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