Where is Home?
Mid-Life Crisis or an Awakening?
“I know you’re our organizational consultant, not my personal therapist,” a client told me over the phone, “but I grew this business for twenty plus years with the idea to sell it and spend my retirement traveling with my family,” he took a long pause, “but now, I won’t get to do that.”
He confided in me months earlier that his wife was enduring an incurable disease, leaving him at the current time of our conversation to dress her and stop all work travel so he could be at home to care for her.
“Don’t wait to do what you want to do with your family. Do it now.” he said.
Now he was acting as my therapist.
At the same time, we’ve been watching a relative- barely past her fortieth birthday navigate- with a tremendous amount of grace and poise- a surgery gone wrong leading to a long term stay in the hospital turned to long term neurological inpatient then outpatient rehabilitation. She won’t ever see like she is supposed to again. She’s been away from her three girls for over three months.
She told me at Thanksgiving, “Hopefully I can get this (benign) tumor removed in January and by February, I’ll be back doing all the things.”
Instead, she is still in Atlanta- over an hour from her home- working through outpatient neurological therapy five days a week. With her husband right by her side. It’s been a privilege to witness their love and their perseverance. And it has been a reminder- none of us are guaranteed what we think should be next.
Call it a midlife crisis, call it an awakening, but our family over the last couple of years has reexamined what home is and what it means to be home.
Our Programming and Our Privilege
On top of our realization that you never know what life will hand you, it has meant us re-examining our programming, as one friend and colleague phrased it.
She said to me over lunch one day, “I did what I was programmed to do.”
Meaning she and her husband along with me and my husband got the degrees, got married, registered for all the china we didn’t need and never use, bought a house that was the right size, even too big, worked the grind, had the 2.5 kids along with the dog. We did what the world told us to and what we thought we wanted to at the time- with little to no thought.
And now I just want to sell it all. Fight against the programming and all the stuff. Who needs 24 place settings of tea cups? No one these days.
My husband and I are both first born, Type A achievers. Born of baby boomer parents, we took on more of their generational characteristics instead of taking on more millennial characteristics. Work hard, show up, buy nice things, devote yourself to your kids’ life being better than yours was (when there was nothing wrong with our life growing up to begin with).
And on top of that, we care for everyone else around us. We are the present ones. The responsible ones, the mature ones. We were this when we were sixteen and we are still this. The obligations can be extremely routine and extremely exhausting.
We took no gap year, heck we took less than a week to transition from school to full-time work.
Our programming tells us to rarely think about what we may need or want or dare to dream. Do what the world tells you to do. Pursue the American Dream.
What the heck is even the American Dream? I think it told us one thing, or we thought it meant one thing, but at its core it means to take advantage of what freedom offers.
I’ll admit, we’ve had a life of privilege telling us what to do. To even have choices- whether we realize it or not- on how and where to shape our family’s life is the ultimate level of privilege. It is freedom. To realize there is and could be something different and the means to pursue it is not what most of our world has.
We have that. Have we been squandering it?
I’ve worked with some kids in career development that haven’t even been across the river bridge, much less realized they could shape a life someplace physically or mentally outside of their current reality.
We’ve been fortunate to have exposure. And to have wise counsel in the form of people around us.
Like my client, like my friend.
And the advice over these acute years of raising kids and growing businesses has led us to realize that maybe- just maybe- we need to take the road less traveled- at least the one that has been less traveled by our peers with the same conditioning.
To wait to enjoy doing what you want to do until you retire is what we have been told. And what we have believed and worked towards.
Our Next Right Thing- Building at the Beach
Like most married couples, we don’t always see eye to eye on what to do tomorrow, much less further down the road. But even as newlyweds, we both knew we wanted to retire on the Gulf Coast.
We’ve spent more and more time down there over the years. We will celebrate 20 years this summer and we’ve realized we, and our kids, never want to leave once we are there. We dread the six hour drive home every time, and it’s not because of the time in the car.
Do we want to be on perpetual vacation? Maybe. But it seems to be much more than this.
Slowly but surely, we’ve done what has felt like the next right thing which has led us to decide to move, as a family, not as retirees, to the Gulf Coast. We want to experience this as a family of five, not as empty nesters.
We will have three kids aged 15, 12, and 6 start in a brand new place in August. New schools, new hopeful friends, new routines and new possibilities and challenges. All three are excited, for different reasons and in different ways. Nervous, asking all the what if and what could be questions, but excited. If you told me I was moving at any of those ages, I would have been in the fetal position. It was my conditioning.
But they too are a product of their programming for better or worse. And we all decided to choose adventure instead of fear in this season. And I realize staying in the same state in the same country, really isn’t all that adventurous- it’s all relative.
Our adventures aren’t extending to changing careers. I’ll still be running our consulting firm, with a team still in North Alabama for the most part. But as our business has expanded to out of state, it really doesn’t matter where most of us are physically. Again, another privilege. I’ll, no doubt, be back in the northern part of the state often. Drew will still be doing real estate. Buying, selling, building and investing. He is looking forward to some exciting opportunities.
And we will be launching Building at the Beach on the blog here. True to form, we bought a fixer upper in a fabulous location overlooking the bay. Follow along with us and watch us navigate all the things that renovating- on pylons no less- will bring.
Finding Home
We will miss the community and the people that have given so much to us, especially seeing- on an almost daily basis- the four most amazing parents/grandparents the world has to offer. We pray we have poured a fraction of love and grace these people and places have poured into our family.
Our hope is the right family will be able to move into the home we’ve created in Decatur over the last 14 years. The renovations have been a labor of love and we know whoever moves in will have the BEST neighbors on the planet! We know someone will find Home here just as we have.
But alas, there will be a bunk room waiting for everyone to visit us on the coast. We will catch some sun, catch some fish and catch some waves still with the people we love and who continue to love us so well.
And finally, I’ll close with a last piece of advice from another dear friend and colleague when a career move was weighing heavily on our family several years ago. Basically, she repeated to me the age old advice- “Girl, almost all decisions are never fatal or final.” And that most people regret not what they did do, but what they didn’t.
That advice led to lasting peace with the choice made then, and we will rest in the comfort that this choice is the next right thing for us.
Where is Home we ask? Honestly, it is everywhere we choose to make the most of with the people we love, for however long that is.
We aren’t naive enough to think a move will “make all the difference” on the road we are traveling. We are in fact the same people and the same family with the same strengths and challenges. We are sure that for now and in this season, making the pivot is the next right thing. And we know Home will meet us there.
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