Wander & Nest

We get this question and the follow ups a lot, naturally. Usually it goes something like this:

Where do you come from? California.

What brings you to France? Wylie’s job. He’s a researcher with the CNRS and works at the university here in Toulouse.

It’s probably a temporary position, right? How long will you be here before going back to the US? Actually his position will become permanent after 5 years, and we don’t have plans to go back. This was a permanent move, or at least as permanent as things can be.

Oh, so you totally left your life in California…why?

And then, depending on the type of conversation, we give the short or long, positively-framed or negatively-framed version of the answer to that much deeper question. I’ll try to tell the whole story here.

After we moved back to the US from Paris in 2016, we were faced with the reality that life in the US was just harder than we remembered. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that now that we had a different perspective of living in France, life in our corner of California just seemed overly complex and difficult… car dependency, long work hours, little time for socializing or seeing family, high cost of living, etc. Still, we found our groove and made it work. Then Mara came and there were new challenges to manage – mainly working long hours at stressful jobs with a baby in daycare for 9 hours per day. Again though, we managed and found a way to make it all work.

Then in May 2022, when Mara was 10 months old, it felt like the whole world came crashing down with the elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Wylie and I grew up with school shootings, we knew it was just part of life in the US, but until Mara came it was hypothetical, distant, unlikely. This time though, this level of horror and tragedy was devastating on a whole new level. I felt completely breathless thinking about the families, the parents, the five year old children. I talked to friends about it, about how I couldn’t stop sobbing and swung from despair to anger to hopelessness. Of course my feelings were validated by other parents of young children, one said “yes, your first school shooting after becoming a parent is especially hard.” I understood what she was saying but I was filled with so much anger… this is not a baby milestone I want to check off!! how is this ok?!?! how are we just ok with this reality of life in the United States??? Then came the even harsher reality that it’s not only guns in schools, it’s the possibility of a mass shooting in grocery stores, movie theaters, shopping centers, churches, concerts, etc. And how would we deal with the conversations of gun safety at home when Mara was old enough to go to a friend’s house to play? Do we have to ask… do you have guns in the home? How do you lock them up? Is it possible for a kid to accidentally get access to a gun?… and what would we do if we weren’t comfortable with the answers??

So this was the moment for me, the moment I realized I wanted out. I told Wylie I was ready to leave one night after rocking Mara to sleep, and the next day he started his job search for positions outside the US.

And of course almost nothing meaningful happened to ensure a school massacre wouldn’t happen again – it’s just thoughts and prayers, convince ourselves that there was something defective about Uvalde that allowed the tragedy to happen there, and then lie that surely it could never happen here, to our kids. Some schools did respond, like the one in our Fullerton neighborhood, by erecting large metal fencing around the school and adding bigger locks to the playground gates. I’m sure there are fine reasons to have fencing around schools, but it’s so clear that this initiative was essentially a performative action to illustrate security without actually addressing the problem – but what else is a single school or school district supposed to do?

After deciding that we would leave the US, there was a definite snowball effect where the things that we had accepted as part of life (high cost of living, stressful work, car dependency, precariousness of health care, school shooting security measures) transformed into complete injustices with no hope of change in our lifetimes. Maybe that “no hope of change” part is a little dramatic or pessimistic, but that was the feeling. So we decided to “vote with our feet” and leave the US.

We had planned for Wylie’s sabbatical to double as a sort of exploratory trip to test out potential countries and scope out opportunities for a potential long term move. But he ended up securing the job in Toulouse before we left for sabbatical, so our permanent move away from the US essentially happened in July 2023, though we didn’t actually settle in Toulouse until August 2024.

I wish that our story for moving to Toulouse was more about going to something rather than running away from something. There’s certainly a way to tell the story with more of a positive spin – seizing an opportunity, a new adventure, etc. – that’s all true, but it’s only part of the story.

And the last and maybe most important thing I can say is that we are so lucky and so privileged to have been able to make this decision, to have even had the option to consider this decision. Most people can’t just find a job in another country and move there. We had incredible access to opportunity and resources that made our move possible. It can be hard to talk about our real reason for moving, especially with friends and family in the US. I do have feelings of guilt for essentially running away and abandoning our old life. I’m working through that in my own way while encouraging everyone to come visit us here in the lovely pink city. Maybe the visit will encourage some to make the jump too!