It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when our infatuation with
California started. I think that from the time when we met, my husband, Zak,
and I knew we would eventually want to settle somewhere outside of New York
City where we were both born and raised. Zak always suffered from terrible
allergies due to the changing, and extreme, seasons in the North East so he knew
he wanted to live somewhere where he wouldn’t feel like he was sick for ¾ out
of the year. And me, well I love going on adventures and experiencing new
things, so I was always open to anywhere!
During the time we were dating, my future brother-in-law was
offered a promotion that would transfer him to San Francisco. Zak took a trip
with him to check out the city and came back enamored with the golden state.
That was in 2004, but it wasn’t until 2011, after about a dozen more trips to
California, and my own brother and his family making the move to the East Bay,
that we finally got a call about an opportunity to go ourselves.
However, although Zak and I had always dreamed about moving
out of New York, and then eventually fell in love with the idea of living in
the city by the bay, we now had a two and a half year old son to think about
and two stable jobs that while we were unhappy with, kept us feeling content. We
lived near my in-laws who were a huge help with child care and I was in close
proximity to my mom who I visited at least once a week for dinner and quality
time. We were no longer in our early “care-free 20’s” and while we may have
jumped on the band wagon with the call to California, we still had a lot of
trepidation.
Since arriving to California, there have been many times we
felt regret. Many times I felt a longing to go back to the familiarity of New
York City, whose subway lines I knew like the lines on my palm print. Many
times I missed my mother (still miss my mother) and have since started cooking
a lot more down-home Puerto Rican cooking just to fill my California apartment with
the wonderful scent of my childhood home in El Barrio. But, every time I feel
that ounce of regret I think about my son, and our little family and the goals
and hopes my husband and I have spent our lives dreaming of that we are finally
able to fulfill. And we are fulfilling those not because California has more opportunities
than New York and not because we all of a sudden came into more money… I
attribute our colorful path towards our goals to the mere fact that making such
a big cross-country move like this has in more than one way taken us so far out
of our comfort zone that we have had no choice but keep our eyes on the prize.
That said we feel blessed with our constant views of the
mountains and the Pacific Ocean, our newfound love of camping in the Redwoods
of California, and our overall feeling of an increased amount of quality time
together as a family. For those reasons and more, no matter how much I
sometimes long for the tall buildings and familiar streets of NYC, I am so
happy with our move, the changes we’ve made with our lives, and look forward to
what’s to come!
