Life Affirming Decisions

Over the past year or so the wife and I have had a goal of moving out of our current location to Austin for a number of reasons...we have loving, and supportive family members there (all of whom would would love nothing more than to have us move back) and for the most part all of Gommy's doctors are in Austin as well. Those are the concrete reasons. The vague, emotional reasons are that...well...to an extent Twisty and I need a bit of a fresh start with everything going, and we thought Austin would provide that.

Recently we closed that door for a variety of reasons. Circumstances came up that forced us to take a look at our current situation, and we realized that hey, we have it pretty good here, and there's no guarantee that our life in Austin would be better than what it is now...and Austin actually might end up being not quite as good as our current location. So we made the decision to stay.

This decision was one of the hardest that we've ever had to make.It was incredibly incredibly stressful. On the day we made it for certain, both of us couldn't help but wonder whether we'd made the right one.

The title of this post is life affirming decisions...meaning on one hand decisions that affirm the life you want. But also that sometimes, life has a tricky way of affirming your decisions too.

The day we decided to stay put, Twisty got a phone call from a number she didnt recognize. She clicked ignore. Then I got a phone call from the same number. I picked it up. It was our pediatrician's nurse (who we adore). Our pediatrician is moving to a new facility, and they are looking to decorate the new office with pictures of families that mean a lot to them. She told us that we were the first ones that they thought of--that Gommy (and tooties) are near and dear to their hearts. She got choked up as she shared this with us, and naturally we did too.

Life affirming decisions.

Yesterday we were in Austin for a variety of appointments...basically going from about 9:30 until 3. As we drove around Dell Children's between gas stations and lunch spots we kind of realized that we are not really cut out to live in Austin...that we'd romanticized the idea, but we didn't really like it in practice. All the regret and doubt went away in that moment.

I grew up as an only child, and I've struggled with the concept of setting roots down somewhere because of the lack of a real extended family. I'm lucky that I marred into the family that I did because not only do I have another set of parents, and siblings, I also have new best friends. Moving to Austin would have reconnected us with our roots, but the process of making that decision made us realize that we have a different set of roots here in this town. We have nurses, day care providers, trainers, doctors, therapists all of whom care about us in their own way...and all of whom we care about deeply. Maybe roots are defined simply as folks who you have deep connections with. Maybe we have set roots here without even knowing it.

At any rate, with that decision behind us, it's now part of our job to cultivate these roots and make this a permanent home for us. And quite frankly, I'm kind of excited about that.