Anniversary

On the 29th of May 2023, after living in Florida for almost 22 years, I lifted my roots and moved to a tiny town in Mississippi. Population: in the 4-digit range. It does seem like an incongruous place for a Puerto Rican woman to end up in. My husband was raised here. His family is here. His mother is getting older and I am acutely sensitive to the ache of knowing how easily a loved one can suddenly be ripped away from our lives. I had reached a point where I disliked living in Florida, but the fear that my daughter would lose her grandmother and my husband his mom without squeezing joy to the fullest extent of her late years made the need to move close to her urgent. I lost my mother in 2012 to breast cancer. She was in her 50s. She decided not to tell anyone of the lump eating away at her until the cancer had spread and broken her body. I lived in Florida, and she lived on the island. Losing her, combined with the guilt and shame of not being with her full-time in the end was a cataclysmic event for me. It created a cascade of self-isolation and hatred that I feel even now, a dozen years later. The thought of my husband suffering this worried me often. He had lost his father a few months after my little one was born, and he lived close to us. I don't want him to go through what I did. Especially now that we have a child.

So we moved. I remember the last few months of our life in Florida fraught with stress and setbacks. A sign from the universe perhaps, that this was the right choice and that we as a family, desperately needed this reset. Here are some of the things we went through in the first half of 2023:

• My husband was laid off

• My little one had 3 seizures, the first one taking us to the ER, and the last one being on the 26th of May at home

• Starting therapy and masking so much that it ended up being fruitless

• My daughter's IEP didn't provide the accommodations she needed, prompting a lot of issues and unhappiness for everyone

• Insurance woes with being billed thousands of dollars for copays that were supposed to have been waived

• An evaluation for autism that didn't get me the diagnosis I needed

• My car broke down on the day we were to leave the state, which needed an expensive repair that was essential we'd get before our apartment lease was done

• The worry that my autistic daughter would have issues with the move, the changes, the new place

I don't write these to evoke pity but to provide the context of how things were in those final weeks. The sense of urgency felt acute. I remember feeling suffocated, raw, frazzled. Sleeping on a Japanese futon on the floor and explaining to my daughter why our things were gone. It was a nightmare, packing the final things that had to wait until the end. When the car was fixed, we drove up for a few hours and stayed overnight at a hotel. She liked it, which was a relief. I was still so stressed that my appetite was gone, and my heart felt tight and achy. The drive was a nightmare. We were exhausted from packing, the seizure, and the car breaking down. She had a meltdown which made me crazy with worry and in tears. What if the car's safety features didn't work? What if she broke loose from the car in her tantrum? She eventually calmed down and fell into a fitful sleep, waking up once every few hours and crying. I played ocean sounds to soothe her. We stopped at a rest stop for a break, so my husband could sleep and we could let her stretch. Florida lasted an eternity in those 18 hours. The night was always a sad time for me. I always thought the morning dark was of solitude, but the night is loneliness, stretching forever and threatening to swallow me whole. Frankly, I was relieved to see a hint of the sun rising in Alabama. The air started cooling. Alabama was a skip and a hop from MS and my town. I cannot describe the joy I felt when the sun fully rose and I noticed my surroundings. The quiet roads, what seemed to be a million trees. There was a sparse smattering of buildings intermittently dotting the road. Farmland. Picturesque hay bales. A cow grazing in the distance. I remember arriving at my mother-in-law's and hugging her, almost in tears. We had somehow done this thing. I stretched my legs briefly, before lugging out the bread machine and setting up my daughter's favorite bread. Every time I move the bread is the first thing I do for her. To make the place her home.

I needn't have worried back then. My husband was offered a place in the company again, my daughter is happy and supported in her school. People throw out endearments as casually as Puerto Ricans do. The town is more diverse than I dared to dream (this was another worry for me, to be a Latina in MS, due to my personal associations). I have a lovely kitchen, a yard, herbs growing in pots, and a closet for my art and craft supplies. Bookshelves full of books, and a kid who can run happy and free. Life is better. I might get despondent at times, but I feel that I'll get there. I really do have a lot to be grateful for.