In pursuit of life: Why I moved my entire family to Ireland in just 2 months

By Caroline Knox, Culdaff, Co. Donegal

The setting of my story is all too relatable.

My husband and I were in our early thirties living in the Big City with two babies (1.5 year old girl and 6 month old boy), two dogs, no assets and a helluva lot of bills. Every week was wrapped up with us counting our money and making a list of priorities for the upcoming week:

Daycare had to be paid every Monday ($568). My subway pass and his car’s gasoline were non-negotiable if we wanted to keep our jobs ($100). Food, diapers and formula were, of course, must-haves ($200). But did my husband really need a new pair of work boots? Surely he could make do with holes in the soles for another month. Should I pay for electricity or heat – which would we need most that week? Did we have to feed the dogs real dog food or could they live off our scraps for a few days? Should we lie to our friends yet again about why we couldn’t go to some special event in their lives? The questions (and, inevitably, their sad answers) were never-ending.

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Did my husband really need a new pair of work boots? Surely he could make do with holes in the soles for another month.

When we were first married, we dreamed of holidays in Maine and Ireland with our families and planned sightseeing road trips across the US. He mapped out his future contracting business while I set my sights on leadership positions in higher ed. We had good jobs and we were going to work hard so naturally we would be rewarded with vacations, nice clothes, two cars, some kids and a house. It was the American dream, after all! A bit of elbow grease was all we needed.

Once our daughter arrived (and all the wonderful, dirty, fun and expensive things that come with new babies), we started seeing that two full-time working parents (with good jobs and health insurance!) can’t have it all. How could we afford to travel and keep her fed? How were we supposed to buy a house for over $300K (the norm in our neighborhood) when we didn’t have $300 for the cell phone bill? It was like I was always trying to answer an impossible riddle: if we both had well-paying jobs, why were we constantly having to choose between survival or happiness? We could either keep everyone fed and clothed, or we could visit my family in Maine and buy a new pair of work boots, but we couldn’t do both. My husband and I would crunch the numbers constantly, but we could never find an answer in which the quality of life was factored in.

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If we both had well-paying jobs, why were constantly having to choose between survival or happiness?

Four days after our son was born, my husband was raced to a nearby hospital with a heart rate of 28 beats per minute. He’d been complaining about heart issues all week, but I’d selfishly brushed them off because I needed him. I needed him to go to work all week (including Saturday) so that we could pay bills the following week. I needed him to “buck up” and help me with the kids as the c-section prevented me from doing any heavy lifting (figuratively and literally). I needed him to be my entire support system as my parents lived 5 hours north, and you don’t ask your work colleagues to come to your house and help you pee! I needed him to promise me that he was just as excited about this new baby as I was (even if we didn’t know how we could afford him).

When I first saw Paul lying in that hospital bed with his temporary pace maker threaded through his neck, I realized I needed even more from him. I needed him to sleep next to me (and snore so loudly – oh my god, you have no idea!) for the next fifty years. I needed him to laugh and make others laugh. I needed to hold his callous-covered hands every day and continue to be surprised by their tenderness. I needed to see him reap the benefits of all his hard work. I needed him to travel and love and rest and swim and sing in the car with our crazy, funny kids.

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That’s when I finally saw my mistake: You can’t get there from here.

That’s when I finally saw my mistake of thinking that if we just worked a bit harder, a bit longer, we would get to where we needed to be. I saw that I had been lying to myself and to my husband in thinking that we would be able to spend time with our kids and each other and maybe a kayak or two when the weather was nice if we just worked a bit more. We were working our asses off, but no matter what, we weren’t going to get to Easy Street any time soon. As we say in Maine, you can’t get there from here.

Luckily (and I don’t say that lightly), Paul recovered. We eventually found out that he had heart block caused by Lyme Disease and, once treatment was over, he was as good as new. But we were still broke. We still had an extremely limited network of friends and family. We still had insurmountable bills. And now we had two kids who needed our time (and money). This wasn’t the life we had envisioned, and finally I decided: this was not the life we were going to have! In just two months, we made a plan to move to Paul’s hometown in Ireland, and we pulled the plug.

Since moving about a year and a half ago, many people have asked me how we were able to just pack up and leave. You want to know how? We. Just. Did. It. Some people thought we were being rash or ungrateful by leaving our jobs; others thought we were somehow doing our children a disservice by moving them from the Big City to a rural county in Ireland; and still more believed we were reckless fools who weren’t doing the right thing: Work harder. Just work harder, damnit. As hard as it was for me to dismiss the critics, it was even harder to see how much my babies hated their overpriced daycare or how my husband struggled to get through the day. If I was going to work harder, I was going to work harder at being a great mom and an awesome companion. Damnit.

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Many people have asked me how we were able to just pack up and leave. We. Just. Did. It.

We arrived in County Donegal without jobs or daycare, without a house or a car. It was scary, but it was exhilarating to know that we had successfully hit the reset button. It was like being eighteen again with the whole world ahead of me – except this time, I knew what I wanted. And, sure enough, things fell into place rather quickly. We both found jobs that value work/life balance; we got our kids enrolled in a Montessori daycare (that charges less a month than we were paying a week!); and we found a place to rent in Paul’s hometown where our network of helpful friends and family continues to grow. And you know what? We’re happy. We’re actually happy.

Life is more than what others expect from you. Life is more than working and paying bills. Life is more than struggling until the day you die. It took me a few years to see it, but the answer was there all the time: Life is about being happy. And I’m looking forward to spending the rest of mine teaching my kids that very simple truth.

Bio Caroline Knox is an American communications strategist originally from Maine. She lives in Culdaff, Co. Donegal with her husband, their kids and their two Wheaten Terriers.

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