We chose a place that's just perfect for us. But there's this one big downside.
When I was pregnant, my husband and I did everything we could to plan for our growing family. We bought all the supplies and then some, we had the nursery set up well in advance, we read all the parenting books, we interviewed doulas, we made the birth plans. What we didn’t know was that we’d long ago made the decision that would shape our parenting more than anything else, before we ever even thought about getting pregnant.
It is glaringly obvious now, but before becoming a parent, I had no idea that raising a family far from family would be so hard. We knew we’d miss them, but in the past, it had been easy to FaceTime and plan trips every few months. Once we had children, that became much harder. Traveling several hours away is no easy trip. Every stage presents obstacles. There were feeding and nap schedules, and then school schedules and extracurriculars. It’s not super easy for our families to visit us either.
And then there’s the missed time with cousins. When I was five, my parents bought a fixer-upper camp near my aunt and her family. My childhood summers were spent on the water with my cousins, my mom and her sister’s laughter echoing off the lake. I long for my kids to have that kind of experience with their cousins more often. I long for them to know the joy of being excused from the dinner table to go play while the grownups sit around and talk for hours.
Of course, having parents close by doesn’t automatically mean you have this support. Plenty of people have relatives nearby with whom they don’t have this kind of relationship, and that can bring its own kind of heartbreak. But for those lucky enough to have loving, supportive families who also happen to live nearby and can be involved — that’s the dream. Or at least mine, anyway.family.
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