We’ve big news in our little world; we’re on the move and will be migrating north to the Gold Coast!

Thanks to my very clever husband who has accepted an exciting job opportunity in the Sunshine State, it means we are in full blown moving mode and need to be setting up home in a new humble abode (address still unknown – minor detail!) in a mere month and a half… (related: send me strength to survive this crazy busy next 6 weeks!)

You may wonder why I’m so excited by the thought of uprooting my children from their comfort zones, or whether I’m a glutton for punishment for putting such stress into our lives in order to make this rapid relocation. Especially as we only settled into what we expected would be our long term home at the end of 2009…

It’s been a mostly solitary 4 years since we made the “semi sea-change” to the Central Coast. The tentacles of loneliness have lingered ever since we arrived. Sometimes they’ve latched on for dear life and threatened to smother me, other times I felt like I was able to shake them off and finally find my groove. But even though it took years until I found my feet and my “urban family” of some truly wonderful friends in this current city, it’s still never felt like “home”. Perhaps it’s my own fault. I was always fighting against my reality, always pouring energy into lamenting the fact The Husband wasn’t around more, worrying about how I would continue to cope now that there were 2 little people in my charge and crying on the endless days I did not. Yes, I would have been better sucking it up and making more of an effort to assimilate. But when one half of you still has a job in Sydney, it’s hard to integrate entirely. I’ve often felt like the single mother of 2 children living this life; so much so that at my son’s daycare I began to worry they thought I had a fictional husband as it took a long time for him to be able to make an appearance in that part of our life!

So, what will be different this time you may well ask? This time we will have each other – we will be a family who actually sees one another, not just for snippets of time, or not at all, some days of the week.

It’s the simple things that I cannot wait for: being able to have breakfast together again, being able to get back a quality of life that’s been missing (especially for the Husband – no more spending 15hrs plus a week simply getting to work and back again!), of being able to eat dinner together every single night and even manage to watch something together on TV!

Then there’s the big guns: no more feeling like I’m going to have to do it all on my own forever, of dreading each Tuesday when my hubby would leave the home about 5am and not be able to return til about midnight, of knowing he will no longer have to go days without getting to hold his baby girl, or look into the excitable blue eyes of his boy. I’ll no longer have to harden my heart just to get through the toughest days and no more feeling like we are ships in the night, merely existing on other sides of the riverbank. And blessedly, no more wallowing in the ugly emotion that is loneliness.

We’re going to get to be a team again, a family again, and for that I’ll undergo any stress this mammoth move will throw at me. The big picture in our life is again looking bright and I am bloody excited about that!