I never thought it would happen while doing something as mundane as shopping for groceries in my adopted town's local Safeway.
Yet I'm so glad it did.
During the twenty-nine-day reprieve from reality, we spent our time they way many parents of young children do-- keeping the kids in perpetual motion with activities that could reveal their hidden talents while giving them less time to fight.
For us, this meant soccer and dance class and Girl Scouts and swim lessons and playdates. What we didn't really appreciate at the time was that we weren't just socializing our children-- we were socializing ourselves. Our involvement with the school and these organizations allowed all four of us to meet many friends and neighbors who added fun and a sense of validation and connectedness to our lives.
Our mistake was not placing an equal amount of value on these relationships as we did on the idea of getting ahead financially.
As has always been our pattern, Russ and I spent the weekend mornings discussing articles in the newspaper over coffee. One leisurely Saturday morning, we started reading the Home section. Not because we could afford to renovate ours, but because there were often articles and ads for communities an hour or two away from our pricy Bay Area.
Before we knew it, the idea of moving a few hours away became our escape hatch whenever we felt overwhelmed by the cost of living. Once we allowed the possibility of a move to settle in, it baby-stepped its way into becoming our reality.
When I look back at this decision now, all I can say is that we got greedy. We decided to shake up our day-today living in order to live larger for less. We were consumed with the idea of finding a bigger house with a smaller mortgage.
It sounds so foolish to me now, but it seemed to make perfect sense at the time. We really thought we could replicate our rewarding and connected life on a dime.
Don't get me wrong-- we were very sad to say good-bye to the wonderful friends we had grown to love over the preceding five years that we'd been raising our kids in the area. It's just that we must've thought that great people who would want a platonic love connection with us would be on every single corner of any given town.
They weren't, of course. Or perhaps they were, but we just couldn't see ourselves finding them. Alas, many of our new neighbors were perfectly content to continue the life they had been living before the Moores landed on their street.
I just never could have envisioned how lonely this would make me feel.
And though this town was just two and a half hours from our home in the Bay Area, the culture was entirely different. The friendships I had stumbled my way into at home were made possible by simply showing up repeatedly on our daughters' elementary school campus. By helping in the classroom or getting suckered into committees I never intended to get involved with, I met dozens of like-minded people who would become my lifelong friends.
The new school had a different way of doing things. I'm sure it made perfect sense to the people who lived there, but it certainly didn't work for me. All of the children there arrived by bus, unless they lived a block away and could walk alone safely from their home. What this meant to me was that the blacktop at that school was a veritable ghost town for parents. And so it came to be that they only way I knew to connect with people in the same stage of life I was in was now unavailable to me.
I felt like I had Dr. Phil on replay, asking me over and over again: "How's that workin' for ya?"
The answer was: Not so much. In fact, I went so far as to start identifying with stalkers. Whenever I got a glimpse of a woman who had a spring in her step, I couldn't help but watch her and try to run into her around town. Would she be fun? Would she get my quirky sense of humor? Would she be horrified that my family lives off a rotation of just five dinner "recipes"?
I wanted to write to my friends at home and request that they send me some testimonials, vouching for my normalcy. "Shana is fun. Shana won't hurt you. She will make you feel domestically gifted in comparison. Let her in as your BFF."
I can't imagine that I was giving off a vibe that read "emotionally stable," especially if I was really going to present my friend resume at a first encounter.
Somehow, though, I managed to meet a couple of women who weren't trigger happy with the writing of restraining orders. I had a few women over and was invited a few places in return.
The slowness of it all was killing me. I had no idea how much I would miss the utter comfort of knowing and being known.
I even tricked myself into believing that I would see familiar faces in the new local Safeway like I always did at home. What a contrast it was to look into the eyes of strangers ever single time when, at home, I needed to plan for an extra thirty minutes to visit with all the people I'd run into from soccer and school while giving the avocados and tomatoes the squeeze test.
I'd never felt so lonely in all my life. And the irony wasn't lost on me that I'd moved away to afford a bigger house with a smaller mortgage, yet now that I had so much space, I had no one to invite over to frolic in it with me.
I was officially riper than one of those tender avocados for an Aha moment.
The first phase of it happened when I decided that I owed it to myself and my family to carry on with the various holiday traditions we had enjoyed at home. For the kids, it meant a Halloween party with games and crafts. That was easy enough to accomplish since children have that delightful way of living in the moment.
With me, it was going to be more complicated. My tradition had been to invite my mom friends over on the first weekend of December for an ugly ornament exchange. The basic idea is that everyone buys the ugliest ornament they can find and wraps it up to look pretty. We then draw numbers and steal from one another in the same way you do at a white elephant party. We take pride in taking home the trophy for having brought the year's ugliest ornament and laugh so hard at the worst the retail world has to offer. It's sassy, irreverent, and a hell of a good time.
Not wanting to hole up and wallow in my sadness, I decided that the show would have to go on. My intention was to invite any woman whose first name I knew, which would still have made it an intimate gathering. As the invitations churned out of my printer, I dissolved into tears. Would any of these women understand the charm and humor of this event? My gut said no. From what I had seen so far, the townswomen who supported the idea of a first-grade class holiday party decorated by interior designers weren't likely to rally behind ugly.
All of a sudden, this party became the litmus test for my sense of belonging to this community. My Aha moment was rising even faster than Bay Area housing prices.
The next morning, with the tear-stained invitations tucked away in a drawer to dry, I put on my best suck-it-up face and made my regular trip to Safeway for the week's groceries. As was my habit, I scanned as many faces as I did packaging labels. And then it hit me right in the middle of the salad dressing and condiment aisle...
If I dropped dead right there, would anyone even care? Sure, there would be the mother of all cleanups on Aisle 7, but then?
The answer was an unequivocal: "No, Ma'am, but can I help you to your car with that cart full of reality?"
I needed to get out of there. In fairness to the fine people of this new town, I hadn't given myself the chance to become endearing to any of them yet. And I never would because I knew I needed to go home. How had it never occurred to me that I was a deep root kind of girl? That it was essential for me to feel understood and connected where I spent my time?
I called Russ at work and asked if he was sitting down. The man was already beyond stressed because he was still working in the Bay Area and living with his parents during the workweek. This was our only option after the agreement he had come to with his employer about working remotely fell through following the sale of our home. But I think he held out hope that this arrangement would be short-lived.
The plan was that he would interview in this new town and ultimately leave the high-tech world to go back to teaching, the career he wished he had never given up. But, as we already knew, raising two children and affording a home in Silicon Valley was nearly impossible to do on a teacher's salary.
My phone call to his office with my desperate plea to leave this place didn't fall on deaf ears, but it did fall on a muted voice. Had I just contributed to the death of him? He drove back up to see us and talk things through.
I poured out my heart that night. I told him how much I had underestimated the importance of belonging. He questioned me, for sure. After all, we moved into that house in August and would have it for sale after Thanksgiving. Who does that?
By anyone's account, I didn't give myself enough time. The problem was that I didn't want to. My gut told me that we'd made a huge mistake by moving into a town that saw itself as exclusive when we've always been an inclusive, humbled-by-our-mortgage kind of family. As a lifetime Bay Area resident, I knew that giving it a year would price us out of ever going back. I viewed this as a now-or-never undoing of a mistake.
Russ saw it as a permanent goodbye to a dream. As I type this, I realize this moment could easily be looked at as the first step down the path to divorce. By moving back home, we would be flushing some $90,000 in realtor fees and moving expenses down the drain. And to a family that was just getting by before, losing that amount of money in equity was dramatic.
Even more profound than the loss of money, though, was my husband's acknowledgement that he would never get to return to teaching. For a man as stoic as Russ to say that out loud while a few tears wrestled their way out of his eyes was something I will carry with me the rest of my life.
As difficult a decision as it was for him to make that sacrifice for me, he did it. While it made the job situation easier in the short term, his longer-term hopes disappeared. He took one for the team. A whale of what at that.
As scary and stressful as it was to make this decision, the following six months were worse. We moved into my parents' house while waiting for our home to sell so we could make an offer on a house back in our old neighborhood. As we waited, we watched the Bay Area housing market get tighter and tighter. We lost out on several houses due to bidding wars.
Six months later, we wound up with a house that was slightly more expensive and significantly smaller than the one we had originally sold in the area. But the upside was that it allowed our girls to return to the school we all knew and loved.
I started to feel like we had rescued ourselves from the biggest mistake of our lifetime.
I am sure that many people -- heck, every person we knew -- whispered behind our backs. Some of the questions people asked insinuated that we should be ashamed of the mistake. I honestly never looked at it that way. If anything, I thought our story would flatter people to know that our connection to them and to this place was worth the huge financial and emotional price.
Looking back, some ten years later, I see how much the experience changed me. I've become more actively and vocally involved in this community because I know what it feels like to have loved it and lost it. I'm sure that my involvement is half done in celebration and half in trying to prove that the tough choices were worth the sacrifice.
I discovered, in time, that this mistake might not have started like the plot of a Hollywood blockbuster, but it certainly became a life-changing one for me. By reconnecting with friends and rolling up my sleeves to do good work within our community, I have found happiness in the smallest yet most meaningful ways.
And I feel a priceless sense of peace in knowing that I will never have to think about anything weightier than the choice between Balsamic Vinaigrette or Ranch on Aisle 7 again.
