What makes you decide to make a big life change?

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23. Belief in the hope that things could be better.

My husband and I have acted on that belief three times in the 29 years we've been married.

The first time was 1988 and we had a two year old child. We were living in Santa Monica--
second marriage for us both (no kids prior marriages) and decided we didn't want to raise
kids in Los Angeles. I had been in L.A. since 1969 when coming to UCLA as an undergraduate
(and continuing as a grad student until '75), then working in hospital administration. My husband
had been in L.A. since 1964 when coming to UCLA for Med School--gone for 2 years in USAF to Sacramento
when he was Berry planned during Vietnam--and returned to finish his residency in psychiatry
and stayed on to practice in L.A. area. So we both had a lot of roots in L.A. and many, many friends.

In 1988 he was offered a position with a hospital system in St. Joseph, MO to direct the building
of a new psych facility. Small town, 80+ thousand people, an hour outside Kansas City. What a
time warp! Yes, there were some progressives in town, but not many! Things turned sour within
a year, and the hospital system withdrew from its plan to build the psych facility and terminated
his contract. We had bought and renovated a big house; he had built his own small office building
in an office park. By then we also had another son. We decided to stick it out--with him in 100%
private practice for the first time in his
professional career (he had always had some portion of his clinical work either at a teaching hospital, the VA,
or public clinic). That went fine until about 4 years later the hospital system that had hired him (largest employer
in town) cut him off from their preferred provider list--meaning no hospital employee could see him for treatment
and have their insurance cover the visits--because he had gotten together with some of the other docs in town
to try to create an HMO independent of the system. Hospital employees constituted about 2/3 of his practice.
We were screwed. Really screwed. So, determined to move, we decided to take a look at some other options.
We went to New Zealand and checked that out. We considered Chapel Hill. We ended up moving to Lincoln, NE in 1994
where he was hired by the VA and able to support making a move and gradually reduce his VA time and build a private
practice.

For me, it was frying pan into the fire time. I hated Lincoln. Yes, it was bigger (about 250,000), but populated
by some really right wing Catholics who basically run the town. When we arrived, Mike Johanns was just about to
be re-elected Mayor. He went on to be Governor, Bushie boy's Sec'y of Agriculture, and now senior Senator from Nebraska.
Not many people know Johanns started his political career as a Democrat and became a Republican before running for Mayor.
His shift matches the swing to the right of the State of Nebraska.

Eventually, hubby retired from the VA in Lincoln and became full time private practice. In 2000, after the private, non-Catholic
hospital (where hubby had his office in a medical building next door) acquired the county hospital, the medical staff made it
a requirement that in order to have an office in the next door medical office building, you had to agree to take call at the
newly acquired county hospital. Well, that was too much for hubby. He was then almost 60 and not willing to take 24 hour call to cover a public ER on a weekend for psych cases. So, we made plans to construct a small stand alone office on the property
of our residence. The city gave us a permit, we hired a contractor, and knocked down a playhouse that had been built by the
previous owners to make room for his one person office (no employees). Total uproar! The next door neighbors (old family) got together with the neighbors on the other side(old family), and the neighbors next to them, and hired the attorney neighbor--also old family (ironically enough, his wife was from New Zealand) on the other side of the long driveway access that ran behind our lots, to file a law suit to prevent us from doing what the city had told us we could do. Long story short, they prevailed (frontier justice) in spite of having no legal basis to stop us. I had convinced my husband that if we lost, we would move to Chapel Hill (which is where I wanted to come when we moved to Lincoln), so within a week after the court decision came down we had the house listed. We made a fast look see trip to Chapel Hill, and I returned a month later for a house buying trip, and by the end of the summer we had moved. When we drove out of Nebraska I flipped the You're leaving Nebraska sign the bird and swore I would never return.

It just goes to show you that you can make what you think is an informed decision about change and turn out to be very, very wrong. And then you can make another informed decision and be very, very happy with the result.

I have LOVED Chapel Hill and said so many times on DU. However, with the takeover of the NC State government by Republicans
in 2012/2104 elections, I am very worried that even the liberal oasis of Chapel Hill is going to be negatively affected by their policies. We're already seeing it in the number of vacant teaching positions in the Chapel Hill/Carrboro City School District. When we moved here in 2000, the CHCCS District had been named as one of the top 10 public school systems in the country! Now, they are struggling, along with all the other school districts, to fill teaching jobs because of the lousy support for public schools from the Republicans. There is no doubt in my mind they are out to destroy public schools in North Carolina. Don't even get me started on all the other stuff they've done. (See Moral Monday actions for a complete list of what we're fighting.)

So, even when you DO finally find a place that feels like home, the dynamics can change to the point that you wonder just where
you can go--and whether it's worth it--to move again, especially at age 72 and 63.