Fear of moving

It has been over two years since I began to seriously entertain the idea of moving, and it is only very recently that I have reached a point where my excitement at the prospect has begun to outweigh my anxiety...ok perhaps fear is a better word.....sometimes bordering on terror
It has come as a great surprise to me that I have found the idea of moving so daunting - as a grownup and capable woman of 40! Over the past couple of years I have observed numerous of my cafe customers making decisions and plans and preparations to move, and then disappearing off to the new chosen place - and none of them displayed any signs of the anxiety I was feeling at the prospect. They behaved as if it was just an ordinary, normal part of existence, and not at all as if it was a cataclysmic life fracture, which was what it has felt like to me!

This is not to say for a moment that I don't want to go - I want to go very much, but I have been struggling to accommodate the part of me that also wants to stay - this is not really a desire to stay in Cairns specifically, (although I love it here with a passion) but a very strong desire to stay safe, stay the same, stay in the framework that is working fine in my life at the present.
We have given ourselves plenty of time to deal with the emotional and practical preparations, so I have not had to force myself to resolve these concerns quickly. I have had the luxuxry of being able to take a patient and gentle approach with myself, and to just have faith that these issues would resolve themselves in due course. And I have just been listening non judgementally to my own internal chatter and trying to pinpoint the heart of the often floating anxiety I was feeling.

I have realised that one reason this is daunting is because I have never actually done this before - I have moved before, but never of my own free choice. My previous relocations were all compelled by the neccessity of my life circumstances at the time and I have never had to fret and worry about whether I was making the right decision. I left home at 19 and moved with my fiance to Brisbane - but this move was compelled by the fact that in Brisbane was the nearest university at which I could study Law. From Brisbane we moved to Cessnock in the Hunter Valley - but that move was determined by the fact that a flying school from Cessnock had held a receruitment seminar in Brisbane and my fiance decided that he would go there to pursue his pilot's licence. A few years down the track I moved from the Hunter to Brisbane, to be with him during six months he spent in hospital after a plane crash. And after that we moved back to Cairns, to be back in the social support network of family that he (and I!) needed after getting out of hospital.

Then we had a couple of kids, and after a few more years split up, and for the decade since then I have felt unable to entertain the notion of moving away because of a reluctance to part his children from him. These kids are in their mid teens now and I believe they will be able to manage having their parents in two different places, so now, for the first time in my life, I am going through the process of deciding I would like to live somewhere else, and choosing that place, and setting processes in motion that will lead to me moving, of my own free will. VERY SCARY!

One of the big issues I have had to sort out is an overwhelming feeling of guilt at moving to the opposite end of the country from my lovely mother. And the strength of this fear has been surprising, given that although I couldn't love her more, and I enjoy her company, and we live twenty minutes apart, I only have contact with her maybe once a month ...but she is a very capable woman still, and cheerful and resourceful, and I have always felt that if she ever needs more support from me, I will be here to give it. Once I move to Tasmania, I will not be able to be of much practical support at all, and I found that a difficult notion to reconcile. But the alternative was allowing that prospect to stop me from going, ever, while she is still alive, and I could see immediately that that would not be normal or desirable. I reminded myself that millions of people live far away from their parents, and that this does not make them unworthy, uncaring children...when I got thinking about it, the list of children who live far away from their parents includes two of my siblings, who have been living merrily wherever they desired for the last three decades or more! Before long I convinced myself that it was ok for me to move away from my mother. We would both find a way to cope!

Similarly I felt very guilty at causing the kids to have to face the prospect of having their two parents at opposite ends of the country. My daughter, who is almost 16, is fine with it, as she barely choses to see her father anyway. My 14 year old son, however, is experiencing conflict and uncertainty about where and with whom he will live. He find the idea of going a few months without seeing one of us upsetting. For my part, I feel panic stricken and woeful at the idea that he might live with his father and that I wouldn't get to hug him or care for him for months at a time...of course I hope he will choose to live with us and holiday with his father, but the decision is his. He wishes he could go on being able to see each of us often. This continues to make my heart ache, and I deeply regret causing him this pain, and I suspect that I will continue to feel conflicted about this until I see it all working out for him somehow....but I have decided not to let that stop me doing it. Eric and I have been waiting a decade to be able to strike out somewhere new together, and I just don't feel I can wait another 4 years until he is finished school. In the end it may cause him some sorrow, which I will suffer intensely also, but I do believe the benefits to all of us will outweigh that cost.

The other thing that has made this decision difficult is the irreversibilty of it. I am perhaps the world's most cautious person and I am always searching for ways to minimise risks. I have a strong preference for being able to proceed in small, reversible steps, where at the first sign of trouble you can quickly back up. (When I was newly pregnant with my first child, even though it was a completely planned pregnancy, I was completely overwhelmed at the inevitability of this thing that I had started...being in a situation where there was no going back was very novel, and quite disturbing! )

This move will not be reversible. The real estate market in Cairns is reasonably expensive and upwardly mobile, and once we sell our house, pay off the mortgage and move to Tassie, we will never be able to afford to buy back into this market. If things don't work out in Tassie we will have the option of some other places we could move, but back here will not really be an option. I am quite unused to working in that kind of framework. Usually I quell my fears with self-assurances that if something doesn't work out, I can just abandon it and go back to the way things were before. This aspect of the move is calling for some real bravery on my part. I can't be absolutely certain that I will be happy in Tasmania, so I have just had to accept the idea that if I am unhappy there, I will tackle that problem then and work out a solution!

So now all the hard emotional work has been done and I can finally just feel excited about the prospect of the dramatically new life that lies ahead. There are so very many things that I am looking forward to about living in Tasmania, and now I am impatient to get everything done here that needs to be done before we can put our house on the market and dawdle off towards the place where the berries grow!
Cheers

Sue