PicoBlog

As COVID started to fade into the background of our lives – for me this started roughly in the last half of 2022 – many of the things I had ignored came rushing to the forefront.

I was fresh into my recovery for compulsive gambling and was working through its underlying causes. Our family was in the beginning stages of thinking about moving, and one of the options was leaving Minnesota. That, of course, would have meant a job change and likely a career change for me.

It was a time of a lot of conversations: with my wife, with my friends, with myself and, eventually (though informally) with prospective employers in journalism-adjacent industries.

As I tried to imagine an entirely different life, two things ended up being particularly resonant.

One was a conversation with one of those employers. We had traded a couple of emails, whereby I had tried to explain to him where I was coming from. It boiled down to this, at least as I saw it: I was in my mid-40s, squarely mid-career, and the previous two years had generated a certain personal and professional stagnation that made me curious about what else might be out there for me.

When we met for lunch, one of the first things he said to me was this: “So, are you running toward something or are you running away from something?”

It stopped me in my tracks. I didn’t have a great answer, and that lack of clarity probably told him all he needed to know. I was just someone who knew he needed to make some changes, but I had no idea what that meant.

As I thought about it more, what he said in tandem with this notion became a guidepost for my decision-making: Change is good and healthy. Change for the sake of change is not good or healthy. It is important to be cognizant of what you are changing and strive to change the right things.

Soon after that lunch conversation, our family put down firmer roots in Minnesota. My wife accepted a new job and started a PhD program at the University of Minnesota. I stopped thinking as much about the things about my job at the Star Tribune that were frustrating and started appreciating the many things I loved about it.

As I’ve written about before, the seeds for this site were planted around that time as I realized that I needed a new creative project and not a new career in that moment.

We were in the process of making a lot of well-considered and intentional decisions.

But one big question still loomed.

ARE WE THERE YET?

Considering a big move out of state made me an amateur real estate agent. In the two places we were looking in particular, I scoured Zillow for neighborhoods and home values to see what was possible.

The thing is, my wife and I had already been talking off and on for years about whether we should move out of our South Minneapolis home.

We imagined there would come a point when 1,300 square feet – space that was a vast upgrade from our small condo when we bought the house in 2012 – felt a little cramped. We particularly knew that when we decided to try for a third child that the math wouldn’t add up on bedrooms. Our house had three, meaning siblings would need to share. That’s fine, especially when they are young, but is it a plan indefinitely?

So after it became clear that we were staying in the Twin Cities, we remained on Zillow and kept looking.

And now, about 18 months after we really started looking, I’m writing to you for the first time from our new house in Eagan. How we got here is a journey that is both simple and complicated, both universal and specific to us.

The basic parameters for a potential move, particularly to a suburb, were not complicated.

By the time we moved, our kids were 10, 7 and 4. They were starting to crave more of their own space, as were my wife and I, and we just didn’t have it. Imagining how that would play out when they were 15, 12 and 9, with bigger bodies, bigger emotions and bigger lives, made the house feel even smaller.

Our dining room table was a de-facto work-from-home desk, our kids’ art project table, my wife’s jewelry-making station, a catch-all for mail and other semi-important papers and a toy repository. Sometimes, it was even a place for our family to eat a meal together.

There is a sweetness in that proximity, in being piled on top of each other. There is also a tension, a claustrophobia.

Our experiences in Minneapolis Public Schools had been mixed: Good and caring teachers plus conscientious local administration mixed with baffling decisions and mismanagement from much higher up that had profound impacts on our two school-aged kids. We had concerns about pending budget cuts, among other things. What might life look like in a different district?

Minneapolis is a wonderful city, but it has changed in both perceptible and imperceptible ways in the last four years. A lot of things written about the city — why people are leaving or staying — paint it in one extreme or the other. That feels disingenuous to me. It is nowhere near the on-fire hellhole that some might have you believe it is, but it is also not a problem-free utopia.

Our old house was seven blocks from Lake Street and a little over a mile from the Third Precinct. That’s far enough away that in the summer of 2020 we weren’t in any imminent danger. But it’s close enough that we had neighborhood patrols and could smell the fires. What might it feel like to be away from those memories and what remained in our everyday lived experience?

As we started thinking about moving in 2022, those factors became reduced into a predictable shorthand in my mind: We were thinking about moving to the suburbs because of space, schools and safety.

And then a little over a year ago, my wife was assaulted. She was walking one block to her car after dinner with a friend in a Minneapolis neighborhood – not ours, but one that felt like ours.

Her assailant knocked her to the ground and demanded her purse. My wife’s glasses fell off in the process, leaving her vision blurry as she frantically clutched her purse, screamed at the top of her lungs and kicked him as hard as she could.

I heard everything that was happening because we were on the phone together at the time. I had bolted out of our son’s bedroom to take her call after he had fallen asleep, and our two girls were in the living room with me as it all played out. They could tell something was terribly wrong, and our older daughter started pacing and crying along with me.

My wife’s persistence eventually led the attacker to flee. She’s pretty sure she kicked him squarely in the balls, after which she screamed at him to “RUN!” Nobody came to her aid despite her loud screams in a residential area.

It took her several minutes to find her glasses. It was hours later that she realized chunks of her hair were missing. It was more than a week before the scrapes and cuts on her hands healed.

And her trust in being alone at night in Minneapolis never returned.

Our oldest daughter became anxious anytime one of us wasn’t home yet after dark.

My trauma was a fraction of my wife’s, but it was real. There was the powerlessness of the moment, hearing everything happening on one end but not being able to place exactly where or what was going on nor having any means to stop it.

For a while, though, I tried to rationalize what happened and tried to think about it through a different lens. I played out these thoughts in my head in the months after the attack.

Crime data actually shows things are getting a little better.

The city would not be any more or less safe if this had happened to someone else and we never knew about it.

Our neighborhood still feels safe to me.

As I came to realize, though, I was trying to talk myself into the status quo. Not moving was the easiest thing we could do. Moving is hard.

And however I could try to rationalize what had happened, it was not my lived experience. Feelings are powerful and valid. If my wife was telling me that she no longer felt safe, she was right and I needed to listen.

SLOW, THEN FAST

Even with all that subtext, there were considerable emotional and practical hurdles to moving.

Emotionally: Our identities, mine in particular, were tied to Minneapolis. I moved to the Twin Cities in 1994 for my freshman year at the U of M, and I had never lived anywhere other than Minneapolis. On numerous occasions, I had boasted to friends that I would never live in the suburbs.

And of course our family liked a lot of things about our life and our house in the city. We could walk places with ease, including the wonderful Riverview Theater. We had great neighbors and friends. Our kids, particularly our oldest, had several school friends who lived nearby.

Practically: Could we even afford a new house? Could we sell our old house? Weren’t interest rates pretty terrible (yes, and they still are). Did we have it in us to go through such a massive undertaking, to make a decision that would have such a profound impact on our lives?

That swirl played out slowly over the course of a year, with buckets of pros and cons changing constantly.

Sometimes it seemed like we were going to stay. Maybe we could finally finish the basement? Could we squeeze a fourth bedroom out of it? Maybe we could try charter schools or open enrollment if Minneapolis schools no longer seemed like the right fit?

Other times it seemed like we were for sure going to move. This just isn’t working. There’s nothing we can do here that would solve all of what we want and need as simply as moving would.

My process is that I have to think slowly for a long time, but once I cross a threshold with a decision, I want to move fast. Around mid-March, almost in tandem and perhaps not entirely for all the same reasons, my wife and I were both ready to get serious.

Was it the gun shots outside our son’s preschool, or the car that was stolen from the parking lot? Was it another cramped winter day in the living room/dining room, all five of us piled on top of each other trying to eat, work, play and generally live in the same spaces? Was it finding out that if pending school budget cuts came to fruition, there would be 37 kids in our daughter’s fifth grade classroom?

Was it all of it or nothing in particular? There probably wasn’t one tipping point, but you know when you are ready.

We contacted realtors my wife had met through a local group for moms. They came out to our house and patiently walked us through the process of buying and selling at the same time in this market. The upshot: They were confident they could sell our house quickly at a price we would like, though it would require some work to get it ready. The bigger challenge would be finding a new house.

But a new house is the fun part. It lets your imagination run wild, and even in a tight market there are seemingly infinite possibilities. We had narrowed our search to a handful of suburbs — houses that had at least four bedrooms (bonus if they were all on the same level) and had good schools in places that didn’t feel too far out there guided us.

Our kids came along for all the showings and open houses, immediately blowing any negotiating leverage by calling dibs on certain bedrooms and proclaiming their love for certain features of each house within seconds of arrival.

Then we would go back home and talk about how much they loved our existing house. Our two daughters in particular would alternate between being giddy about the possibilities of a move and crying about missing their friends, their school, their neighborhood and the only house in which they had ever lived.

My wife and I tried to give them the space for those emotions, telling them all that this would be complicated and that it was OK to feel all of those things. We promised that we would still visit the old neighborhood and that they could still see their old friends, even if it wasn’t as often as before. “We’re not moving across the ocean,” I said countless times. “We’re moving 20 minutes away.”

In a way, talking to our kids about the feelings they were having helped me process my own emotions.

I knew it was the right decision, in part for the present but even more for the next 15 to 20 years.

I knew that we were getting really serious about doing this, but was I really doing this?

My perception of the suburbs for a long time was a vast expanse of nothingness. Would I fade into the beige, get swallowed up by the above-averageness of it all?

Was that me?

I also wrestled with some guilt about leaving Minneapolis and the privilege wrapped up in having a choice to do so.

This feels like a critical time in the trajectory of what I still consider a great city even with its problems. Was I running away from that fight, writing a check so that I could view it from a distance? Were we building a taller fence instead of a longer table?

TOWARD MOVES

We looked at a few houses in one particular suburb, and it just didn’t feel right. One was a new build, and we decided we aren’t new build people. One was gorgeous but not the right fit for us. One had a great neighborhood but the house was meh. Another was nice enough, but it just didn’t feel like home.

Then we went for a showing at the house we ended up buying. It was the first place we had looked in Eagan, and I knew from the listing that it checked all the boxes.

The price was reasonable, even when we factored in what our realtors told us: In this market, be prepared to make an offer at least 5% above the list price. All the bedrooms were on the upper level. The schools were very good.

For as data-driven and logistics-happy as I can be, though, feel is very important to me. Being inside a house and taking in a neighborhood, carries far more weight in a final decision than just the raw numbers.

The house felt right. It was quiet without feeling stale. It was built in the 1980s — more than 60 years younger than our old house, with a good mix of modern amenities and the sense of an established neighborhood. It had tons of space without seeming like it was swallowing us up. Our family could be cozy when we wanted to be and spread out when we wanted to be.

We spent some time in the neighborhood after the showing, talking to some folks across the street and dipping our toes in the water at Lebanon Hills Regional Park — a short walk from the house.

Our realtors were pretty sure it was the one for us, but they also knew this: If we really liked it, we needed to move fast. We talked it over quickly and scrambled to put together an offer along with a thoughtful note to the sellers.

By the next morning, it was submitted. Our realtors called us to tell us the offer was one of six on the house. We braced ourselves for likely disappointment, that we would be among the five not chosen. I remember sitting at Dunkin’ Donuts, where I had picked up treats for my U of M students, trying to get some work done but finding it impossible to do so with the decision looming.

At that point, it was all still just an idea. We weren’t moving for sure because we didn’t have a house yet, and the buckets of pros and cons were still transient. I allowed a small part of myself to think that maybe not getting the house would be for the best, that we were moving too fast.

And then our realtors called that afternoon. Their first word: Congratulations.

You can’t fake emotions in the moment. As soon as they said our offer was the one accepted, I was ecstatic. I guess you never really know until you know, but the feeling doesn’t lie.

That was almost exactly two months ago, and the last 60 days have been a chaotic whirlwind of tasks and emotions.

On more than one occasion, one of our kids asked us to unpack a toy or stuffed animal that had already been stowed away. The reality of what we were leaving behind hit all of us at various moments.

We had a sweet back yard dinner with two particularly close neighborhood families, comparing notes on our decision to move and their decisions (so far) to stay. Both have two kids instead of three, and their youngest kids are each the same age as our oldest. They’re on different timelines, making different decisions that feel right to them.

We will miss seeing them as often as we used to, and our kids will miss running across the street or down the block to see their kids.

Those realities hit even harder this week when all three of our kids had their last day of school or preschool in the old neighborhood. We lingered after picking them up from school, spotting the group of friends my older daughter used to walk home with. We took pictures by a garage mural and saw “Inside Out 2” (tremendous) at the Riverview with the family of our younger daughter.

Then it was time to go home, which meant a 20 minute drive instead of a three-block walk. We had dinner at an emerging favorite new spot in Eagan, completing an evening that felt like we were still living in two worlds.

I can already tell the summer (and beyond) will have some of those same themes. We’ve met some new neighborhood families already, but our kids don’t have school friends here yet. We’re already establishing some new traditions, but we also have a lot of old ones.

To me, that means the life we have had was a sweet and good one — that for the most part, even if there were genuine reasons for leaving, we weren’t running away from anything.

Our decision to move was more about running toward something, and it’s OK to realize this: How you feel and who you are can evolve with your stage of life. Where we were was right for that stage. Where we are is right for the next stage.

I didn’t fully know what we were running toward and what we were gaining until we got here, which I suppose is the case with all big decisions in life.

But now that we are here, I love so much about it. Even after being here just two weeks, and even with a lot of unpacking yet to do (literally and figuratively), it already feels like home. It’s been gratifying to hear our kids tell us how much they love it, too, even as they know they will miss things about our old house.

As my wife and I took a walk through Lebanon Hills the other day, I tried to explain to her how I don’t think I would have been happy just anywhere and that if we had settled for a place that only checked all the boxes but didn’t feel right it would have been a mistake.

Trying to articulate these feelings, whether in a long space like this or in short sentences to new and old friends, often feels incomplete. I’ve even jokingly started telling people that we moved just so I could get out of jury duty.

In circling back on some of these thoughts with my therapist earlier this week, I was reminded of his consistent message that I should strive for “toward moves” in my life — actions that bring me closer to the person I want to be, not away from that person.

He also said he wonders how having more space and possibly even more time will benefit my writing.

I’m looking forward to finding out.

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