We've Moved 9 Times in 6 Years. Are We Home Yet?

Trying to explain the last few years of my life to people who don’t know me well is always a bit of a challenge. It’s never a great conversation starter when someone casually asks where you’re from and you launch into a long-winded (but still very much abridged) explanation of the many different places your family has called home.  

“Well, I respond, trying to keep it short and sweet, “we’re originally from Chesterfield but then we moved to O’Fallon and then spent a couple of years living in Florida (both Sarasota and Fort Myers Beach), but in the end we moved back to St. Louis and lived in Kirkwood for a few years, until recently when we decided to move to De Soto.”

My words are usually met with a confused – and sometimes completely blank – stare. I like to assume that the person standing across from me is busy trying to process how a seemingly normal family could manage to live in nine different homes in only six years.  

But more likely, they’re busy trying to comprehend why anybody would move to Jefferson County ON PURPOSE. I still haven’t entirely figured that one out myself.  

The reasons behind our many moves are long and complicated, but suffice it to say, I have years of experience leaving one house behind and moving on to another. I’ve learned the hard way that four walls don’t make a home, but that the people who live within those walls do.

Even so, when my husband opened a restaurant in De Soto last spring, I swore I would never trade the suburbs of St. Louis for the small, largely rural Jefferson County community. Moving is one thing; moving to a town that is 28.6 miles from the nearest Target and a whopping 32.0 miles from a Starbucks is a whole different beast.

And yet, last month, I packed up my family one last time and took the leap.

Come to find out, I’m more of a city girl than I realized. I don’t understand things like how driving across a set of railroad tracks and thirty seconds away from Main Street can qualify as being “outside of town.” I have zero interest in hunting season. And it is completely beyond my comprehension why no one here seems more concerned by the astonishing lack of access to a triple espresso.

Mostly, though, I can’t stop worrying about how small town life will impact my kids.     

I worry about the quality of the education they will receive, and the opportunities they will miss. I worry that the decision to pull them out of a top-rated district will haunt me in years to come when they’re filling out college applications.  

I worry about the kinds of friends they will make, and if the parents of those friends will be the ones secretly stocking up on cold medicine. (This is not just me being paranoid; in 2011, Jefferson County had 253 meth seizures, more than the states of Texas, Florida, and California combined).

You name it; I’ve managed to worry about it.  

My daughter, at 9, has a different perspective.

“It’s boring going to the same school year after year,” she told me when I expressed my concern over the changes. “New schools are exciting and pizzazz-y.”  

She sees life in a new town as one big adventure, an opportunity to meet new people and experience new things. After barely a month, she’s totally at home in her new environment – and I’m totally in awe of her ability to roll with the punches and embrace the opportunity in any situation.

As parents, we have this funny way of assuming that we should always be the ones doing the teaching and the hand holding, when, ironically, it’s often the other way around. In my case, I need to take a page from my daughter’s book, and focus on the many positives before me.

After years of living in places that never quite felt like home, we’ve renovated a hundred year-old building into a space I absolutely love. My husband, who we used to see only on Sundays, now works just down the street – and no longer spends two hours commuting each day.  

Despite my fantasies to the contrary, my kids are adjusting remarkably well, and the people we’ve met are some of the kindest and most generous you'll ever know. It’s been a long road getting here, but I have a feeling that my family has finally – FINALLY – ended up where we need to be.

If only it wasn’t so damn far from a Starbucks.