The Big Question: What’s Next?

Let’s do a quick walk-through of the past 18 years of my and Sona’s relationship. If you skim through that timeline, you’ll hit a milestone every few years: graduate from undergrad, move to a big city, get graduate degrees, land our dream jobs, get married (legally!!!), have Finn, buy our first house, have Elias.

I think back through those years, and I am so proud of where we are and how far we’ve come. We are living the life we could have only dreamt of when we first met in that Tennessee dorm room way back in 2000. 18 year old Danielle’s big dreams aren’t lost on 37 year old Danielle, trust me.

Still, for as long as Sona and I have been together, we have always been working towards something: a degree, a career, a home, a baby. Now that we’ve had Elias, and are certain that our baby-making years are behind us, I have found myself thinking, “What’s next?”

Before you start sending me “appreciate what you have” or “stop and smell the roses” memes, let me assure you: I do. We do. We love the life we’ve created together, and we recognize how fortunate we are to live it, but at the end of a long day, when we’re frazzled and tired and thread-bare. When we’ve paid the bills and called about the weird insurance notice we got in the mail and responded to the 27 to-do items on our HOA’s fix-it list, and dropped the boys off at daycare, and ran to the gym, and commuted to our respective jobs, and picked the boys up from daycare, and rushed home to cook dinner, and answered a million work-related emails, and given whatever pet is sick their medicine, and rushed to make bedtime happen at a relatively normal hour, and watched our 60-90 minutes of DVR’d TV, and crawled back into our perfectly comfortable bed, and set the alarms on our phones for the next morning, when we will wake up and do some version of all of that all over again, I think we both wonder, “Can we do this for the next 30 years?”

More to the point: do we want to do this for the next 30 years?

That is the question that’s been needling us for a while, now. Before the boys, we talked about our pipe-dream of moving internationally for a stint. Where to? Who knows. And do what? That’s a good question. But it was always something at the back of our minds.

When we started traveling to the Caribbean a lot, it became clear to me that a Caribbean lifestyle was I could be happy with. Like, forever. If you know me, you’ve likely heard me wax poetic about being barefoot in the sand, living in a simple cottage, spending most of my time outdoors, eating head-on fish with my hands, and never wearing make-up again.

Yet, there were milestones we knew we wanted to hit. And so, our one-day Caribbean pipe-dream never moved far beyond the waxing.

Then we had Elias, got through the first few months of having a newborn, which, as any parent can tell you, doesn’t allow you much time to think about anything else, and let the dust settle. And once it settled, the nagging question began to echo louder: “What’s next?”

I think it’s easy to conflate a lust for adventure with discontentment. A therapist might tell us that, by always looking to what’s next, we’re trying to out-run some sort of emotional baggage. But for me, it’s not so much that I’m craving an escape as I’m craving a beginning. Like I said, I love my life, but I don’t want this to be the only life I ever live. I don’t want to re-write the same chapter over and over, decade after decade, without ever trying something new.

And what’s also become abundantly clear to both myself and Sona is that the lives we live now don’t allow us to maximize time with our kids. Practically speaking, our kids are with their daycare providers more than they are with us. And even when we are together, Sona and I are often so spent that we don’t have as much energy to devote to family time as we’d like.

But we’re also craving something else: a completely new experience that shows our boys a different pace of life and affords us the invaluable gift of bonding together in the context of the unknown. A chance to live somewhere altogether different than Chicago. A new landscape. A new language. A new lifestyle.

And we recognize that, when it comes to the boys, there’s a window in which we can do this. We need a few years to prepare. We want the boys to both be old enough to remember our adventure and get the most out of it but not so old that they resist family time and resent us for leaving their friends. And, should all things go as planned, we’d like to come back in time for them each to experience a full high school career in the States, giving them the opportunity to experience all the things you experience as an American teen, including a fairly rooted peer group.

Ultimately, that means that our window is somewhere between the ages of when Elias is 4 or 5 and Finn is 12 or 13. If you’re doing the math, that means we have about 3 or 4 years to shit or get off the proverbial pot.

Recently, Sona and I have begun getting more and more serious about our pipe-dream. We’ve given ourselves one year to make an informed decision, which means we are embarking on an info-gathering mission.

There’s so much to consider. Chief among our anxieties are these questions: Would I be stupid to give up a tenured academic position that I love, knowing these sorts of gigs are near impossible to come by? (Sona could get a new job relatively easily.) Would we be fools to abandon the financial security that we’d likely have at about the same time we’d be giving it all up to move abroad? Would I be able to have affordable access to insulin? What would we do with our stuff? Sell it all and start from scratch? Pay to store it for an unknown length of time? Will our pets still be alive?

Of course, some of those questions are more pressing than others.

Then, there’s the questions we have about where we’d move to: Can we find a place that feels undeveloped without sacrificing basic infrastructural needs? Will we both be able to find jobs that support our cost of living? Will there be good schools for the boys? In case of emergency, will we have access to affordable healthcare?

A while ago, we abandoned hope that we’d end up on a small Caribbean island. As much as I’d love it, it just wouldn’t be practical. And we’ve gotten to the stage in our game-planning that we are mindful of practicality.

That has led us to Costa Rica, a place we visited in 2012 and fell in love with. Costa Rica gives us much of what we want: a new language, a new culture, a Caribbean vibe, lots of geographic variety ripe for exploring, cultural richness, the ocean. It also has enough infrastructure that we’d feel comfortable moving there with young kids. CRNAs can practice, and there are several teaching possibilities.

The one catch is that you have to be a citizen in order to be employed in the country, and citizenship requires three years of residency. So, we’d have to have employers advocate for our getting work visas out of need, which might prove tricky.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. We haven’t made a decision, remember? Come the summer of 2020, we have to decide: Do we want to slowly begin downsizing, preparing for a life-changing move out of the US? Or do we want to sell our condo, roll our money into a single family home, and commit to life in Chicago long-term.

By the summer of 2020, we’ll have to decide: what’s next?

(In the meantime, I’d love to be connected to any ex-pat families with small-ish children who would be willing to let me pick their brains.)