It wasn’t long after Chad and I were married that we found out we were expecting McKinley. (And by not long I mean we got pregnant two weeks after our wedding) We were excited, terrified, and every emotion that comes with that life-changing news. Ready or not, we were about to be parents.
Once the dust settled on that incredible news we really started evaluating where we were in life and what our future should look like raising our family. Chad had been working retail for the last decade and we had always planned on that being our life. We would move with the needs of the company and just adjust and go with the flow as a family. For some reason the further into the pregnancy we got the more we started to question our plan. Most of our friends and family that were also from small, tight-knit towns raised their babies close to family. Were we missing something? Should we be changing our plans to do the same thing?
After a lot of soul searching, praying, and talking we decided to change paths and move our family back to my hometown where Chad would join the family business with my dad. We felt there would be security and support in that decision and that’s what we were “supposed” to do. We were ready to finally, for the first time in our adult lives, put roots down. This was our end game and how our family would be raised. We went all in and didn’t look back.
Over the year and a half that we were there life happened. Some amazing things, and some not so amazing things. In short we realized that what we thought would be an amazing opportunity for our family, was in fact tearing our family apart. We didn’t think we would have an issue mixing business and family. Not us, we had it all figured out. There’s no way this couldn’t work out. Without going into too much detail, what we thought it would be, it wasn’t and we were at another turning point. We needed to re-evaluate (again).
We were faced with the reality that staying there wasn’t an option and we needed to focus on our new plan. It got us thinking that what was putting roots down for some had become shackles for us. The idea of never moving to another new city again was unimaginable. It took us trying to fit into the popular idea of happiness and plans to realize we were just a square peg in a round hole.
I am in no way saying my hometown isn’t wonderful in its own way. There are things I will miss from there that I understand fully I will never find anywhere else. There is a safety and security in raising your kids in a community like that that you just don’t find everywhere. That being said almost 3 years ago I made a promise to God and my husband to always make our marriage the priority. In our time there we had become almost strangers to one another. We had lost who we were and didn’t realize so much of that lied in our previous life plan. Our decision to start over and leave what we had planned on being our forever home is not one that came lightly and still holds a painful place in our hearts.
We had to make the very difficult decision to put our marriage first and know that as long as we are happy our girls will be happy too. We want to raise them with the knowledge that a house is a building and a home is a feeling.
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