My name is Sarah and I have a wanderlust filled heart; this blog is
about my path and the steps I am embarking on to make changes to my
world. I have dreamt about living and travelling all over the globe with my
family for about three years now. It is literally something that I think about
daily. There is a small problem, my husband has a dependable job that affords us
the life that we have and his work is based in Los Angeles. We live
in San Juan Capistrano, a quaint, but bustling part of the suburban sprawl that
makes up Orange County, California. I have recently felt trapped by the
pressure, the busyness, the consumerism, and the redundancy of our life. By the
end of last year, I felt like I was on the brink of a nervous breakdown and so I
convinced my husband to move to Mexico and commute to work.
So now, here we are, in a small isolated pueblo in Mexico,
some 900 miles south of the Tijuana border. I am currently sitting in a hammock
taking a quiet moment for myself and writing. My three and five-year-old just
finished their first week of school here. I will be posting about that next!
It’s nearly time to make dinner. I can see the distant blue of the ocean to my
left and the warm rays of the setting sun are shining through the trees to my
right. There is a subtle breeze that make a light
cardigan over my sleeveless dress necessary. In the distance I can hear the
sound of a car rumbling down a dirt road. The clamor is married with the subtle
noise of the trees in the wind and birds twittering. I feel relaxed. I feel
like I can breathe and I feel happy. Sounds just about perfect, doesn’t it?
After feeling stressed out beyond human capacity, I chose it
because I needed it.
I don’t know if it’s just me, or if it’s being a mom of
young kids in the world of social media in the year of 2017. Or if its feeling
trapped by the flurry of living in Southern California for longer than I ever
expected or planned. Maybe it was the intensity of the 2016 elections. It might
have been the fact that my daughter started kindergarten this year. Or maybe,
it was everything combined…but I hit my breaking point in early December of
2016.
I needed a change and I needed it immediately.
A little background on me, I grew up mostly in the Oregon
countryside, but I’ve spent a good part of my life in Mexico. It feels like
home to me. My mom, and her husband at the time, started traveling in Baja when
I was eleven years old. We lived in Oregon and spent the winters across the
border, surfing and adventuring the peninsula. Each year we spent a little more
time outside of the United States. By the time I was fifteen-years-old we moved
to Mexico full time. It wasn’t perfect. Like any typical teen, I thought that I
knew everything and would be better at adulting than my mom. I hated my
step-dad. I was begrudgingly homeschooled and resented that I took the GED at
fifteen, thus missing out on high school. I disliked my mom’s choices, and I
grew up quickly in a land that felt somewhat wild and lawless. Being a teenager
in Mexico also felt incredibly free and I loved it. It was paradox. A lone
American teenage girl. I surfed every day and took in my existence as a fair
observer of life, in a tiny pueblo in the middle of Baja .
When I was sixteen-years-old, I met my husband, Jesse. I was
surfing, alone, at dawn, he paddled out; and it was love at first sight. He was
adventurous, fun, had wavy red hair and freckles and adored me. I was done for.
We lived in Mexico together for a spell, and then I followed him to Orange
County, California. Over a twenty-year span, we built a life there. We both got
degrees, we traveled the world, we bought a house and built a beautiful community.
My husband became a firefighter, I got a master’s degree in cultural
anthropology and then we started a family. It wasn’t all butterflies and
rainbows, but overall, we have a beautiful life.
But there is this small problem; my gypsy heart and the pressures
of living in Southern California.
The thing is; it’s been five and a half years since I became
a mom and I feel like I haven’t made a choice for myself in as many years. My
kids are amazing, my husband loves me and is dedicated to our family and the
three of them are my world. I’ve had a lot of jobs, I have a master’s degree,
but no relevant work experience. I’ve dedicated nearly every moment since
getting pregnant to making the best choices for my children and family. I’ve
taken classes and read an endless stack of books on parenting. I’ve scrambled
to excel and be the best mom, friend and wife that I can be. And in December…I
tapped out. I found myself giving to everyone. Even people I didn’t know well.
Even dropping my kindergartner off to school caused me stress. My three-year-old
boy is sweet and adorable, but also wild and aggressive, and I found myself
doing everything I could to manage him and ward off the subtle judgement of
friends and other parents.
Being a mom in 2017 is no joke. I see social media videos
and posts all the time, that are full of nostalgia for what it must have been
like to be a mom and kid before the 2000s. And then there are the posts that
everyone shares… telling you how to or how not to parent. It’s hard. I feel
judged for every choice I make; it feels like no matter what choice I make as a
mom, there will be an argument or a judgement against it. Everything feels so competitive.
It’s not just with parenting either. I feel pressure to do my best and be successful
at everything and it is exhausting.
It feels like I somehow accidentally signed up for some
sort of motherhood/life endurance competition and that I was going and going and
going, yet getting nowhere, but overwhelmed. At some point I started feeling
like I couldn’t take a full breath. After years of worrying about trying to be the
best at everything and feeling like I was mostly disappointing myself, I had to
make a change.
We live in such a complicated world these days. It is so
hard to slow down, take a deep breath and be fulfilled in the NOW. It’s even
harder when you are worrying about taking care of your kids, husband, extended
family and being a good friend. After experiencing some particular ugliness relating to politics on Facebook in December, I broke down. They say we all
have flight or fight responses to things and all I could think about was
getting the heck away. Not just for a vacation, but for a life style change. I
wanted to stop stressing, slow down, get quiet and listen to my heart. So late
one night, just before Christmas, I texted my husband while he was working at
the fire station.
“Hey, babe. What do you think about
moving down to Baja until next fall
and enrolling the
kids in school down
there? We could rent our
house out, you could move your
your schedule around and commute to work every
couple of weeks. We would simplify life, I
could finish writing my book. We would save
money, the kids would learn Spanish
and we would all surf more. Plus, I know how
much you love fish tacos.”
I watched the little dots move back and forth as I waited
for his response. I chewed my bottom lip in nervousness and then delighted in
his answer.
“Let’s do it.”
My father-in-law has a home in the pueblo where Jesse
and I met twenty years ago. Jesse was building it when I met him. We were
already planning to spend Christmas break with my father-in-law at his house
and so we continued as planned. That entire week of our vacation, my husband
and I vacillated on whether or not we would really do it. When we got home, we
still weren’t entirely sure we were up for the huge change. But Jesse called
his dad and asked him if we could stay in his house and he generously said,
“yes”.
And so here we are in Baja California Sur, in the village of
San Juanico. It took five weeks to make it happen. Murphy’s law, the
three-year-old got the flu. Poor guy, it slowed everything down. I moved most
of our stuff out of our house, we took the kids out of their schools and tied
up loose ends. My husband decided to paint the walls and refinish the floors in
our home. We rented our place in California to a wonderful friend, who is
kindly caring for our cat and chickens. And one week ago today, with our truck packed
like the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath, we crossed the border and started on
this fresh path. I want to acknowledge that I am fortunate
to have this choice. I am able to take this path because of the life of opportunity that I have been blessed with. My husband has a good job, I was able to work my way through college and grad school. I have
so much.
This blog is to document and share with you this new journey.
It’s to celebrate this big change and to see how it will transform our family
for the better. I am so excited to write and ponder about simplifying life,
about following the heart, about slowing down, about taking risks, and about
living and parenting in another culture. I hope you read about our adventures
and feel inspired to share them with others. Next, I will be posting about
what it was like to leave our preschool and elementary school in California, and how the first week of enrolling at the local school went.
Stay tuned.
Hasta entonces, mas tarde…
~Sarah
