Am I 6?

I remember watching an episode of “Kids Say the Darndest Things”, and Bill Cosby was asking a little boy, he was between 4 and 6, what he wanted to be when he grew up. The boy looked up at Bill and with confidence said “A lion”. When I tell people about this big dream to move to Scotland I feel like that little boy. Like people will laugh and pat me on the head and say “that’s nice dear” because like being a lion, it is something that is impossible.  Now I know that it isn’t really impossible, but I feel like people look at it in that way, like it isn’t going to happen. It makes me feel like I am 6 and not a 30 year old wife and mother of two who is perfectly capable of making life decisions on her own. This may or may not all be in my head, but that is beside the point, I feel how I feel. I think that if we go or not, this should be a good lesson in making decisions based on me and my family and not everyone else.

Will We or Won't We??

Okay, now we are in the stage where I think about all of the things that need to happen if we are actually going to do this and freak out.  Not only the things to go, but also all the issues for when we move back, you know like jobs, shelter, transportation.  It is all very overwhelming.  We still haven’t heard back from my husband’s potential employer since the first email, so I am starting to think that everything is falling apart while my husband is feeling more at peace about the whole thing.  I think that we should base things on his feelings because I have the tendency to be over cautious and shall we say neurotic.  At this point in the journey we just sit back and see if things are going to come together (I love it when a plan comes together) or not.  If you haven’t guessed, I am not very good at the sitting around game.  I like to plan, organize, and be completely in control, but we are too far away from the actual move to really do much.  I make myself feel useful by looking at apartments that realistically won’t be available when we are ready to move, but it makes me feel like I have some control over things and, let’s face it, a false sense of control is better than none at all.

Guess What?? We are moving to Scotland!!

A few more things that you should know about me:

1. I lived with my mom until I got married at the age of 21

2. After we got married we moved into my sister’s basement for a year and a half until we could save up for our own place.

3. I have never lived more than 10 minutes away from my family except three months that I spent in Spain when I was 19.

4. My sister is my best friend, and I am very close to my mom.

All of these things make it very hard to tell my family that we want to move to another country.  After the failed attempt to tell my mom and sister, we decided that we better start with people who will not be as affected by the decision and would think it was an exciting idea.  However, my husband texted my brother-in-law, while they were away for their anniversary, saying basically that we were moving to Scotland but not for a year so they didn’t have to worry about it.  I thought that his timing could have been better, but at least we would have to talk about it now.  To my surprise, she never brought it up, and if she wasn’t going to then neither was I.  So we both waited, she was hoping that it would all be forgotten, and I was trying to get the courage to actually bring it up.  In the meantime, we told some friends from church and a few less emotionally involved family members.  We got a lot of people saying that we would be missed, but it would be an amazing experience for us all, and they would love to come and visit.  Then, while my sister was on vacation with her family, my husband texted my brother-in-law asking how and when we should tell my sister. Well apparently he read “tell my sister” and so he did.  What followed next was a serious of awkward conversations because we both knew, we knew the other knew, and we knew that neither of us wanted to talk about it.  Finally she stopped by, and I was happy to have the difficult conversation to stop the very painful awkwardness that had become our relationship.  She was upset but supportive.  None of our parents know yet, and I don’t even know how to start the conversation.

The Idea

So I was sitting there minding my own business, living my ordinary little life, trying to fall asleep on a very long ride home from South Carolina with my sister and mom when all of a sudden I think to myself “We should move to Scotland”.  Who knows where thoughts come from?  They just appear.  This much unexpected thought got me excited, and I immediately started to dream of the possibilities.  The more excited I got, the harder it was to keep the idea to myself, and as my husband wasn’t there to talk to I decided to see how the idea would go over on my sister and mother.  Now if you know me you will know that I have always tried very hard not to “rock the boat” if you will, I don’t like to disappoint people, I care way too much about what people think about me and my decisions, and I definitely do not like to hurt the people that I love.  Never the less, I forged on cautiously by asking my sister, “So you know how you moved up north for a few years?  Well what if I moved to Scotland for a year or two?”  Well as you can imagine it didn’t go over so well.  My sister said, “excuse me, I moved 6 hours away, not across the world”, to which I thought, Scotland is only 6 hours away, it just happens to be by plane instead of car, and my mom said, “you are not taking my grand babies anywhere”.  I can totally understand their reactions because I am sure that I would have felt exactly the same if I was in their place.  I decided not to bring it up again.

When I got home I mentioned the idea to my husband who, to my surprise, took the idea and ran with it.  Within a week we had learned the regions in Scotland, decided on the area that we wanted to live in, and my husband had contacted a tree company who said that they were expanding in a year and would have work for him should we come.  It all seemed like a dream, but we would eventually have to wake up from our own private dream and include others in the plan.