0201: Held by Home

ATTACHMENT, IDENTITY & STARTING OVER
WITH DENAYE BARAHONA, PH.D.

Hey, Denaye!

Hi, Eden. How are you?

I'm good. I'm so excited to have you on with me today.

Yeah, I'm excited to be here and to talk about this topic.

Yeah. So before we jump in, I want to give you a chance to introduce yourself to our listeners and tell us a little bit about who you are, what you're working on these days, and let's get acquainted.

Yeah, this is the hardest question of all. Let's sum it up in three sentences. Let's see.

I am a mom of two. I live outside of New York City, but my kids were both born in Texas, which is how I know you. I think you were maybe my first mom friend, pushing strollers back when our babies were nine months old.

I think we really connected over the fact that we're both mental health clinicians and really getting started on the parenthood journey together, which I think made such a difference in the early days for me. I am, in addition to being a therapist, I'm also the host of the Simple Families Podcast, where we focus on topics like minimalism, child development, child behavior, kind of a host of different topics to help support parents to a simpler, more intentional life.

I've been on your podcast before. It's been fun to collaborate with you. And so, of course, of course, I thought of you.

Yes, you and I met. You had you just moved to Dallas as well?

No, I think we had been there maybe two years.

Okay, so you'd been there two years. We had just moved back from Seattle with a new baby. And we met up at like a mom group.

Yes, pushing strollers. And I remember like spotting you and really needing community at the time. As we were kind of moving into that new place for us and having a new family.

Yeah, I forgot that you had just moved. She wasn't born in Dallas then, you're first, right?

No, she was.

Well, she was.

I was, I think I was like eight months pregnant on the flight.

Got it.

Sneaking on the flight. It was.

Like, don't mind me and my belly. Okay, so this first topic, this came out of my own process of leaving Dallas most recently, about a year, a year and a half ago, and trying to get established in Charlotte, which is where we call home now. I think I found that my process kicked up a lot of strong emotions that I was surprised by, which maybe that's strange as a therapist, to be surprised by your own strong emotions.

But those emotions felt like attachment needs and attachment insecurities, like they felt kind of that strong. So I thought of you, because I know your family moved, as you said, recently from Dallas to New York, and we followed a couple of years later, but not to New York, to the East Coast though. And I remember you talking about how the process for you at points felt really challenging.

And so if you'll just jump in with a little bit of like what it was like for you, your experience leaving Dallas and un-attaching from this place where you had put some roots.

First of all, did I warn you? Did I tell you this is going to be really hard? I feel like if I didn't, I'm sorry.

Did I? Thinking back, it's been five years since we moved, and my kids were one and three. And we moved for my husband's job.

It felt like the right thing to do. So we are both, I'm from the Midwest, he's from the East Coast. So we really enjoyed our time living in Dallas.

Like I said, both of our kids were born there. We were there for five years. But it never quite felt like our forever home.

So literally the same week, December 2016, my daughter was only nine months old at the time, but my husband got a job offer to come to New York to do his dream job. And I was graduating from my PhD program all the same week. And it just kind of seemed like this is it.

Like, this is the time to make the move. New York had never really been on our radar. We live about an hour outside the city now.

Definitely never wanted to live in the city. That just wasn't, I knew that wasn't right for us. But just the whole New York area wasn't something that we ever really had in the plans.

We were really excited. We sold our house pretty quickly.

That part went pretty smoothly.

I remember that.

I think that in the process though, I was mostly just going through the motions. I was checking off all the boxes without processing any of the emotional stuff. We had moved lots of times before kids.

We had moved, I mean, we originally lived in DC and then we went to Chicago, and then we went to Dallas, and then we went to New York. So this wasn't our first move or even first big move. But it was our first big move since having kids.

And I think that when I was going through and checking off all the boxes, cleaning out my house, getting the house on the market, doing all those things, I was very busy. And then we're busy. It's easy to push down all of the feelings.

And my husband actually moved several months ahead of us.

So I was flying solo for I think at least two or three months without him. So it was just me and the one-year-old and three-year-old.

So I was under a lot of stress as I was in the process of starting a business, launching my podcast, had both these very small kids that I was 100% responsible for. So I literally, we made one trip to New York and kind of explored the suburbs and narrowed down where we wanted to be as a family, the four of us. It was a long trip for us to go for a weekend to take the kids because we didn't have anybody to keep the kids in Texas.

So after we made that one trip and we kind of narrowed down where we wanted to be, my husband went back because he was working there and I said to him, I said, please don't come back without a house. Like we need a house, we need somewhere to go because I didn't want to spend, I know how long it takes to find a house and buy a house and clothes on it. So I didn't want to spend a lot of time in limbo where we didn't have a place to live because at that point our house had an offer on it and we were ready to get out of there.

So I didn't want to be living in a hotel for a long period of time with young kids, especially being as stressed as I was.

So I think that was maybe my first mistake was I put a ton of pressure on him to just find a house.

Find something.

And he did and it was not a great fit for us. We tried to make it fit and make it work for us. But we definitely bit off more than we can chew.

It was an old house with a lot of maintenance, a lot of things to keep up with. So kind of from the early stages of moving in, not only was I moving away from all of my people, all of my village that I had built up, but I moved into this house that just was going to kind of slowly suck the life out of me, just the time that it was going to take. Kind of reflecting back at the time as I was thinking about my village was that there were certain points in time in my life where I found it really easy to build a village and build a community.

One that comes to mind is like freshman year of college, when you're in a dorm with all these other people who are going through the same thing as you, that shared experience.

Then the other time is becoming a new mom. You're going through these same really big changes with other people and you have that really intense shared experience.

That bond I think is different than someone you just meet on the playground and you go on play dates with as your kids get older. I think that when I left Dallas, I didn't realize that was what I was leaving behind, was that I had these people who were not just my casual friends, but people who shared this really important life experience with me.

So much of that, I have kind of realized in my own process.

And I remember we lost touch or our connection just kind of maybe got lost in the midst of all the busyness once you had transitioned up to New York. And so I think the details and the depths of maybe that struggle of reconnecting and feeling the loss of the connections in Dallas, I maybe wasn't so intimately like aware of that process.

And so I think coming through my own, I know I've been messaging people persistently, right? Trying to be like, hey, put me on your radar.

But you know, I mean, I think that you could just hit on something that is an important differentiating factor. Like we had sort of lost touch in the sense that we weren't like texting each other every day. But when we did regain touch, it was like we didn't miss a beat, right?

Because we had that early shared connecting experience, that it was really easy to pick up where we left off, even if we hadn't been in constant connection. And I think that, you know, that's the village right there.

Okay. So what do you think? Let's, let's, let's go backwards.

What do you think was so important to you? Or why do you think it was so important to you that you had a house?

Because I didn't want to live in a hotel. I was really afraid of an extended period of time of being in limbo. Because I felt like I was in limbo for a long time because I was living without my husband waiting to sell the house.

We had already been in limbo and I didn't want to spend like a few more months in limbo or potentially having to live with my parents or my in-laws until we closed down our house.

Yeah. Okay. So that was something that I think really surprised me and I didn't anticipate.

So when we moved to Charlotte, we very intentionally did not buy a house. Granted, it was in the midst of this like housing market craziness. We got a rental and we're very happy with it.

And I thought I was very happy with it until we did end up kind of saying, okay, like we would do want to land here, let's buy a house. And once we got our house, I think I realized how much insecurity I had been holding on to. And that kind of that sense of limbo, like I can't root myself here, even in the community, because we're not going to be here.

Or even to like the small things, like I can't make a change to this house, or I can't paint this wall because it's money that's going to go down the drain. And I think I've figured that out when we bought our current house and felt so much relief.

And so much relaxation that I don't think I had been experiencing.

And I'd been holding on to for whatever, eight months. Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that a lot of us who grew up in houses that were owned, not rented probably experienced some of that. I mean, I think if you've always been a renter, it's probably not as alarming. Yeah.

After we sold our first not the perfect fit house, we were there for four years. We rented for a year while we were looking for the right house. Renting was so freeing.

I loved it. I was just like, you know what, if something breaks, I don't have to worry about it. I liked that I didn't feel the pressure to decorate perfectly, or to hang things in the perfect spot on the walls.

That felt very freeing in the sense that I was just like, you know what, we can just be here, we can just live here and not have to worry about the house at all. But simultaneously, that freedom also, I guess, equated to feeling a little untethered. And I wanted to feel more tethered than I was.

So we did end up buying a house, even though I kind of said had a little house PTSD after our former house that we owned. And I needed that renting period for a while. And I am so glad that we did that.

I think that was the right choice for us.

You talked a little bit about kind of losing your village and losing those connections and also just being so busy. So I think when people think about leaving a place, they think about this process, like the logistical process, right? And all the things, which is natural, because there are a lot of things to juggle and manage.

But I think what I'm hearing a lot and what my experience really has been is that there is this kind of like after wave aftermath of once you, it's like you've been holding your breath to get there. And when you get there, there's almost this exhale of emotions and experiences that have been put on pause until you've arrived. And so for you, talk a little bit about like your sense of identity and your sense of self and what happened with that in this process.

Yeah.

Well, I still don't feel like I've arrived at the end of my life.

But I mean, I think I remember it when we had first moved.

So we live in a small town and there's a lot of I guess it's a village.

There's a lot of small towns in our area and they all have town parks. And I would drive to with the kids because moved in the middle of the summer. There was no summer camp.

There was nothing. They were one in three. We needed the playgrounds.

So I started to go and like, let's just you know, this summer, we'll just try out a new playground every day. So I would pull in to the parking lot on a playground in one of the town parks, one of our neighboring towns, if I wanted to try something new. And nine times out of ten, there was a sign at the front that said, this park is for Sommers residents only.

This park is for South Salem residents only. And I didn't know what to do with that because after, you know, having kids in Dallas, like it just there, I never saw anything like that.

Yeah, different.

I was like, you know, and there actually was one park that did check ID. Like they had a stand that checked ID to make sure.

And the reason I found out later, the reason for that was because they have a summer camp there and they just try to make sure that the people who are coming are the people who are supposed to be there.

And I get that. I didn't know that at the time. And I was fearful that I was going to be breaking this rule by going to a playground that wasn't quote unquote, my playground.

And my playground in my town was kind of crappy. It just wasn't very fun. And I wanted to visit the other playgrounds.

And I think that's where I kind of started to feel this, like I was spinning my wheels where I didn't know where my new community was going to be. Because this small town that I was in, I would go to our library and it would be great. But then I would go to the library in the neighboring town and literally you had to be a resident in order to participate in the story time.

And I just felt like I was running up against these obstacles of kind of exploring my greater community and my community was very, very small. So I found myself wanting more community where I could just kind of walk around, see friendly people that I knew and wave at them, know the names of their dogs and their kids.

Yes, yes.

And that is what I really craved. So when we decided to sell that first house in New York and move into the rental, we had found a smaller community that much more had that vibe, where everybody knows your name and when your kid crosses the street without looking well, they come and tell you about it. And that's really what I wanted, and I didn't know that at the time.

I thought at first that I wanted this more rural house with more peace and quiet, and I had that and that just wasn't it.

And sometimes you don't know what you really want until you try something and then like, oh, yeah, that's not it.

Yeah, and it's what's funny is, you know, we're talking about our attachment to places, right? And when we think of a place, we think of like a physical place. But a lot of what we're talking about is community and village and connections and people.

And so I think it's just so it's become so apparent that our places, we become attached and rooted in our places because in part of the community and the connections that we make. And that is part of what makes maybe uprooting ourselves and leaving a place so painful and destabilizing.

I think the people are so important. And, you know, being like when I met you being in a city, I think that we had kind of this privilege of having millions of people and we could kind of find ourselves amongst them. So, you know, it just was a different experience being in a small town where instead of like one million other newish moms, there were maybe like 30.

Maybe those 30 kind of fit me well, and I jived well with them, and maybe they didn't. And I kind of felt like at that point I had like a 6 out of 10 ratio where I felt like I was tracking what's maybe 6 out of 10. But when you only have 30, that doesn't leave very many.

So, yeah, I felt like I didn't have that breath of people to kind of find my way with maybe.

I also think you have to be in a place where you're willing to like be vulnerable and risk, right? Like it is very intimidating walking into a space. Like I think one of the meetings that we met about where it was at someone's house.

I didn't know this person, right? I didn't know the area. I didn't know the house.

And walking in, you're kind of like fingers crossed, you know, talking yourself up into the place where you can walk into the room and, you know, be able to talk to everybody, have that conversation just for the hope that one or two of those people, right, might be people that you can build deeper connections with.

Yeah, I found that culturally things are just different in Texas versus New York, too. I'll never forget that first summer.

I don't understand that.

The first summer when I moved, we moved in July, and I immediately, like, tried to get my kids into preschool for the fall, and people were so mean. Whether it was the lady at the front desk at the new pediatrician's office or the administrative lady at the preschool, I just felt like everyone I was coming into contact with was being short with me. It only took a couple months to realize that it was actually kind of reverse culture shock and that the people weren't really being mean to me.

I was just used to this really kind of soft, nurturing, Texas approach that I was maybe being a little hypersensitive to the New Yorkers because I don't notice it at all anymore when people are short. So I think I was just kind of decompressing from my Texas years. But that was hard, too.

I'll never forget talking to the lady at the preschool and the admin, and I would hang up with her when we were trying to make arrangements to get the kids registered. I'd hang up and wonder, like, what did I do?

Like, what did I see?

Why is she, why is she-

I have offended her and I don't even know how. Yes.

But that process was really informative. I remember filling out the paperwork to get registered. And one of the questions on the initial form was, have your kids experienced any trauma lately?

And it said, for example, death of a loved one, like a flood, some kind of natural disaster, moving to a new house. And I felt so much validation for seeing on this preschool registration form, that moving to a new house can be traumatic because it hadn't ever, I never had kind of conceptualized it like that.

This is a good segue to what did you observe in your kiddos in regards to like their processing of this move, their processing of losing connections, uprooting and then having to like build more connections and reattach it to a new place.

You know, it's really hard to say because I think that I was so emotionally volatile during that time, that most of what I was seeing in them was my mirroring, you know? Because I was so unsettled, I was under so much stress, I was feeding them frozen pizza every night. Like it was just a really, really hard time.

And I think that everything, maybe not everything I observed, but so much of what I observed was, you know, them seeing me, I hate to say handling it poorly, let's say handling it like a human.

Yeah, struggling.

Right, struggling and really reflecting some of those feelings back to me. So it's so hard to piece it apart, you know? What was them struggling to say goodbye to everything that they knew?

What was them struggling to kind of reconcile why their mom seemed to have lost her mind after a four-hour flight to a new place? So probably a little of both, but what about you?

Tell me more, you're older, so tell me.

I think like five and seven were their ages or somewhere around there. And, you know, I think we wanted to make sure that we told them and gave them plenty of time to kind of process the move before we actually relocated. And so we gave them several months.

And then we also, you know, it's funny, the biggest thing to them has always been like they've loved stairs in a house and our home in Dallas did not have stairs. We had found a rental that had stairs, so we made sure that that was like our punchline. The little things.

Exclamation point. Yes, exactly. And I also, you know, I think I wanted, it was important for Michael and I to model being sad about leaving.

So like as we told them, like we were tearful and excited, and I think they were maybe a little confused by both emotions.

But I also think that as much as, right, like our pain and was like oozing out, it was also a good like modeling of how they will also have these like conflicting experiences. I think I've seen both how they, they maybe are more resilient, right?

And more flexible and adaptable than we are as adults. And so in some ways it feels like they've just like haven't skipped a beat. In other ways, I'm hyper aware of all the new experiences that we're putting them in, right?

New places, new experiences. And we had family in Dallas that we left. And I think that was also not only leaving like their primary home with Michael and I, but also leaving almost a secondary home, I think was also something that they had to process even more than maybe Michael and I did.

So it's been interesting and I think they've done really well.

There have, I would say for the first year, they would still reference Dallas as like, that's home, you know? And it's not that they haven't liked it here, it's that identification of like, where their stories are, right?

Like where they've experienced the most life is still Dallas.

Which is maybe the same for you too.

Oh, yes, yes. Yeah, so I grew up in Dallas and as I said, I have family there and as much as I would say, I'm not that parent that says, Oh, I want them to go to the school that I went to.

And this is the place where I used to live.

And I used to cringe when my parents would drive us past their old houses. And yeah, but I think even though I didn't hold that dream for my girls, I also realized that there was a lot to grieve that maybe I had unconsciously been imagining for their futures.

Yeah.

Even though as you said, like Dallas never totally felt like our permanent home.

The difference there is that you were there, you lived right down the road from your former school. So it was impossible not to imagine driving in that carpool line.

It was easy. It was going to be easy.

Like it was really tangible. Like I think we all kind of dream up and imagine what our futures are going to look like. And being right there, that that did become part of your vision, whether or not that was the intent.

So, you know, your leaving was kind of part of, you were losing some of that vision and that idealized reality that you had kind of inadvertently created too.

Professionally, we didn't talk about this. Did you feel like you had a professional community that was local in Dallas?

You know, I mean, because we had moved so much, I made sure from the beginning that my career was always very mobile because I knew Dallas was not going to be our forever home. So I was always doing a lot of remote, friendly work. So not so much for me, but probably for you more so because you were doing a lot of in-person work.

I got my degree in Seattle, but got licensed and really started all of my work in Dallas. Yes, the majority was in person. This was pre-COVID and built a lot of really close connections because kind of like you said, as new moms, you have this bonding stage of life that you go through together.

Similar things, I worked in a facility and within a facility, there's all sorts of bonding experiences that come up and found a really close-knit group of people, also built that professional network in the city. I think that also became a big part of my identity. Losing that professional community also meant, wow, what do I do professionally now?

Or what am I connected to? Or asking a lot of questions for my future professionally.

Yeah, I mean, I think that it's also important, this keeps coming to mind as we're talking about these things, about to recognize all the privilege that we have had in these new experiences because I think that just having the opportunity to pick up and move and try out a new place is really something not a lot of people have the chance to do. But I think it's also one of those privileges that comes with a lot of heartache too, like we get to try something new, it's so exciting, it's a new adventure, and that's definitely how it felt for us. But then also feeling those mixed emotions, that dialectic between like, we're going to have this new adventure, but also, wow, it's really hard.

I guess maybe that other side of that coin was what I didn't really see coming up quite so much. I thought of it more as this privilege and this excitement, and it hit me like a train.

Totally. I definitely see that, feel that, and appreciate you bringing up that point because it certainly is. I think oftentimes in our culture, we want to see the shiny side of the coin, and not the dull, scrappy side of the coin.

I think it caught me off guard as well. Another little pivot, we haven't talked about our partners, right? The people that we did this move with, and I think there's a shift that happens there when you relocate to.

Did it impact your relationship with your husband, your partner?

I think one thing, because we did move for his job, but when we moved, he was a lot busier because he was settling into a new job. So I think that he was more absent during those early months when I was having a hard time. I mean, I definitely remember that.

I definitely remember saying to him, I'm having a hard time, and I need you, and him really needing to be at work. And so that, I think, in the early months, especially the first six months, I do remember that coming up a lot. But I mean, 1 think since then, it has been, I mean, I think the changes and the challenges have more come with our own professional changes to, as he's taken other new roles and made changes, and I've made changes in my work, that those things are always really taxing and sort of this kind of figuring out where we stand and what our responsibilities and roles are.

My husband, Michael, was very accessible. We both kind of were working from home for the most part post-COVID. And I think because I had lost such community in Dallas, I was almost too reliant, right?

It became too much of a relationship to a degree, right? Like he was the only person that had that close relationship and that was local, right? And so I think I found myself needing him to fulfill so many more different roles.

Whereas I wouldn't have relied on him in that way in Dallas because I had other people that could fill those roles. So I think I found myself really struggling with, you know, when we had bad days or when we would argue, that was, you know, that felt like my whole community world, right? Like everything's going wrong.

And so I think that also then eventually made me pivot more towards, okay, I've got to find people here and motivated risk taking in that way. Okay, like, I'm going to go to this group or I'm going to go to this thing and see if I can find some people to invite into my village or that will adopt me into their village.

Well, and I think another thing that I am trying to wrap my head around still is that now my village feels very transient.

It's like my kids have changed schools a couple of times, like we've moved houses and the people that I'm most connected with are always the people that I'm spending the most time with or that I'm participating in the same shared activities with and that has changed and has shifted regularly since we left Dallas. And I mean, maybe that's just a matter of we, our lives have been more transient with moving a few schools and that kind of thing that has led to that.

Or maybe that's just part of growing up with our kids.

When you land somewhere, you may not be there for forever, right? Because you don't know the place, so you think this might be a good fit, and so you land there. But maybe that shifts as needs shift, or maybe your kiddo pops up with different needs, and then you've got to pivot there, too.

So it definitely feels like there is a transience there that... right, we don't have or we don't feel maybe in college or in high school when those kind of relationships are really marked by the bonds.

But I mean, at the same time, I've also really enjoyed some of these transient relationships. And I've met so many new people, learned so many new things, and that's been really wonderful too. It's just different, right?

It's not worse, it's just different.

Part of appreciating what you have and what you have access to is really like changing your perspective, saying, okay, this isn't going to be what it was in Dallas. And there's so many reasons for that. And there can be quite the benefit here of having access to what I have access to, whether that's for a month, a year, two years or whatever.

Thinking back to the ways that you created and nurtured a sense of belonging in your new place, what are some tips that you would offer to people who are maybe about to head to a new place or wanting to attach when they really feel like they're untethered?

Give yourself some grace because it's going to be hard and you are going to feel like you're flailing a lot. I think that's part of the process. I mean, I don't think you should try to force it, right?

Like show up and put yourself out there, but at the same time, recognize that not everybody you're going to meet are going to be your people. That's okay too. You might offend some of them, if you're coming from somewhere else, like when I was in New York and Texas, I feel like I probably put off a lot of people just not really knowing culturally what those interactions look like.

I mean, I felt the same way though when I went from Chicago to Dallas. That was a big adjustment for me with friends because I didn't know some of the social norms in Dallas. It took a full five years to try to just barely scratch the surface on that.

I remember once I co-hosted a baby shower. Was it a baby shower? Yeah, it was a baby shower.

There were 10 co-hosts and it was a very expensive baby shower. I guess in my frugal and simple mind, I thought that maybe we could streamline a little bit of it, maybe cut the budget a bit because it was getting very expensive and very elaborate. I suggested when we were looking at the budget with all the other 10 hosts, I suggested maybe we could cut the flower budget a little bit.

That did not go well. I had no idea, but I think it cut very deeply to some of the other women who were basically, one of them said, flowers are one of the most important parts of my life. Every week, if we don't have anything else consistent, we have fresh flowers on the table and things are in fact, bigger and better in Texas in many ways and the flowers are included.

I had really offended people when I suggested cutting the flower budget and I had no idea. It's like things like that that you just don't know and you're going to mess up and you're going to suggest things that nobody else likes and maybe that's just me, but I still find myself doing that all the time.

Yeah. What makes that hard, I think, in a new situation is that there's so much importance placed. There's so much emotion placed on this need to make connections.

That when those mishaps happen, it can hurt and really send you to go running back to your corner. I love that grace and giving yourself time. Hopefully, it doesn't take five years for everyone, but time, I think, is an important factor and let yourself mess up and learn.

Yeah, I mean, I think now my most significant connections have been at my other parents at my kids' schools and that's where we're at right now, with who I feel the most connected to, those people who have kids in the same classes, same teachers. But it's just also noticing that next year, that may shift when they're in a different classroom or they're with different kids and knowing that I'm going to meet other new people, but also still knowing that I have people like you that I'll always have that intimate connection to if I need it.

OK, any other like practical? I did this when I was looking for belonging or looking to like set up roots.

You will. So I guess maybe something that I maybe would think about as a mistake was that I really, even though we didn't love our first house and we knew pretty much immediately that it wasn't going to be our forever home.

Although I did say, I remember my words were as much effort as we put in moving into that first house, that we would never leave, like this was it.

Never doing this again because it was so hard.

I think I remember hearing that.

But I think we both knew that that wasn't going to be our forever home. But we spent a lot of time and effort and money decorating to make it feel like it fit and to make it feel just right for us. And even though we did all those things and it looked pretty much just the way that we wanted it to look, it still was just the house itself wasn't the right house for us.

It wasn't in the right part of, it wasn't in the right town that really fit us culturally and that we felt connected to. And it just wasn't quite right even though we really invested largely in trying to make it feel right and try to force it into a fit. So I guess that would be kind of being aware of that.

Like I don't think there's any amount of money or anything you can buy that's really going to make it feel better if it's not the right thing for you.

This concept of trying to squeeze a square peg into a circle, right? Like when you really need something to work, you also may be fighting what like inherently just isn't meant to be.

Yeah.

And you tend to need things to work when you're like displaced, right? Like when you don't have that home that you had before. You know, I found us like wanting to walk the neighborhoods more.

I found us talking to, like initiating conversations with people at playgrounds. Initiating, oh my goodness, even my daughter would come up and say, mom, go talk to this girl's mom. I'm like, I don't know who her mom is.

Like you have to have her point it out because she's like, I want to play date with her. You have to go talk to her. I'm like, I don't want to go talk to her.

Socialization. Yeah, so I remember moments like that where, yes, I would have to walk up to some strange person and out my daughter and say, okay, she really wanted me to come talk to you because she's enjoying playing with your kiddo.

But also having conversations where, okay, maybe they fall flat, this isn't my person.

Going to local grocery stores, like these are maybe more boring, practical things going to the local grocery stores using local doctors too, like gives you kind of a sense of the community that you're in. I think locality is like recognizing the resources that you have like close to you, can help you feel more rooted. Even to the degree of like picking out and being able to identify what types of trees are in my yard.

What type of animal is that that we see like scurrying across the yard? What type of frog noise is that? Little things that I think help to root you and become familiar with an unfamiliar place.

Yeah, absolutely. Actually just this week, my daughter brought home a big nut, like a big seed in her pocket and I said, oh, a buckeye and she's like, no, it's a horse plus nut.

I'm like, no, it's a buckeye.

I grew up in Ohio and I know buckeyes. And this was a buckeye. And she's like, it is absolutely not a buckeye.

This is a horse chestnut seed. And I Googled it and sure enough, they're almost identical, but horse chestnut seeds, horse chestnut trees, I guess. I don't even know what they are.

They grow in New York versus buckeye trees go, are they buckeye trees? I don't know what they're called. If they're like a type of tree that has a buckeye.

But those grow in more in the Midwest and like the Mississippi River Valley. So she was right. It was not a buckeye.

But that was my kind of instant, like it was what I knew.

It's what you could identify.

Yeah. So then I had to face up with the fact that I was wrong, but I'm wrong often, so I'm familiar with that.

Any last thoughts for those who are listening, words of encouragement?

I don't think it's always going to be the right move. Maybe you do it and you regret it and it was wrong, and maybe you do it and it's hard and it turns out to be the right thing even though it's not easy. I feel like for us that it has been the latter, right?

It was hard and it has taken a long time to feel settled, but this is definitely where we're going to be, at least until our kids get through school and go off to college. I guess you'd call it our forever home in those terms.

This is our forever home and it's not necessarily a house, right? It's like this area, this locality, this is where we will be. I agree with you.

I think that was our approach too, that, okay, we do this move and if it goes horribly and it doesn't feel like a fit, then we move back. And as much as work and money that would take, right? It was like, okay, it's going to be okay either way.

And it has been a really good move as much as it has also been a process, an emotional process too. Well, thank you so much, Denaye. It's really good to see your face.

I know no one else can, but I've enjoyed talking to you and seeing your face again.

Thank you.