How do you say goodbye to a place you love? You know you can’t stay because leaving is the only way to make significant and positive change that is badly needed in every part of your life. How do you let go of all that you are leaving behind?
At the beginning of this year, my husband and I decided that our lives were not going in the direction we wanted. We were stuck. Stuck in our situation, and in our minds. We couldn’t move forward no matter what we tried. So after long soul-searching talks with one another, we decided our lives needed to go through a massive change if we ever wanted to have the kind of lives we really wanted. But we knew even then it would take massive work from both of us to make this a reality. We also had no idea how long it would take, which made for another daunting uncertainty.
One of the major changes we decided to make was to move, and not just a small move. An almost 1,000 mile move from one end of the country to the other. This also meant making a lot of other changes too. A lot of those changes had to happen inside of us. What was the point of making such a drastic relocation if all our problems followed us there?
Both my husband and I dedicated a lot of time to healing ourselves as well as our relationship. In fact, we became much stronger as a team after he relocated to Florida at the end of March. We had to communicate much more and rely on each other almost everyday to make sure everything didn’t fall apart.
It took major effort from both of us as we inched along to solve each problem that came our way… him getting and starting a new job, somewhere for him to stay while we looked for permanent housing for our family, deciding to buy or rent, then once we decided to buy we had to go through the whole house buying process, and then trying to get our son to be okay with letting go of the only home he ever knew to accept the new one.
Cynthia D. Griffin 