Another Talk with My Kids About the Move

A second mourning about an impending move is not about what will happen to us in the new place but what we would miss by not continuing to live at the former home. This can also be felt once having arrived in the new place.

My kids were upset that they would miss upcoming events that they and their friends had planned to do together. There was the favorite homeschool co-op that would begin without our presence. There was the highly anticipated Boy Scout campout at Sikorsky that never could be attended in the past due to being too young for the minimum age requirement until this fall.

I tried explaining to my kids that everything as imagined would not be reality. They took past memories and projected them into the future in an ideal utopian way (when reality never was so perfect). They envisioned that the old great stuff would continue this year when it wound up not panning out in reality.

We made a big change to move and so we could not do the things we'd planned to do, but the other families we know would also make changes that would alter the plans.  For example, we found out that some of my older son's best friends at the homeschool co-op actually did not return. A favorite teacher of my son's is not teaching there this fall. A good friend enrolled into school and quit homeschooling. Another is very busy taking an online AP class in grade nine and is not able to do the homeschool co-op. A boy who said he'd do an activity we are flying back to attend as part of a big group, has decided he doesn't want to do it after all. Some well-liked Boy Scouts are finishing up their Eagle projects and soon will probably be absent from the Troop meeting and camping trips, leaving a bunch of same aged or younger Scouts present (which will be a totally different experience).

Now the activities and experiences that we all felt bad about missing due to the move less of an issue after all! Now reality is not what my kids had imagined. In some cases they are not missing much at all and in other cases what is happening is not something they necessarily would love as much as the former good memory times they had.

Meanwhile while in our new Texas home we are making new friends and having good experiences. In some cases the opportunities here are better! For one thing my older son is competing on a rowing team and just won a silver medal in his first race! At the old team in Connecticut he probably would not have been allowed to race at all since he would be a novice/rookie team member. Here, new bonds are being formed and new fun things are happening which are the stuff of tomorrow's memories. We all like Texas, the place and are happy here. Moving is an adjustment, that's all. We do miss the different weather and seasons and landscape of New England but we'll have to settle visiting the area for vacations! In the meantime, we have phones, email, Facebook and Twitter to stay in touch with our Connecticut friends and family.

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Clarification: Discussing this ahead of time seemed to fall on deaf ears. However once the activities began and my kids learned that their friends didn't do that thing that they'd planned to do together (if we had not moved) they started to really see that people made changes in their lives that had nothing to do with them not moving away like we did. Once they started seeing in real life that what I'd said might happen was indeed happening they realized they were not missing everything they imagined they would miss by us having moved away. They started realizing that their imagined reality of what was happening back in Connecticut really was not reality so they were not missing much. Then they started feeling happier about the good things that were happening with them here in their new Texas home.