Crossroads

I've been quiet here for a while because I wanted to turn down the “noise” and spend real time with my family in France. Liam and I haven't done that in years. No content calendar, no next stop to plan for. Just days that were ours.

But quiet has a way of making room for the questions I've been outrunning. Mine was this: where do I want to settle? Not for six months. Not for a filming season. For real.

I realized I've never done that. Not once in forty-five years. The closest I came was in my twenties, during my first marriage. I say first because yes, there was a second. That's a story for another time.

So, this summer, I asked myself whether Europe could be the place where I finally settled. I explored it thoroughly and looked at it from every angle. Liam staying in the American curriculum wasn't negotiable for me, so I needed a country with a real English-language school option. That narrowed it to a few countries. But when I weighed the job market and what I could realistically earn against the cost of living, the Netherlands kept coming out ahead. My mind went to the Netherlands.

And then one morning I woke up and asked myself why I wasn’t excited about this European option. At least not the way I was about New York, a city Liam and I visited right before we crossed the Atlantic and fell for it immediately. We could move there tomorrow. The weather would be brutal and the rent even worse, but something about it pulled at both of us in a way Europe didn't this time.

I've written about the pull before, and Europe has always had it for me. This time, it just wasn't there.

Even though Liam is nine, I always include him in our decisions. It’s important to me to give him space where he feels like his wants and needs are heard. I ask him if he'd want to stay in Europe longer; he doesn't say no. He starts talking about all the other places he wants to see, like Japan, Australia, everywhere. But then the catch comes. Can we go back to the States soon, tho? Both things are true for him at once. He wants the world, and he wants home. And when I ask him where home is, the answer is simple. The States.

I'm still in Europe as I write this. I'm surprised by how hard it is to imagine letting go of America as a place to live. Not the politics, not the noise around it. The country itself. The one Liam and I drove across, from LA to New York and back.

I never thought that would be the hard part.

What has been a crossroads for you? Please share with me in the comments section; I would ABSOLUTELY love to read it.