California Dreamin': Blowing Up the Life You Already Love

 I love my life.

I also can’t stop trying to change it.

For the first 40 years of life, I lived in my home state of Kentucky. Worked at the same place for nearly 15 of those years.

I married young, had a daughter, went to work, came home, and did what responsible adults do.

I became very, very accustomed to the familiar.

After my first marriage ended, I spent over a decade single, working full time and raising my daughter with tremendous support from my family. During that time, I also started learning who the hell I was aside from “mother” and “faithful employee”.

Then I met The Balkan Storm, who carried himself with the confidence of someone used to working for – and getting – what he wanted.

We both came from humble beginnings, but learned very different lessons from them. His taught him to push relentlessly toward whatever came next for him. I learned to dream (obviously) but also to stay in my lane and live for the comfortable and familiar.

I’d never lived more than a handful of miles from where I was born, in a family where nothing went to waste, including bacon grease in a ceramic jar by the stove because ‘you just never know’.

There were things you spent your money on and things you didn’t. Places you went and places that just weren’t for people like us.  

Even after earning a spot at a prestigious performing arts school, a part of me always questioned whether I really belonged there.

So early in my relationship with The Balkan Storm, I never felt more like a fish out of water.

I can vividly recall the turning point in our relationship. We’d had dinner with some of his friends at Ruth’s Chris, a restaurant regarded as one of those ‘not for us’ places, or at best, for the most special of special occasions.

These guys were casually ordering martinis and dinner on a random Tuesday.

I’d been there exactly once, twenty-odd years ago for my high school graduation dinner.

That being said, the conversation flowed and we laughed until our stomachs hurt. You’d think that would have been enough evidence for me but instead, some nasty little voice in my head spent the evening saying what does this man see in poor white trash like me? How long can I keep faking that I belong in his life?

Back at my place, I told him I just wasn't comfortable in his world, fully anticipating that to be the end of us.

“Well, you’re just gonna have to get used to it, aren’t you?" he replied, unfazed.

Looking back, it was probably my first real lesson in not confusing 'uncomfortable' with 'wrong'.

The best thing about my relationship with The Balkan Storm has always been that we’re stable, even though our lives are anything but boring.

So early in the relationship I knew if we stayed together, we wouldn’t be staying in Kentucky forever; his career made relocation a question of when and where rather than if.

And that became a much bigger deal in my family (at first).

We were all very close, emotionally and geographically.

Our lives all seemed to collectively orbit around my grandparents’ house, where we’d gather for everything from special occasions to random game nights and dinners. My grandmother was the glue that held our family together.

Then she died three months after being diagnosed with a brain tumor.

In the year that followed, while I was busy falling in love, my grandfather was dying, and my family was falling apart.  

So when it became evident I’d eventually move away, I got a lot of pushback.

In my family, staying close was loyalty. It was Sunday dinners and holidays and this unspoken assumption you’d always be right there.  

I understand now that my willingness to move must have felt like betrayal, but at the time, I just felt suffocated by the dynamic.

My grandfather died on Veterans Day. Ten days after the funeral, without any warning, my dad died.

Those weeks between then and New Year’s were the beginning of one of the messiest times my mother and I ever had. She was grieving in ways I didn’t understand and definitely didn’t know how to handle, and for a while I wasn’t sure our relationship would survive it.

The next year, amid all of that, I got engaged.

I thought that, despite the messiness, the dust was finally settling. Maybe, just maybe, I’d made it through the worst of it.

One of my best friends was helping me plan my wedding, and we were both excited for something that had nothing to do with death.

Then she was found dead in her apartment.

After that, I was still grieving, but mostly I was pissed. At God, the universe, and everyone with a seemingly normal life.  I began to believe that every time something good happened to me, the universe took someone from me in return.

(Like I said – grief does strange things to the mind.)

Every time I started to think the worst was over, I kept ending up at another goddamn funeral.

It began to feel like a message:

Your life was never meant to be traditional, so stop planning like it will be. Get your ass out there and live it before YOUR funeral.

The Balkan Storm and I eloped and never looked back.  

Shortly after, I applied for a promotion at work I genuinely thought I’d get. I had fifteen years in, my degree, solid reviews, “nailed” the interview.

I didn’t get it.

It hurt more than I care to admit, but once I got over myself, I realized that I didn’t actually want that job. Just the change of it, because I definitely didn’t want another fifteen years doing a harder version of a job I was already dissatisfied with.

Call it fate or dumb luck, but a month later, an opportunity came up 500 miles away in Wisconsin.  

I knew almost nothing about it except that the culture was a bit different and the winters sounded like the stuff of nightmares.

We’d be leaving everyone we loved behind and starting over completely alone.

And I loved that idea. Was champing at the bit to get moving.

Me.

The same woman who’d once structured her life around avoiding the unknown and uncomfortable was now enthusiastically quitting her job, packing boxes, and buying a Cheesehead Hat.

We spent our first Christmas as a married couple in our home in Prospect with a tiny little tree balanced on top of our moving boxes. It felt right.

The next morning, we drove those 500 miles in separate vehicles.

And in the ever-evolving theme of ‘what could possibly go wrong?’, our little caravan entered Wisconsin in the throes of a Day After Tomorrow–level snowstorm complete with toppled-over semi-trucks along the way.

Roads were treacherous. I was quite literally white-knuckling my way to the hotel. After 40 years of Kentucky roads, I had NO experience with whatever this frozen bullshit was.

I didn’t even know if I was in a LANE most of the time.

In Chicago, the trailer got a flat, leaving my husband and daughter stranded on the side of the road for hours.

My daughter, I later learned, was gleefully making snow angels while I was at the hotel with my mother and stressed AF about what was going on.  

Because I am who I am, amidst all that frozen bullshit I started second-guessing my decisions.

Was this a bad omen? Was the universe saying get off your ass…but no, not like that?

Eventually, we were all safely reunited. But as far as introductions to new lives go, this one was:

The honeymoon’s over.  Welcome to your new life.  

That was nearly 12 years ago.

Wisconsin has been very good to us. We’ve made a life here. We’ve built careers, made memories, traveled, raised kids and even grandkids.

I can drive in the frozen bullshit.

But now, at the age of 51 (don’t do the math about the grandkids, it’s not what you think), I’m thinking of what I want next – because once again, it’s time for a change.

I already made a change nearly two years ago by dropping 65 pounds in a way that didn’t have anything to do with shots or surgery. In the process, I became someone who thrived on starting the day with a run outside. Someone who craves sunshine and the outdoors.

Which doesn’t really mesh with the long, bitter winters up here.

And every time we’ve traveled somewhere that made me realize more and more how much I’m NOT built for this place anymore, I resented going home.

Not home home - I love our home. I resented coming back to Wisconsin.

I began thinking about other, much warmer places that could serve as the logical next step, and I kept coming back to one simply because I’d been there over twenty years ago: California.

Which I realize is the practical equivalent to throwing darts at a map while blindfolded.

It’s beautiful, it’s warm, it’s expensive, it’s riddled with its own conflicts, but for whatever reason it still makes perfect sense to me.   

So much so that we just came back from not just a vacation but also a fact-finding mission named: could we actually live here?

Part of me thought (hoped) traveling there again would make me realize I’d put it on a pedestal and scratch my proverbial itch for change.

It didn’t.

It made it worse.

I came back feeling uneasy about how right California had felt, because it made absolutely no logical sense. But for the first time, The Balkan Storm and I began discussing in earnest what life there could look like in a few years, once we’re empty nesters again.

I told myself I’d be back either way.

Once I recovered from jet lag, I looked around our house, and suddenly everything felt stale and cluttered and definitely not us anymore.

From the time we built it, the house had been furnished for other people's needs: first as a rental, then as home base for two kids who needed a safe place.     

But now, I could finally start feathering this nest for how we wanted to live-  not just a few years from now, but right the heck now.

My husband shuffled into the kitchen for a second cup of coffee one morning to find me deep cleaning and rearranging everything.

“Got a wild hair up my butt,” I offered in explanation, cross-legged on the floor amidst piles of kitchen tools and serving dishes.

He’s so used to my weird vernacular that he just poured his coffee and left without a word.

From that point on, I started purging, from furniture to clutter to years-old texts I’d been hanging onto for no reason. Once I deleted them all, I realized that this had become soul-level cleaning. 

That’s when The Balkan Storm started seeing (and liking) the changes and understood the wild hair wasn’t really so much a wild hair in retrospect.

It was evolution.  

I say all of that to say that maybe California will happen exactly the way I’m imagining it, and maybe it won’t.

Right now there are still jobs and money and family and logistics and timing and about a zillion very real practical considerations between now and then.

But the point is, I know that California won’t fix my life for the simple reason that it doesn’t need fixing.

I have a great life right now. Wisconsin, despite its winters, has been very good to me, and our home has been good to all of us. The life we’ve created here is one I’m incredibly proud of.

But we’re approaching another stage of life, and what worked beautifully for this one doesn’t automatically mean it will work for the next, or even that it has to.

This is what I’ve learned about change: it doesn’t always mean something went wrong.

A good life changes for the simple fact that you change.

So indeed, I love my life – and that’s exactly why I keep changing it.

Heather Papovich is the voice behind Unfinished Business. She's seen some things. She'll tell you about them.