“So, how long do you think you’ll be living here for?” our friends and family members ask as we give them a tour of our current apartment. Since having children 11 years ago, we’ve moved eight times. They know we don’t stay in one spot very long.
Our nomadic lifestyle wasn’t planned, per se. My husband moved twice as a teenager, but we had what some would call stable childhoods. Perhaps our transient tendencies were born out of living in one place for so long. Maybe we were primed for an itinerant lifestyle, or maybe we just love to move.
Before having children, our moves were practical. Getting visas, finding jobs, and living near family were the logical reasons. Each move we’ve made was for different reasons, but the later moves were an expression of dissatisfaction with where we were. We longed for something different, even though we weren’t exactly sure what we desired so badly. We just knew that we didn’t want to stay put.
Shorts
After our first child was born in 2016, we moved out of our rented apartment in Calgary because we felt left behind. Our friends and coworkers were purchasing houses and as renters, our life felt inferior to their grown-up choices. Without much thought, we became homeowners, believing that homeownership would provide us with something we were missing, but instead, homeownership proved to be relentless maintenance and daily refurbishing tasks and financial sacrifice; it was not the right route for us. Homeownership made us feel trapped while it led to opposite feelings in our friends. “We love the stability,” they’d say. We wanted freedom.
