And so it begins...

The road leading us to Frankfurt has been long. It began in 2000, when my husband's employer told him he was being considered for a position at the corporate headquarters in Germany to start in a couple of years. It evolved over time to a definite move in the summer of 2003, but then the war in Iraq heated up and the German employees they asked to trade places w/us refused. Apparently, our location in the western suburbs of Chicago was too dangerous a place to bring their families. So, we were told it wasn't happening and, although we were disappointed, we got on with the business of raising our children and enriching our lives here.

So, when my husband told me in June, 2005 that he'd been offered a job in Germany, a specific position to start at the beginning of 2006, I was stunned. I thought we'd decided we wouldn't even consider a move again until our youngest was out of high school. Yet, here we were with our oldest just done with her freshman year of high school, our middle daughter finishing 6th grade and our youngest finishing 4th grade. Basically all they wanted from us at that point was a decision as to whether or not we'd consider moving for 3 years. My husband and I discussed it, we discussed it with our kids, and spent some time thinking over the possibilities. Since we weren't really committing ourselves at that point, we said yes, we'd consider it.

And the research began.

I bought all the books I could find on being an expat, moving your family overseas, living in Germany, understanding the German culture and how to help your kids adjust to such a huge change in their lives. I read them, my husband read them, we talked about them. There was a lot of information out there and it was a little overwhelming.

I search the internet relentlessly. I found websites on living in Germany, being an expat in general and in Germany specifically, and on moving children overseas. I spent countless hours clicking links to language courses, relocation consultants, expat connections, housing concerns, tourism bureaus, cultural treatises, and experts on the emotional impact of moving kids. It was incredibly exciting, but also incredibly frightening.

Was this the right thing to do for our family? Would our kids hate us forever, especially our oldest, for pulling them out of their schools and away from their friends? While I believe strongly that travel is essential to creating a full and enriched life, was it necessary to actually live abroad to raise well-rounded, intelligent children who were understanding and sympathetic to the ways of the world? Maybe.

I searched international schools near the company headquarters in Weinheim. There's not much, I have to say. There's an international school in Heidelberg, but they couldn't accomodate all three of our girls, because they didn't have high school classes yet. There's the department of Defense schools in Heidelberg for military dependents, but that would only be an option on a space-available basis, since my husband isn't in the military. I didn't like the uncertainty of that. So, I kept looking and found two viable options - in Frankfurt.

Our daughters have always been in the gifted and honors classes in their schools. My husband and I both went to an Ivy League university and have many teachers on both sides of our family. Education is highly valued in our family and we stress academics with our girls. They have bright, inquiring minds, and truly enjoy school. Our oldest already hopes to attend an East Coast Ivy League university when she graduates from high school, not something many of her classmates here in the mid-west necessarily consider. Not that there aren't many students bright enough for the Ivies in her class, but it seems to us that people in this area just don't go East very much. Not for vacations and not for college.

So, anyway, it was important to us that we found a school that would be academically challenging for our girls and prepare them well for admittance in top notch American universities. While both of the schools we found seemed to fit that bill, one offered American AP courses, which made sense to me. Whether she took an AP class in Illinois or in Germany, her score on the AP exam would mean the same to Cornell when it came time to apply to college. There wouldn't be a chance for her fitness as an applicant to get lost in translation. Apples to apples, so to speak. So, although we would reserve our final decision until after seeing the schools, we agreed that this school seemed to be a good option.

So, if they kids were going to school in Frankfurt and my husband was working near Mannheim, where would we live? I tried to research housing options in the Frankfurt area, but not speaking German made this a half-hearted effort at best. I asked that the company consider hiring a relocation consultant for us, to help make this transition easier and fill in the gaps of information for us. I looked for expat connections and it seemed that we'd have no trouble finding other Americans and English-speakers in the Frankfurt area.

I felt strongly that it was important for my kids to be able to live near their schools, so they could participate in activities and be reasonably close to friends they might make. I wanted to live in an area where other expats live, so that they could walk outside and hear others speaking English and so that I could meet other English-speaking women. Everything I read said it would be important to the girls and to me to have some familiarity around us in the dizzying new world of living in Germany.

After all the reading and research, discussion and dialog, we felt good with our decision and awaited further information from the company. We planned for my husband to move at Christmas time, but for me to stay in Illinois with the girls until the end of the 2005-2006 school year, planning to move there in the summer. My husband discussed the move with his boss in the US in addition to the executives in Germany, getting as much information as he could and letting them know how we felt about the opportunity.

So then, the wait began.

I'm not good with waiting, I'll admit. I became frustrated at the lack of information. We didn't hear anything for months at a time. We eventually learned that his start date was being pushed back until the spring or summer of 2006. This caused me to have flashbacks of all the times the proposed move in the summer of 2003 was delayed, pushed back, and eventually abandoned. I decided to put the whole thing on a shelf labeled "possibility" instead of "probability." I went about the business of my life, leading Girl Scout troops, driving car pool and raising my girls. I decided to get a part-time job, but the possibility of the move gave me justification not to look for a "real" job, something career-oriented.

I wanted to stay an at-home mom to my girls and only work part-time, while they were in school. And even though I'm a licensed attorney, I haven't practiced since my 15-year-old was about one. I'm not even licensed in Illinois and have no real desire to practice any time soon. I worked part-time as a paralegal in Chicago when the girls were little and it would have made sense to look for something similar, if I was serious about getting a job. But, with the possibility of a move in less than a year, I opted to take a low-paying, minimally-stressful job as a book merchandiser, just to have a small income and a social outlet.

Things remained quiet on the work front. The fall came and went with no news at all. We saw our families at Christmas, but couldn't give them any more information than we'd had for months. We planned to take the girls to see Germany over Spring break, but hadn't heard anything about it, even though February was rapidly coming to an end. So, my husband started asking what was up, had they changed their minds yet again. No, no, we were told, everything's still on. The whole thing was starting to make me nuts - didn't they realize what a huge undertaking this would be for us? Couldn't we get some definite answers and start making some plans?

Finally, by the beginning of March, we were told to go ahead and find a flight for Spring Break and that they'd hired a relocation consultant, who began planning our trip and organizing information for the move. After all the months of waiting, this struck me as a serious commitment by the company - the move was really going to happen, if we agreed. All that really remained was for us to see the schools, see what kind of housing would be available to us in the area, what Chris's job and commute would be like. It was up to us to make up our minds after this fact-finding trip - did we want to take the job or not?

It meant fresh tears for my oldest, lots of excited supposition by my middle daughter, and butterflies in my stomach. I think my youngest mostly thought of the chance to travel somewhere new and exciting for Spring Break. A chance to buy gummi bears and trinkets to bring home for their friends, like we do every time we travel. But the trip turned into so much more...