During the summer that our girls turned 14, 12 and 9, we relocated from Minnesota to Princeton, New Jersey. I will not pretend that we weighed the pros and cons carefully. Instead, we plunged into it so that I could advance my career. I was offered a huge opportunity that was unlikely to come again, and I took it.
Spurred by my ambition, we gave little thought to the cost that the move would exact from our daughters. We had relocated only once before, when the girls were very small, in order to move back to Minnesota from San Diego. That one had gone smoothly, and we knew that corporate relocations were commonplace. As we would learn, though, there is a world of difference between relocating small children, and relocating young girls in the midst of their adolescence.
The girls were unhappy at the news, to say the least. They loved their school, their friends, their house, their relatives; in short, they loved the life we had all built in St. Paul, and none of them wanted to give that up for the unknown. I would like to think they embraced the adventure of it all, but the best I can say is that they bowed to the inevitable and went along with a combination of acceptance and resignation.
On a scouting trip that spring, Francine and I bought a house within walking distance of the center of town and the campus of the famous university. The location was great, but the house was a wreck. For some unknown reason, the previous owners had nailed the windows shut, yet wisteria vines had begun to creep into the bedrooms anyway. Despite the brutal heat and humidity of New Jersey summers, there was no air conditioning. Our very first purchase were two window AC units, which is how we discovered the nails in the windows. As we learned in our first few days, the skylight over the family room leaked copiously whenever it rained, leaving us tripping over buckets of rainwater. We spent the next two years living there with massive renovations under way all around us. We had no kitchen for a few months, and we were down to one bathroom at one point. We came to love the house and all of the improvements we made, but the work lasted as long as our tenure did. As I drove away from the house for the last time two years later, I watched the workers putting the finishing touches on our landscaping and driveway. It looked beautiful.
Their new schools were harder on the girls than the housing. Katie and Maura started ninth and seventh grades at an excellent nearby school, and being good students they were able to handle the homework. But at their ages, the schoolwork was only a small fraction of the entire picture. What really matters at that age—and perhaps at any age—is the social network. Back in Minnesota, each of our girls had wonderful friendships with kids they had known since early childhood. In New Jersey, they didn’t know anyone, and for the most part the kids they met already had their own friend groups.
Stanley Kubrick said that the most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile, but that it is indifferent. Making new friends is never easy. Claire was the youngest, and adapted the fastest. She attended a tiny school with only 15 kids in the entire fourth grade. As we dropped her off on her first day, a classmate ran up, said “Hi, I’m Maren,” grabbed her hand, and led her off to join a kickball game. Maura burrowed in and gradually made her way. She ended up with a large group of acquaintances, and though she made no deep friendships she was able to navigate the social waters of her two years in New Jersey without great difficulty or drama.
For Katie, the oldest, it was another matter. She made brave efforts to meet her new classmates, and they included here in several outings and parties, but nothing remotely replaced the friends she had left behind. On a day to day basis, at least outwardly, she coped. She got her schoolwork done. She played field hockey. She joined in all of our usual family activities. But, looking back, I can see now how lonely and isolated she felt. She had long phone calls with a friend back in Minnesota, who proved to be an incredibly important lifeline.
Meanwhile, I was buried in my own work, often returning home late at night, often working during the weekends. I missed the clues, some of them right in front of my face, that should have told me that it was not going well for Katie. It’s not that I missed them entirely; Francine and I had many discussions about how the girls were adapting, and especially about Katie, and I tried to check in on her every night. But it was too easy for me to put it down to the typical ups and downs of a teenage girl, and to convince myself that everything was on track.
In the end, it wasn’t any crisis in New Jersey that made me realize what the move had put the girls through. Rather, it was what happened when we got back to Minnesota. Suddenly—and I mean suddenly—everything was better. Friendships picked up where they had left off. Their social life was restored. They had their grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins around them again. Things hadn’t seemed that bad in New Jersey—things weren’t that bad, in fact—but they were so much better back home.
Initially, I had a lot of second thoughts about leaving my job in Princeton—the one that represented such a significant step up in my career. It took me the better part of a year to find another, comparable position in the Twin Cities. But when I saw my girls thriving again, when I realized that what had seemed normal in New Jersey was in fact a period of real difficulty for each of them, I cast away all doubt about the decision. In relocating the family I had flipped my priorities, allowing my career and my ambitions to come before the welfare of my daughters. I suppose I can justify it now, by saying they came through it all right and that perhaps it made them stronger, and by saying that the job in Princeton gave my career and our financial security a long-term boost. But if I had known then what I know now, would I still have done it?
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