I have struggled from the very beginning with what the focus of Portable Parents Blog should be and what sort of content/stories I should write about and what I shouldn’t include on the website. I had not really thought of writing a blog until it was recommended to me by a friend, I thought I might build a static website that included travel information and such…but I did not really give any of this much consideration as we were planning our trip and making the dramatic changes in our lives.
For the most part I think the blog has remained a Travelogue of our family’s trip through Latin America. The stories and photos will bring a lot of pleasure to our friends and family for years and years as we remember this adventure. I am quite sure that we will have other adventures as well that we will chronicle on the blog. I have on occasion published articles of other topics that interest me, but I never felt they really belonged on the blog although some of them I think gave insight into our decision making process both in regards to the actual trip as well as our decisions to change our lifestyle.
This is another one of those posts that I am not sure belongs on here but was conceived both from discussions Gina and I have had about our life plans, as well as from readers questions. I was originally planning to just write a few short comments answering the specific question we received but as I thought more about the answers the ideas I had grew and grew.
This kind of thing happens to me a lot really. To be honest, I have LOTS of stories I have written that I have never published because I don’t think they fit with “the theme” of Portable Parents but I enjoy the process of working through the answers and ideas we have and putting them in writing. The result is often a long diatribe about my philosophies, experiences, ideas, and values that might have started with Portable Parents…but has taken on a different life and meaning and so I don’t publish it here.
So, I don’t have any cool pictures and witty stories to share and I am fairly certain that this will be a long article, so if any of this bothers you please turn away now.
It all began with a simple question:
“Are You Moving Back To Portland?”
A little more than 12 years ago I stopped drinking! I had been a fairly heavy drinker for a number of years that started in High School, accelerated in the Marine Corps, and was refined in College until the point where I could be considered a professional. “I wouldn’t drink everyday” as drunks are prone to say, but just on weekends. That was true of me as well except for those times that it wasn’t true.
One such time was during a weekday Blazer game. Can’t remember who they played or if they won, but I do remember that you could sit courtside and a cute girl would bring you drinks and that instead of returning to your seats after halftime you could watch the game in the Blazer Bar. I can also remember the “pretty lights” behind me after the game…
I was given an option to take a Alcohol Diversion course instead of having this 1st offense appear on my record…sounded like the smart thing to do so over the course of the next 12 weeks I attended what amounted to an AA meeting each week. According to their statistics less than 5% of the people that take the diversion class actually stop drinking, I decided to be one of those 5%. So, I went cold turkey and stopped drinking after some 20+ years of fairly heavy social drinking primarily because I wanted to “break the chain” of abusive drinking in my family. Grant was born the year before and as I thought about my family’s history and Gina’s fathers history it was fairly easy to see patterns of alcohol abuse in both of them and I decided I did not want this for our kids. I wanted them to make their own decisions about alcohol when they were old enough…not have it “forced” upon them as children.
If you are still reading you might be wondering why I am telling this story, here is the thing, I began to notice a lot of changes in my life. Most of them positive for sure, but one of these changes was strange and quite subtle.
I began to lose my friends month after month.
It wasn’t that they couldn’t be found, it was that our friendship was based around alcohol and the activities associated with alcohol. After I stopped drinking I changed many of my habits and obviously did not hang out at McMenamin’s as much as I used to or have the focus of each holiday be how much booze we could drink.
I was a different person and the changes I had made in my life severed many of the ties and friendships that I had. There was no way to “go back” short of picking up a bottle again. Sure some of the friendships remained, and in fact, some of them actually grew stronger and healthier, but in total things were just not the same.
THERE IS A POINT TO ALL OF THIS…KEEP READING
So, the question was “Are you coming back to Portland?”
We were asked the question quite often when we were making plans to leave Portland, and since we let it be known that we are returning to the U.S. in September for a few months the question has surfaced again.
It is a fair question, and it is a question that Gina and I have wrestled with for the past year AND it has been a subject of frequent conversation during the past few months as we decided that it was time to leave South America for a while, recharge our batteries “back home” and see where the new year would lead us.
Oregon was home for Gina and I for the past 17 years and I guess amounted to having spent a considerable percentage of our lives there. We owned homes, began careers, finished educations, and started a family in Oregon and by these and any other measures we considered it home.
It is the ONLY home the kids have ever known, both of them were born just outside of downtown Portland and while they had traveled quite a bit before this trip both in the U.S. and outside of the country, Oregon was and still is their world.
The discussion for us started with a sort of Pro’s v.s. Con’s comparison of the reasons to return to Portland and the reasons not to return. These conversations were not very formal or scientific, just more of us weighing our options and figuring out how each of us thought about the possibilities.
I can’t remember the exact discussions or what we included for each side of equation, but it looked something like this:
PRO’S
- Home for past 17 years
- Beautiful part of the country
- Lots to see and do
- Low crime
- Lots of friends
CON’S
- 8 months of rain
- Cold and wet
- No house or stuff to go back to
- High cost of living
Just looking at the lists one might assume that the Pro’s outweighed the Con’s, but there is more to it than meets the eye. If we assigned different weights or levels of importance to each area the pendulum would begin to swing in the direction of the Con’s.
The weather is the first thing that comes to mind looking at these lists. I never really understood the whole “snowbird” thing…but I think I am starting to get it. Gina and I love the changing of seasons and the beauty of the Northwest but we have both grown tired of the wet and rain. I think individually we had some inkling of this while we were living in Oregon the past few years, but after spending a year in generally sunny climates we have both come to the same conclusion…we are tired of the rain.
These past couples of months in Argentina have really brought this home for us, we have been colder and wetter than we have for almost 2 years and we don’t like it! So, we confess that our advancing years are shedding some light on what draws snowbirds south for the winter and we are both of the mind that there is something to this.
The weather in itself was/is probably not enough to keep us from returning, but another critical factor was the high cost of living. Portland is comparable to many other large cities in the U.S., although housing continues to be well about the national average, but when compared to smaller towns away from the coasts Portland is very expensive. For example, Portland is 36% more expensive than Knoxville or 24% more expensive than Needville, Texas (we own a rental property in Needville). By everyone’s statistics housing and medical care in Portland ranks as some of the highest in the country AND these are two critical issues for our family if we choose to remain in the states.
So, the wet weather and high cost of living certainly influenced our decision…but I think there is a bigger reason that does not show up in either the Pro column or the Con column and it has to do with our decision to change our lifestyle.
What does this mean?
Well it means lots of things really, but for simplicity let’s look at two areas of our lives that we wanted to change:
High Cost, High Consumption Lifestyle – By mainstream standards we were living the American dream… big house, 3 cars, motorcycles, accepted to private schools, dinners at nice restaurants, expensive vacations and the list goes on. We were definitely not wanting for anything.
However, we arrived at a point in our lives where we stopped and questioned this lifestyle. We had to question how our consumption patterns were affecting our environment, the messages we were sending to our kids, and the ridiculously high costs needed to maintain all of this.
Fast paced, No Time Lifestyle – How we got to a point in our society that every waking minute must be filled with some activity still eludes me, but that is exactly what we have created. The adults are one thing…but we have done the same thing to our kids. School, homework, chores, music, sports, computer games, and off to bed to do it all again the next day!
I am serious when I say that I rarely saw my daughter Genevieve, except for the hour before she got ready for bed. Either she was involved in some activity or I was or her brother was that meant that I was. When you don’t have time for them AND they don’t have time for you…somebody please question this madness.
Now we are talking! Those to me are some big issues that should be considered when we evaluate where we want to live. So, the question might become “can we change these areas and still live in Portland?”
The answer to this question is probably yes…but here is the rub – I think the situation is very analogous to when I stopped drinking. We could move back, but it probably would not involve the same set of friends that we currently have/had.
Just as I changed when I chose to stop drinking and hanging out in bars, we have changed when we decided to sell everything we own and engage in voluntary simplicity. If we returned we would not be engaging in the same activities that we used to, both because of a lack of resources and because of our choice to remove many of these things from our lives. If we are not living in the same neighborhoods, visiting the same restaurants, participating in the same activities, driving the same cars, etc, etc, etc, it will not “be the same”!
Sure, some of our friends would remain. And I would guess that some friendships would greatly improve but I think that similar to the experiences we had when alcohol was removed from our lives these would be the minority when we removed ALL of these other things from our lives.
So, never say never…
BUT things are stacked up against moving back to Portland. In fact, at this point we have no plans to return to Portland and our focus is determining what we want to do with our lives next year. Instead of dwelling on the Portland question we are asking a different question…
Where can we find all of the things we are looking for?
Not really sure what we are looking for or what priorities are more important, that involves too much forward thought and planning something that we are unwilling to do at this point. We are still on a “journey of a lifetime” and are not going to spoil it worrying about nebulous answers to poorly thought out questions. We allow ourselves to dream and to ponder what life might look like…maybe to ask ourselves “if you could create any life you wanted, what would it be?” – but that is as deep as we get
Warmer weather, slower pace of life, walk instead of drive, affordable housing, strong arts and culture, good schools, strong sense of community, a place where you know your neighbors, closer to nature, low taxes all sound like pretty good criteria to me!
Sound a little too good to be true…maybe, but I can dream! And besides being called a Drunk and a Traveler…I have been called an Idealist as well.