NY to FL

(Jaiden’s 1st day of 3rd grade picture in FL) ^^

“Sometimes our lives have to be completely shaken up, changed & rearranged to relocate us to the place we’re meant to be”

We really just woke up one day and said “let’s move to Florida!” I think there’s a point in everyone’s life where you just get tired of the same old routine.  Even if the routine is working for you, you still need a change.  I believe that’s what happened with Hommy and I.  We had a great apartment in Ridgewood, Queens, we both had super great jobs…we had everything we needed but it was always the same.  When everything is always the same and changes aren’t being made no matter how good things can be going we still tend to crave a change.  For us it was our surroundings.  We had a railroad apartment and yes it was snug but it was home, it was fully renovated so it wasn’t really an old crappy looking apartment, our rent was decent and the neighborhood was great as well.  The parking sucked but hey!, that’s a problem in all of NY.

I spoke to a friend who lived in Florida and of course I did as much research as I could to see if this move would even benefit us.  Everything after that just made sense to move, I visited my friend for 3 days where I got to fill out an application for the apartments where she was living.  I’m huge into “signs” so I told my husband “if we get approved then that’s a sign for us to move and if we don’t then that’s a sign for us to stay in NY.”  Sure enough we got approved! We were so happy! Nervous, but happy!  It was a chance to start new, to start over.  We had plans to buy a house and start a business and we were all for making that big change.  I didn’t tell my family until I actually had the keys to my new apartment.  My parents took it really bad, I didn’t get the reaction I wanted from them, you know the “oh wow great hope everything goes well and we will visit you as much as we can…” but then again their baby daughter was moving with their grandson to a different state so why would they say that? why would they be happy? But still we were determined to move and we did, I would say in less than 2 months from us getting the keys we were driving to Florida with a trailer in the back full of our stuff.

I’d like to say we left NY “cold turkey“.  We packed and we left. We left our families, our little apartment, our city….we left everything.  I literally cried almost the whole way to Florida.. the thought of leaving my parents and my siblings and my nieces and nephews really hit me while we were driving.  Although my family and I don’t always see eye to eye it still hurt to know that I was no longer 15 mins away from them.  Sometimes we tend to take advantage of certain things when we know they’ll always be there.  And it truly sucks when something like this has to happen in order for us to realize that.  But that’s part of life I guess.  The drive was extra long since we were pulling a trailer behind us and I remember us getting to the apartment at 3am.  We were dead tired! The apartment was empty, we had nothing.  I had Jaiden’s little twin mattress in the trailer and like 2 or 3 blankets and 1 pillow, and I remember that’s where we all slept on the floor in the new apartment. (I have a picture to prove it but Hommy wouldn’t let me post it haha)  Jaiden and I slept on the mattress and Hommy on the floor until the sun came up and we switched.

In the beginning it was ok, our minds were occupied with furnishing the apartment so we really didn’t have time to really think about how lonely we were about to become.  That all sunk in later… After we were settled in my anxiety attacks came back in full swing and I cried a lot.  My biggest concern was Jaiden.  I was worried about him starting a new school, I thought he wouldn’t transition well and his grades would go down but to my surprise he was fine. He made friends quickly and he was always outside playing with kids which is something he wasn’t able to do in NY.  Hommy was still working in both NY and FL so he left a couple of times to NY.  Since Jaiden was in school we couldn’t go with him and that’s when I really went crazy. I REALLY WENT CRAZY, I would call my mom screaming and crying to the point where they would offer me a plane ticket so that I could go back.  It wasn’t that I didn’t like where I was at it was just that I felt alone. I took everyone’s “aloneness” and attached it on to mine.  My dad was no longer able to pick me up and take me to get food, I couldn’t just drive to my mom’s house and have dinner…All these things that I was so used to were no longer available to me.  Everything in FL is far, it’s not like in NY where there’s a BODEGA (corner store) on every corner. We ended up taking trips to NY every chance we got.  In less than a year I would say we went to NY over 4 times and my husband maybe 6 times.  I eventually put my big girl panties on and decided that if we really wanted it to work for us in FL we would have to stop running to NY every chance we got.  We would have to stop comparing our FL life to our old NY life.  Our NY life no longer existed.  And that’s what we did.  And I must say that everything is going very well for us in FL.  I don’t know if we will ever have the urge to move back to NY or if we will ever move back but for now Florida is our home even though our hearts will always be in New York.