Photo by: CarbonNYC

Mama and the Hometown Blues: Raising Kids Where You Never Thought You'd Live

Photo by: CarbonNYC

When I was a little girl growing up in St. Louis, I always pictured myself raising my kids…well, in St. Louis. Where else? I come from multiple generations of St. Louisans, and people in my family rarely move away from home. I envisioned my kids being able to do all the fun things that both I and my parents loved as kids…visiting the St. Louis Zoo with their cousins, cheering on the Cardinals at Busch Stadium, and enjoying Friday night pizza at our favorite local dive.

Even when I graduated from college and moved across the country to be a TV news reporter, I still wholeheartedly believed that when it came time to raise my chicks, this mother hen would find her way back “home.” And I did. For a while I was living the good life with a husband and two kids in suburban St. Louis, not to mention two sets of grandparents (a.k.a. instant babysitters) within ten minutes of our house. Then, life threw us a curve ball. <truncate)

A year ago, my husband’s job relocated us from Missouri to Massachusetts. We had never even been to New England before our first house-hunting trip to Boston. While we fell in love with the beauty and the history of this place, the move has come as quite a culture shock. Primarily…I’m not raising my kids in St. Louis anymore. And it’s hard!
If you have ever moved to a different part of the country (or the world), then I’m sure you know what I mean. There is just a big difference between raising children in a place that you can drive around with your eyes closed, and raising them in a place where you need a GPS to make your way to Target. As a parent, you feel like you’re operating with a bit of a handicap. I no longer have the advantage of living within my comfort zone. I don’t inherently know where all the best parks and shops and doctors are. I don’t understand the weather patterns. At school functions and town events, I always feel like the “outsider.” And while I never say anything about it, I often wonder if my kids can sense that I’m off my game.

They, on the other hand, seem to be fitting right in. My daughter is six and my son just turned three. They started their new schools last fall and immediately felt like they belonged. Kids are very adaptable that way. And while I think that’s great, it freaks me out at the same time. I didn’t picture myself raising children who used adjectives like “wicked” or called a drinking fountain a “bubblah.” My son still doesn’t pronounce the letter “r” – and I am beginning to wonder if it is a speech impediment, or if it’s just because we live in Boston. I cringe when I picture a teenaged Kellen saying, “Mom, I’m going to take the cah (car) up to the ballpahk (ballpark) latah (later).”
That’s when I sometimes want to click my heels together three times like Dorothy and chant, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home…”

Then it hits me. For my kids, Boston IS home. They don’t have the emotional ties to St. Louis that my husband and I have. To them, Missouri will be just a nice place to visit every once in a while. And it doesn’t matter what memories I wanted to make with them there…because their childhood memories are being created here. Instead of trips to the zoo, they will cherish their visits to ride the Swan Boats in Boston Public Garden. Instead of cheering for the Cardinals, they will root for the Red Sox at Fenway (don’t tell my family…some of them are still a little sore about a certain World Series smack down). And when my children make that now familiar roundtrip flight between Boston and St. Louis, it will be Boston Harbor that makes their hearts skip a beat the same way mine does when I see the Gateway Arch standing proudly over the Mississippi River.

In many ways, my kids’ experiences will actually be much richer than mine were growing up in the Midwest. There, I read about history. Here, it is all around us. The house next door was built in 1730, and homes just down the road date back to the 1630s! There, I was lucky to visit the ocean once every few years. Here, beautiful beaches are just ten minutes away. There, weekend road trips were limited to a handful of exciting places: Chicago, Memphis, Kansas City. Here, all of New England and even New York City are ours to explore on any given weekend.

No, it’s not easy raising your kids away from “home”… especially when it’s not the life you expected. But I’m learning. And who knows? Maybe the family experiences that feel so foreign to me now will become the ones that are legendary rites of passage for my great-grandkids. Even I can admit that would be wicked supah (super).

Kate Hayes is a professional writer, former news anchor, and aspiring children’s book author who blogs (for fun) about her family’s ongoing adventures at Adventures in Parenting. She can also be found on Twitter as @Bostonblogmom.

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