Five years ago, my life seemed happy, familiar and settled. I had just turned 43, the baby was six months old and the condo remodeling was almost finished. I planned to jump-start my writing career in the fall when the baby entered part-time daycare and her brother started kindergarten.
Then my personal stock market crashed. My husband told me we "might" be moving. We didn't have to, of course, but it was the best way for him to advance in a company he enjoyed. It was the moment I had dreaded since the mid-1980s when the corporate headquarters shifted from near San Francisco to Kansas City.
Some people react to moving with excitement. A friend, whose husband was in the foreign service, says when she learned they were moving, she would put on her dancing shoes and get busy. I reacted with sleepless nights, tears and tension headaches.
It wasn't like I hadn't moved before. Before we were married, my career took me from Tennessee to Washington, D.C., Norfolk and Richmond, Va. In fact, it was because of my job that we were in California. By rights, the next move was his. After 14 years, though, California was hard to leave. We had been newlyweds there; our children were born there; and the schools were excellent. We belonged to a wonderful church and had terrific health care and a host of friends that seemed like family. I loved it like no other place I had ever lived and didn't see how I could ever love another area as much. But I was going to have to try.
A Nation of Transferees
Intellectually, I knew I wasn't alone. Corporations move thousands of employees and their families every year. According to the Employee Relocation Council (ERC), a Washington, D.C., trade organization, about 880,000 people relocated for jobs in 1995. Of those, 75% were married and 66% had dependent children. Unlike some transferees, my husband had a good relocation plan that spelled out all the details. It even offered spouse assistance to help me secure a job in Kansas City. What it didn't describe -- and I had no clue about -- was the isolation I felt as I prepared to move.
I was clueless about most of what lay ahead, and it's not surprising. Most corporations don't have the foggiest idea of what they're putting employees and their families through when they ask them to uproot and move, say relocation experts. So how can employees themselves know what to expect?
But what some companies have noticed is that many relocated employees leave within three years of a move. This is confirmed by a study by the Transition Management Group, a retention consulting firm in Bernardsville, N.J., of how 5,400 people from 12 companies reacted to relocating. Employees who transferred were four times as likely to leave their companies than employees who haven't been moved. The reason? "Relocation Stress Meltdown" -- or RSMx -- a term TMG coined.
"It mostly has to do with an unhappy family that feels like a victim in the relocation process and is unable to assimilate into the new location," said Donna Malinak, a partner in Transition Management.
In other words, an unhappy family leads to an unhappy employee who blames the company, and leaves.
But I didn't know about RSMx. I thought I was nuts. I was a grown woman who had moved across the country, faced hostile reporters during press conferences and given birth without anesthesia. I didn't expect to disintegrate when the movers arrived, but I did. Two burly men came to the door and I burst into tears. They just looked at each other and went back to the truck.
It didn't stop there. I couldn't shake the pain that colored every aspect of the move and the first two and a half years in Kansas City. I blamed myself. I kept telling myself it could be worse -- this could be a real tragedy, such as cancer or the death of my children or spouse. I kept busy, volunteering at my son's school, writing and seeking out new friends. Nothing seemed to help until I made two changes.
The first was to join a grief support group at our local church. I attended because I had an "acceptable" tragedy to mourn -- the death of my mother-in-law. What I talked about was the move. Empathy and acceptance can't take away the pain, but they make it more bearable. The second step was talking with professionals at the Grief Recovery Institute in Los Angeles, whose research helped validate my feelings about moving.
"One of the most overlooked and powerful grieving experiences is moving -- whether the move is good or bad, or the reasons are positive or negative," says executive director Russell P. Friedman.
One reason why moving is so highly charged is that it involves profound change. This is the real cause of grief, according to "The Grief Recovery Handbook" (1998, Harper Collins). It defines grief as "the conflicting feelings caused by a change or an end in a familiar pattern of behavior involved."
Practical Aspects
I wish I'd known that I would grieve -- before we moved. Some experiences such as loneliness, feeling displaced, getting lost going to the grocery store are unavoidable. However, if I had known what was happening, I would have spent less time and energy thinking I was crazy and done things differently. First, I might have eased the burden by:
1. Moving quickly. Our move stretched out over 11 months. This gave us time to say good-bye. Repeatedly. It was like putting the life I loved on feeding tubes and watching it ebb away. Moving faster might have been easier.
2. Reducing the number of major decisions. New widows and widowers are told not to make major changes, such as selling a house, for a year. Grief is paralyzing and impairs decision-making. Recognizing my pain as grief might have swayed me to postpone making a major decision, such as buying a house.
This was a more significant decision for us than for other transferees because we'd never lived in a house before. Nor had we ever lived in a place that had winter. By renting, we would have learned how to deal with a dramatically different climate without having the responsibilities -- and expense -- of a house.
Instead, we "bought" the conventional wisdom and purchased a charming old house full of character and pipes clogged with 70 years worth of sediment. Not only was there no water pressure -- which I discovered the morning after we moved in -- but we were quickly overwhelmed by the expense of maintaining all that charm. Which leads me to my next point.
3. Conserving cash. Most people move because of the promise of a larger salary or lower cost of living. Indeed, the Midwest is less costly than California. However, you still need a hefty financial cushion for surprises. For example, in October, just a few months after we moved in, our area was hit by a major snowstorm. We lost trees, power and frozen food -- then had to pay almost $1,000 for tree and lawn repair. Add the cost of snow tires, winter clothes and repairing frozen pipes and we were soon near the end of our savings. Then, in December, our first heating bill topped $650. That's about what we paid for utilities during an entire winter in California.
Because of our cash crunch, we couldn't do fun things. Babysitters, new restaurants? No way. We joined the local Y for swimming lessons because we liked the pool and it was cheaper than the nearby swim club. But no one in our neighborhood went to the Y. While our children learned to swim, they didn't meet any neighborhood friends.
Emotional Decisions
Even when you make great practical choices, emotional concerns can be even more important when moving. These suggestions can help you stay balanced:
- Seek help if you feel like you're in over your head. For two years, I was too embarrassed to attend the grief support group, even though I knew about it. But it made all the difference.
- Don't try to recreate the old location. I kept trying to find a home, church and a best friend just "like the one we left." It doesn't work that way. By constantly trying to find the old in the new, I kept missing the beauty of Kansas City. Very little in a new area will resemble what you left behind, but that doesn't mean it isn't good.
- Do a reality check on your expectations. I envisioned the Midwest as warm, fuzzy and full of neighbors who'd walk over with cherry pies as we were moving in. I truly expected complete strangers to offer to make dinner. I don't know where I got this vision -- TV or friends with fond memories of living in the Midwest -- but it didn't happen. It isn't that people weren't nice, they simply were busy with their lives and families. Since many of the Midwesterners we met had never moved anywhere, they had no clue about my trauma. We were on our own.
- Be kind to your children. It's a myth that young children adapt quickly to moves, and I wish I had never heard it. While it may be true for some children, it isn't for all. I'll never forget driving around looking at houses decorated with Christmas lights more than a year after the move.
"Will we ever find a Christmas Tree Lane here?" my son asked, his seven-year-old face scrunched up against the car window, peering into the dusky December night.
"I don't know," I said. "There are plenty of lights, but I'm not sure we'll find anything exactly like Christmas Tree Lane here."
"Why did we have to move? I want to go back," he wailed for what seemed like the millionth time.
It's easy to say that young children take moving in stride and recover quickly. But children have memories. The problem is they often can't say what's making them sad -- they just act out in horrible, irritating ways. They scream and moan and nothing is ever good enough because it's not what was.
My son's behavior wasn't surprising, says Jane Holston, the Pensacola, Fla.-based author of "Smart Moves for the Relocating Family" (River Forest Publishing, 1990). "Experts say it takes time to adjust to a new location and children are no exception," says Ms. Holston, a mother of two who has moved nine times in 14 years. "Kids often act out their feelings because they don't know any other way to communicate. It's especially hard at school where they can be labeled a discipline problem when all they're doing is reacting to the stress and grief of the move."
I should have been more gentle with my son and spent more time talking with him about leaving friends and familiar places, sharing my sadness and giving him permission to grieve in his own way. Instead, I didn't talk about it much. I assumed he would bounce back to normal, but sometimes he bounced in the other direction.
- Beware of anniversaries. A widow is expected to react to the first anniversary of her husband's death, but it didn't occur to me that I would have strong feelings on the first anniversary of our move. I wasn't prepared for the memories that washed over me, or the sleepless, tear-filled nights. In time, the memories subsided and life went on, but I was shaken. Would the new location ever seem like home? It was then I began to realize that my pain was grief.
- Be gentle with yourself. To top it off, I was disappointed in myself for not handling the move better. I discovered that this, too, isn't unusual. A new friend who also relocated says she was disappointed in herself.
A successful attorney from the South, she had followed her husband's career to the Midwest. Now she was facing her first Midwestern winter. Everyone had been sick, the house needed remodeling, her husband constantly traveled and she hadn't begun to think about getting a job. Completing daily tasks had sapped her energy.
"I think I need counseling," she says. "I thought I would have done better than this."
We all envision how a move will affect us. Most competent, capable people know it will be tough, but we feel we can do it. We'll move in, whip the house into shape, get the kids in school and life will go back to normal -- just give us a few months. But those months can stretch into a year with no end in sight. It all depends on how you adjust to the new location, and no amount of research can predict that.
In retrospect, the work involved in moving is easy -- looking for and buying a house, finding schools and stores, meeting neighbors. It keeps you busy, but you can check each item off your to-do list. But moving your heart is another matter. Hearts don't fit into moving boxes, and they have their own timetable. Be kind to yourself and give yourself time to grieve, rethink your life and find the light at the end of your tunnel.
- Keep your eyes open. If you don't, you'll never see the light at the end of the tunnel or the good things that can come from a move. I let the sadness of the move overshadow the reality of my life, but it wasn't all bad. I learned the importance of family -- not the big extended family we don't have -- but the small, nuclear family here. When you don't have other people to do things with, you do a lot of things together. I've seen my children come to love each other and play in ways they might not have if they knew lots of other children.
The move has been good for my husband's career. He's more challenged and travels less than he used to.
We also have taken advantage of opportunities that might have been hard to find elsewhere, such as two outstanding public school magnet programs. My son is in a French immersion school and now reads, writes and speaks French (and English, too). Not bad for a second grader. He's even teaching his sister how to count in French. Now if we get transferred to a French-speaking country, they can get me to the grocery store!
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