(Continued from Step 2 towards your best life…)

After my talk with my husband and verbally wrestling repeatedly with my resistance to changing anything about where we currently live, my husband asked if I knew of a place that I would want to live. Did it even exist?

Almost none of the smaller communities that are in more natural settings are religiously aligned with our direction, and shifting my religious affiliation isn’t an option.

I then thought of a community in the north where I spoke several years ago. At that time, I had the passing thought that it seemed like a nice place to live.

I mentioned this area to my husband. We agreed to look into it, then each made calls to people living there to begin getting information.

After a couple of weeks we had gotten as much information from a distance that we were going to get, and what we then needed to do was get a first hand feel for the area.

We decided to make a day trip there, to meet a couple of families. I also wanted to see what kind of housing was available and to verify that a home that I would be comfortable with would be financially feasible for us. (I’m very much not a fan of building castles in the air.)

Since we decided to include our children in our exploratory process, we invited ds10, ds12 and ds13 to accompany us on our trip. We wanted them to see the area itself, and meet some of the people living there.

We drove around with a real estate agent and viewed some homes from the outside, then went to visit two families. We had a pleasant time, and two of our sons later told us that they liked the idea of moving there.

Though my husband found it helpful to see the area and liked the two men he met, it wasn’t enough for him to make a decision one way or another.  He wanted to make a visit for a longer time to have a broader sense of what the community is like.

Two weeks later, we spent a Shabbos there. This time we brought dd18, ds7 and ds2 (the four other boys were away at a friend’s bar mitzva). I also reached out to an agent who had an online listing for a home that interested me, and set up a time to view the house.

After this more extended visit, my husband agreed that it looked like a place that our family could be happy.

Wait, let me highlight that because one sentence is too little to express this huge, massive moment of decision for us. It was at this point that we went from having a very theoretical possibility, to making a concrete decision about something we were going to do. We agreed that we wanted to move, and this is the place we wanted to move to. 

Avivah