Pre-Prequel

A few friends and family members encouraged me to write a blog while our family was in Sydney for the summer to keep everyone up to date.  So Neo-Luddite me has joined the modern world and started a blog.  Facebook, Tweeting, and Fweecklr (which is so new it hasn’t even been invented yet) cannot be far behind!

First, let me give you a little back story to explain why I wound up openly sobbing at the American Airlines terminal at JFK June of 2011.

It all started with a phone call, as so many life changing events do.  Back in 2010, I had been spending the month of July in my beachside hometown in Michigan with my two toddlers.  It had been an idyllic small-town month of family, beaches, pools, back yards, cook-outs, the public library, the local children’s museums, playgrounds, and catching fireflies, everything I escaped New York City to enjoy with my kids.  Unfortunately someone still had to pay the bills, so my husband headed back to New York after the first week (along with my 10 year old stepson).  So it was late July when the call came.  I was sitting in Aunt Alice and Uncle David’s beach house that they had so generously loaned us for the month, the kids were tucked into bed, and I was winding down my day with a glass of summery rosé as the sun set over Lake Michigan.  It was my husband on the phone, calling with the idea that he would leave the working world and head to graduate school for a year and a half.  The conversation went something like this:

Him:  So I’m thinking of going back to school to study mining.  The best school is called the Colorado School of Mines, located in Colorado.

Me:  Hahahahahahahahaha.

Him:  Seriously.

Me:  Oh, seriously?  Well, no.  No $%!&#@ way!

I knew he was interested in the field, but this was the first I’d heard anything about him going to mining school.  It just seemed so random and vocational sounding.  My first thought was my stepson and breaking up our family by moving the four of us to Colorado.  Even though temporary, it was heart wrenching to think of disrupting our already splintered togetherness, as he was only with us every other weekend and days here and there in between.  My kids worshipped him.  And to me, he was a part of my life before I had my own kids, he was inextricably family; there was already this persistent feeling that our family wasn’t complete unless he was with us.  So it seemed unthinkable to me.

But my husband had thought it all through before he had brought it to the table.  The school was a science and engineering school and actually like the Harvard of your mining education, and he’d be getting a Masters in Mineral and Energy Economics, which sounded reassuringly brainy and important.  We had long conversations about why he wanted to do it, how it would allow him to take his career in the direction he wanted to go in, and that it was now or never.  We talked about the painful family decisions and how we might manage it.  In the end, as crazy as it first seemed, I supported his decision and began the groundwork to move to Colorado.  The clincher was the admissions deadline had long passed, and the beginning of the fall semester was about three short weeks away.  My husband went on overdrive with application activities, not knowing for sure if he would even be accepted in time.

I started my research in the meantime.  It wasn’t easy to do from an internetless beach house, so I was borrowing other family members’ computers whenever I got the chance to search Colorado neighborhoods, house rentals (you can rent a house for THAT?! seriously?!), preschools, New York storage, and moving companies and costs.  After learning about all of these things, and letting the idea sink in of such upheaval for a year and a half’s time, we began to consider the possibility of staying in New York while my husband went to Colorado alone.

My preschool research was key in this new line of thinking.  Firstly, the Colorado schools that had been recommended to us were long filled up.  Secondly, the alternate preschools that I’d found online looked like roadside daycare centers.  (They looked like the kinds of places that make the news from time to time, and not for heartwarming awards and things of that nature.)  Thirdly, our kids were already fully enrolled and paid for for the year in a school we loved, which was regarded as one of the best preschools in New York City.  And fourthly, we had just read about a seemingly legitimate study that indicated how important the kindergarten year was to future success:  not just testing success, but success in life.  If we were to follow the Colorado path, that would mean putting our daughter in a Colorado kindergarten the following year, only to move her back to New York in the middle of the year. We would also simultaneously miss out on the New York City private school application process in the present year, which is an arduous nearly year-long process for four- and five-year-olds akin to, and possibly harder than, applying to Harvard.  And of course, despite how much we would miss husband and dad, there was the obvious benefit that the kids and I would stay near my stepson.

This approach, however, still required its own brand of upheaval.  We thought it wise to let our West Side three-bedroom pre-war go and downsize for the year and a half, as well as move closer to our kids' schools on the East Side.  And so, after I got back to New York, in a week’s time I was to find a new apartment for our family.  LOL!!  I started like I thought you were supposed to, scanning the listings in the online New York Times real estate section.  It wasn’t long before I decoded the descriptions:  e.g., whatever number of bedrooms they are claiming, take off one because that L-shaped living room, or even straight living room longer than ten feet, is what brokers consider space to make into a spare bedroom; “renovated” could mean in the last thirty years, “Upper East Side” could mean 200th Street and so far east it was floating on the East River, and so on.  And also, most of them did not even exist.  Thankfully a real estate friend clued me in that the listings are primarily bait and switch ads, which is why every time I called about an apartment too good to be true, it was (“Oh I’m sorry, that one was just signed, but I do have twelve more far inferior, more expensive places to show you if you’ll just give me several hours of your time to pound the pavement with me!”).  As you can guess, as any New York apartment hunt is, the search was demoralizing.  But then there was this one apartment…

I’d found a floorplan on my New York Times search that was one of those too good to be true.  The schematic almost looked hand drawn, but the scale was enticing, and the location was perfectly situated within walking distance to my kids’ school, and on the block of my stepson’s school, and the price was right.  When I called the broker, he told me it wasn’t available yet because the current tenants hadn’t moved out, but I could call back in a week’s time.  In the meantime, I desperately followed brokers around the Upper East Side telling me how their microscopic, personality-less apartments were the perfect homes for me.  And then I called the floor-plan broker on the appointed day, and he said it would be ready to see in an hour.  I hopped in a cab, was the first one to see it, saw that it really was just what we needed, and told the broker within a few minutes’ time that coveted real estate phrase:  “We’ll take it!”

So with relief, I checked that box, but ay yai yai, there were still so many more boxes to check…  I had to work it out with our current apartment, find movers, find storage for half of our apartment, designate what was going where, manage the new apartment arrangements, change all the utilities, purge and toss, etc etc, oh, and move – in a couple of weeks’ time.  Everything looked promising with my husband’s application so we were full steam ahead.  He had his own boxes to check, so I concentrated on the moving.  And then he got the news:  he was accepted!  It was bittersweet for me.  He found out on a Friday, and on Sunday he was flying to Golden, Colorado to begin his program.  That left me behind to pack up and move us, with a two- and four-year-old underfoot.  Good times!!

It would all happen over the last week of August, a week when most of New York has high-tailed it to greener, breezier, more fragrant locales.  Thank God for these folks:  Mary, who volunteered to come help me pack, I’ll say that again – she volunteered to come help me pack!!!!, Jacalyn, who hosted my kids for days at a time, Alicia, my stepson’s mom who opened her home to the kids as well, my sister Sheryl, who flew to New York the weekend of my move to help on moving day, bless her heart!!, and my sister Julie and parents, who gave me loads of support and encouragement from afar.  As much as I tried to organize and rally, I could not have done it without these people, and will be forever indebted!

To keep the story short, let me just say that those couple of weeks, outside of deaths in the family, were probably the most stressful of my life.  I’m a pretty conservative creature when it comes to change, so my head was spinning from how different so much of my life was going to be, and from how rapidly it was changing.  And then once we landed in our new apartment, the private school application process had already begun, and I felt paces behind.  For many schools it could mean choosing their kindergarten clear through high school, so it was sort of a big deal to be on your game, and I already felt like I was failing my daughter.  And then my son was starting preschool for the first time so I wanted it to be a positive experience and stress-free.  Despite how I was feeling inside, like mom challenges throughout history, I didn’t really have a choice, I had an obligation to hold it together.