It sounds so cliché, but when I hit 40, I went through a bit of a midlife crisis. Not the kind that involves fancy cars or affairs or plastic surgery. The kind where you suddenly realize your life is half over and you look around and ask, “Is this really what I want my life to look like? Or is this just where life has taken me?”
At the time, my husband and I were both at crossroads in our careers. Our oldest son was upper elementary and we were thinking about where we wanted our kids to experience the difficult teenage years we had ahead of us. And my dad, who lived four hours away and had congestive heart failure, was declining.
We started thinking about moving back to my hometown. Something my 18-year-old self would be horrified to hear had even crossed my mind. But I’ve learned that the things you look for in a place to live are different when you’re 40 years old with three kids.
We loved where we were, but saw the possibility of something different
We lived in a wonderful suburban area of the biggest city in North Carolina, with all the best amenities and opportunities life had to offer. We loved our neighborhood, our friends, our school. By many measurements, it was an idyllic place to live. But besides the tug to be close to my parents, there was also the possibility that where we would go might be even more idyllic.
My parents had a little cabin on a small lake in the country about 20 minutes outside my hometown, where my siblings and I grew up barefoot and feral in the summers. They hadn’t used it much since we all left home and my husband and I started dreaming about renovating it so we could live there full time.
I was excited by the chance to give my kids the same memories I had of lightning bugs, waterskiing, spitting watermelon seeds, and catching frogs.
There were some concerns about the move
The idea of a slower pace and wide open spaces was appealing, but we were a bit concerned about the schools. We would be leaving one of the best schools in North Carolina to go to a rural area that we knew offered fewer resources and where the schools ranked much lower when compared to others in the state.
Courtesy of Kathy Larson
We reminded ourselves that test scores don’t tell the whole story and decided the lifestyle change would be worth taking a chance. After all, there are some things you can’t learn in a classroom.
We were also concerned about leaving the great restaurants and things to do in the big city we had called home for 18 years. And we didn’t know what to expect when it came to the small town everybody-knows-everybody’s-business thing. There were lots of question marks, but we decided to try it for a few years and if we hated it, we told ourselves we could always move back.
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It turned out to be the best decision we’ve ever made
We’re now seven years in and we’re never moving back. The lake life has been even better than I imagined. The kids spend so much more time outside swimming, fishing, tubing, riding bikes, playing tennis, basketball, and soccer, catching frogs, building forts in the woods, waterskiing, wakeboarding, and kayaking. In how many other places can you kayak to your best friend’s house?
Courtesy of Kathy Larson
The school thing has worked out great. Our kids have thrived as big fish in a small pond, and we think they’ve actually had a better experience not being in such a competitive school environment.
We have missed the restaurants, I’m not going to lie. And we miss our friends, but we’ve built a new community that we love.
And our kids got to experience living close to my parents the last five years of my dad’s life. Even if all those other things hadn’t turned out as great as they did, that alone would have made the move worth it.
