2020: An Update

Ok, so like usu­al I promised to write more and haven’t. Like every­one, 2020 has been a year. So, with that in mind, I want­ed to drop in for a quick update before I lost track of time yet again.

Let’s revis­it the Before Times briefly.:

I start­ed a new job in March! Yes, after being in the free­lance wilder­ness for the bet­ter part of two years, I land­ed a full-time role lead­ing full-stack social. I know it is gross to say things like “full stack” but there’s not real­ly a bet­ter way to describe what I do. It’s some­thing I’ve want­ed for a long time and being across organ­ic and paid makes a huge dif­fer­ence in how I approach the work.

Thus con­cludes the Before Times por­tion of this post.

I walked across the hall on March 12th to let my boss know I’d be leav­ing work that after­noon to dri­ve home. The kids were going to be home from school as every­thing got fig­ured out. I fig­ured it would be a few weeks. Boy, was I wrong!

Did I men­tion the new job meant we need­ed to get the house on the mar­ket? Did I men­tion that Michi­gan real estate effec­tive­ly closed and didn’t reopen until May? Are you famil­iar with mar­ket dynam­ics on metro Detroit in a down­turn? Let’s just say it was a wild sum­mer where we weren’t real­ly sure we were mov­ing until our things were loaded on the truck.

A quick note on Detroit: we miss it. I am writ­ing an ode to the city and our friends there in a lat­er installment.

The boys? They’ve been hero­ic. Imag­ine your own kids (if you have some) and then remote school them, shut down their sports AND then move 600 miles from the only place they’ve real­ly known as home. It’s a work­out to say the very least. I’m insane­ly proud of them for being so brave, but it hurts.

Us adults? Well, it’s fun­ny to be back and not quite home. Mov­ing to Detroit was prob­a­bly the hard­est thing we’ve ever done; Char­lie was in kinder­garten, Archie was an infant, we had no sup­port net­work. Spend near­ly six years in a place with school-aged kids and every­thing changes. We unex­pect­ed­ly made dear friends quick­er than we imag­ined and now we’ve been cast back east in a pan­dem­ic. It makes the work days seem much longer.

It’s hard to rec­on­cile the very real life, adult aspects of a move that’s pro­fes­sion­al­ly right for both of us, but social­ly very dif­fi­cult. We’ll fig­ure it out, all of us, but it’s going to take some time. For now, we’re hap­py to have our health and jobs intact. Like every­one, we’re tak­ing it a day at a time.