Why I'm Leaving the U.S.: The Prequel

I've Never Met a Lease I Didn't Want to Break

The choice to leave one’s country and become a nomad in mid-life can begin way before your feet touch foreign soil. This is the prequel to why I’m choosing to leave the U.S.

The Child of an Immigrant

Me and my mama, back when I was an innocent young one, a mere 29 years old.

I’ve never felt like I’ve belonged anywhere. The closest to belonging, to feeling home, I’ve ever experienced had been when I was near my mom. But my mom was an immigrant who herself never felt like she belonged. My nervous system, sense of self, home, place, was imprinted on her dislocation, her discomfort, her outsider status.

She had contempt for many aspects of the United States and a constant longing and mourning for her homeland on the other side of the world. Her melancholy I could never have named but always felt, like a hymn playing quietly in the background of her life.

She was not from here. This was not her land. So I supposed, in my young brain, it was not mine either, though it was the only land I ever knew.

When she died in 2011, the loose tether of belonging I felt in this world suddenly evaporated. Like a balloon whose string had been cut, I floated away in my grief. I now belonged nowhere.

Death and Rebirth

At the time of my mom’s death I was 34, living in Austin, TX, and already deep into my nomadic inclinations, having never lived anywhere for more than a year, often breaking leases because, dear landlord, you’re not the boss of me and if I can’t sit still you can’t make me.

I’d bounced around from New Jersey, where I grew up and where my mom had lived, to and from college in Maryland, to Europe for a summer backpacking trip, to San Francisco on a whim, to New York City, to back home with mom, to various locations in and around NYC, to Florida and back, and then to Austin, Texas.

I drifted away on the winds of failed relationships or toward the siren songs of wherever you go, there you are…going to be different than you ever were before! (No really, this time I was sure of it.)

I had only been living in Austin five months when my mom got sick and died four weeks later. I didn’t have many connections there yet. I was alone and extremely sick with a relapse of my chronic illness, stress and grief being ideal inflammatory conditions for such things.

I also had a five-year-old daughter and was a single mom, having already recreated history by marrying and divorcing a man who was just like my father—the one thing I swore I’d never do.

With the help of a Prozac parachute, I came back to life a few months later, enough to re-evaluate my life, make the choice to transition from my career as a wedding photographer to a couples therapist, and enroll in graduate school.

Sitting Still in Sebastopol

Me and my mini-me at The Met a few months ago. Resemblance much?

During this time in Austin, I had a recurring dream that I was at JFK airport in New York and I had to get to Sebastopol, CA, a tiny town in Sonoma County, in Northern California, that I’d never heard of until an acquaintance of mine had recently moved there.

A few months later I sold my furniture, packed up my car with whatever would fit, and hit the road, heading west with my daughter, then eight, and our cat, Mr. Baker (RIP).

I’d never even been to Sebastopol and had no reason to go, but my gut (and my dreams) said yes, and Austin, TX was apparently just a place where people’s moms die.

I stayed put in Sebastopol for 11 years so I could raise my daughter with some stability. So she could build lasting friendships and I could give her a sense of home that I never felt.

It worked. She loves that place. It is her home.

Seb (as the locals call it) is a geographically beautiful town, though very homogenous (think white, middle-class California hippies and farmers who didn’t get the memo that it’s not 1969 anymore).

But I never felt like I belonged there either.

I’m a Jewish East Coaster. Not a lot of jews there, and I talk too fast and make too many jokes and am too direct for most of them. (“Are you from New York?” they’d ask me within a few minutes of chatting. And “Are you Jewish?” I would imagine they may have thought too, but didn’t say, looking at my wild Jewfro and my definitely-not-born-and-raised-in-Seb nose.)

If you’ve ever seen Gilmore Girls, Sebastopol is a lot like Stars Hollow, the outside-time small town on the show. And my daughter and I are just like the Gilmore Girls, except we’re the Gordon Girls: We look alike, talk alike, tell each other (almost) everything, and talk about our lives like they’re episodes from the show (“Hey mom, remember the one where we moved to California because you had a dream about it?”).

Boomeranging Back to NYC

Photo taken by my bestie of 35 years on our first Thanksgiving together in Brooklyn in a couple decades. That’s my shirt my daughter’s wearing. She’s always stealing my clothes!

My daughter got into her first choice for college in New York, but she didn’t want to move across the country without me. I already worked remotely full-time and had no compelling enough reason to stay in Sebastopol—even after 11 years, several relationships, and a pandemic—which felt both sad and liberating at the same time.

As Cheryl Strayed wrote in Wild, after the loss of her mom and her husband, there are moments when she was confronted by how absolutely loose she was in the world. How completely untethered. This was one such moment for me, which, depending on how I looked at it, felt like either freedom or terror.

Regardless, I’d been holding my nomadic tendencies at bay for years, so it was an obvious yes for me to relocate with my kid. The idea was I’d move nearby for a year and help her (and myself) with the transition. And then, once that year was through, I’d begin my empty-nest dream of the nomad life (and that was the plan even before the election! Though it’s taken on just a tad bit more urgency since then).

My best friend of 35 years lived nearby in Brooklyn and after being away from New York for 14 years, it felt like a blessing to have the opportunity to live local to her and her family.

On the Road Again…

ChatGPT made this for me. Notice the map my daughter is supposedly holding in this image. Why does ChatGPT think AI would exist in the same world where we still use paper maps? Hmmm…

So again, my daughter and I sold all our furniture, Marie Kondo’d like nobody’s business (I like to travel light), packed up everything we could fit in my little Subaru, shipped a few boxes of books I couldn’t part with, and hit the road, for a five-day, “80-West and drive” cross-country trip to New York and our new lives.

But what felt like open road would soon turn into one of the hardest transitions I’ve ever experienced.

Check out Why I’m Leaving the US to find out what happens next!