and the need to keep the end goal in view at all times so that all the other things could ebb and flow or fall away as needed. Here we are, just 6 days away from boarding a plane and things are still shifting and changing. Travel bans and protocols have changed at least 6 times since we purchased tickets. At this exact moment where we will be living and how we will be able to procure furniture is still coming into focus. I have spent the day adjusting my kids expectations around when our home will be fully set up and furnished because as it would turn out supply chains are disrupted all over and we will not be able to get most our furniture for at least 4 weeks once we arrive. Big picture this may not seem like a big thing, but I had hoped we would be all cozied up and unpacking for the first two weeks before I start my job. I am incredibly sad as we start saying rounds and rounds of goodbyes and as every thing we do feels like a finality. Last meet ups, last cups of coffee, last days of school. I am also infinitely excited about moving into a place of settling and out of a place of limbo. I am eager to explore and walk along the river Cam, I am excited to meet new coworkers and see new schools, excited to learn my bike route to work. Fully living in holding that joy and grief. Living with “and” and helping our kids learn this too has been the work of this year. All of the sudden we’ve gone from we are moving in a year, 6 months, 3 months, 6 week to we are moving now!

 

A little of this and a little of that

We are still living with a lot of dueling emotions and seemingly opposite experiences. On any day one of us (mostly our kids) can be found crying, melting down, or raging; the next you can also find us enjoying walks around our neighborhood, riding bikes, and exploring our little corner of Europe. We’ve been trying to fill our days and feel at home, but struggling because we are still living in an empty house waiting on furniture and our things from our Nashville home to arrive. We are in a season of adventure and also one of hard. A season that I hope we will be able to look back on and see the beauty of as well. We’ve had long days of slow family time that are not usually granted to us. We’ve had a breather from caustic politics and bombardment of media in the U.S. and it has felt nice to sit around doing a puzzle, sleep in every day, to walk to coffee in the afternoon. All along this journey we have had long periods of being in the wait with uncertainty about timing. Right now is no different. We have landed but are not settled. I have started work but my contract is still being negotiated. At every turn we’ve walked paths with multiple unexpected turns and we have had to have open hands about it letting plans come, go, shift, and change as needed. Now that we are here I have had to talk myself back into trusting this plan, I have struggled with feeling the intensity of all the emotions surrounding me as my kids and Sean process through this rather dramatic hard move. I have struggled to hold space for all of it when there is not much space for me to process and feel my own feelings. I have felt the weight of chasing a dream into reality only for real life stressors to hit us heavily. I keep reminding myself of the deep peace and knowing we felt when we made this plan and of all the things that did fall into place to make it happen. I love it here, I know on the other side of missing our friends and feeling lonely our kids will love it here too. I love walking and riding a bike everywhere. I love public transportation and proximity to this beautiful country and beyond. I am content and I am stressed. There is a little of this and a little of that for every single thing I feel these days.