So, after our wonderful holiday to France in August, we are pondering a serious question….

Should we sell up and move to France?

There are a wide range of reasons why we might want to do that, and just as many reasons why we shouldn’t, so I am attempting to unpick them and explore them all as carefully as I can. I’ve been talking to a wide range of friends and family to try and understand lots of different perspectives and get a sense of whether or not it would be the right thing for us.

Do we just want to move there because we had a glorious holiday in the sunshine drinking wine by the pool and swimming in the lake and basking in late afternoon stunning views and dinners with friends and family? Undoubtedly yes, that is certainly a factor! Would we enjoy it as much when it’s cold and dark and boring? Possibly not – who knows? We are contemplating going back over the Christmas holidays to see if we like it as much in mid-winter….

There are so many things driving my desire for a change – the tantalizing possibility of being mortgage-free and radically increasing my take-home income has a strong and powerful appeal right now, especially as my mortgage rates have just increased, my gas and electricity bills have gone up by so much and food prices are still rising painfully. In spite of my best efforts to meal plan, and budget, and batch cook, and use coupons, and shop at cheaper supermarkets, and freeze meals, our food budget is way out of control and almost double what it was a year ago. We are staring down the barrel of a fairly grim winter and I’ve already blown the Christmas budget before I’ve even started thinking about present shopping.

So that is a really powerful motivator.

BUT… the likelihood is we wouldn’t sell up straight away – we would need time to settle in and understand where we want to live and find the right house for us, so in all likelihood we would rent our house out here and rent something there for the first couple of years, so we may not be better off in the short-term.

Could we save the same amount of money if we moved to a cheaper part of the UK instead of France? Of course we could, but most other parts of the UK hold less appeal for me personally, and choosing where to live long-term is a big decision to make.

Part of the desire to move for me personally is a sense of wanderlust – I have always loved to travel and immerse myself in new cultures and experiences overseas. I’ve felt keenly the lack of travel over the last few years after spending most of my 20’s and 30’s happily bouncing around the globe. I’ve always hoped that I could raise my kids overseas as expats the way I was raised, and used to dream of relocating to Senegal or Kenya with my kids one day. During the adoption process I mostly put those dreams away in a drawer as it seemed unlikely that my daughters might cope with such a dramatic move, and certainly wouldn’t cope with moving around long-term (eg a 1-year posting in Fiji, a year in Uganda etc wouldn’t work for us).

And it’s possible they wouldn’t cope with a move to France either – certainly the langauge barrier will be an issue for the first year or two, but then culturally it is much closer to us than Africa or Asia so might be a smaller jump. And if we moved it would be with a view that this would be long-term for 10 or more years so they could still settle and acclimatise properly. I suspect they would struggle just as much with a move to another part of the UK, (langauge barrier aside) so any kind of move carries the same level of risk in terms of them settling and adjusting to new schools, making new friends, etc.

Should my desire to travel and experience new things drive this decision? Not solely, but it’s certainly a factor. My friends have differing views on this. One friend said to me that I need to examine what is driving this need to move and to travel – is it running away from something? What scares me about staying here in one place forever? Do I think life will be better somewhere else, and if so, why? These are all valid questions that need to be picked over!

Another friend said “I can see how much you clearly want to do this, so you should do it! The kids will be fine wherever you are, you’re a great mum but if you’re not happy here then you should just do it and go – make yourself happy and the kids will be happy too.”

There are benefits to France for the girls – being bilingual is a huge asset and something I wish I had for myself. The school system in France is good, and university is free there, plus the girls at 18 could apply for dual citizenship and have french passports, all of which gives them more options and opens doors for their lives in the future (especially as EU citizens once more!). The healthcare system is pretty good and while we would need to pay contributory insurance it’s not overly expensive and covers a range of services we wouldn’t have access to in the UK (braces/orthodontistry, laser eye surgery and so on).

From a work perspective I now work fully from home and my job is portable. I can do my job from anywhere and my employer would be able to re-contract me from France so I would be effectively employed in France, and can pay taxes there etc. The downside is there are very few other career options available to me in France (though I hope my language skills would improve) but it means I would be limiting my options to this one employer for many years to come. I happen to like my job and it’s flexibility so it’s not a major issue but I also don’t always get on with my manager and some colleagues so has both pros and cons. And if I were to be made redundant in future it could be problematic. But then so could staying here and being unemployed… Given that we live in one of the most unaffordable cities in the country and can barely afford to live here WITH my salary, unemployment would be catastrophic either way.

It’s a big change from a city to a small village in rural France. Less so for me as I grew up in small villages in the countryside, and I’ve never really been a city person so it’s probably more appealing to me. For A it wouldn’t matter much as I doubt she will remember much about where she has lived so far, but for S it may be more limiting. Right now she can do football and activities after school, cycle around on her bike, or get the bus into town with her friends to shop. In a rural context there would be less to do, and while I would actively try to find activities for her to engage with, there would certainly be more chauffering in my future!

The schools are a draw for me – S is currently in a large urban school with regular incidents of violence. Kids bringing knives to school, beating each other up in the park, I feel that there would be a lot less of this in a rural village school in France. Obviously there would still be smoking behid the bike sheds, or drinking/drugs, or underage sex happening – these things still managed to happen in the villages I grew up in so I’m quite sure they still abound. But I suspect a school where S is one child in 36 rather than one in 300 in her year group might provide a calmer and quieter environment overall.

And while the French school system is certainly fine academically, they appear to have less capacity for special educational needs and pastoral care – which might be particularly needed while the girls adjust to the langauge.

Diversity and Racism are also in the debate – it was a deciding factor when I chose not to move to a rural area nearby 2 years ago. While we won’t find this level of diversity in any rural spaces (in the UK or in France) I was pleasantly surprised to find that even in the smallest of villages in France we still saw people of colour, much more so than in rural Oxfordshire. Though again, they have a different flavour of racism there which we will need to engage with and learn about (in another langauge). Certainly it would be harder for me to pick up on smaller micro-aggressions as a non-fluent speaker….

But then again when I was making those decisions I only had 1 child and now I have 2, so things are by nature weighted differently. My children have different needs and both need to be considered this time around. And of course there’s the fact that where we currently live there have been stabbings and a murder in our local park, and we had a break-in to our home, and an angry mob at our door etc. More recently there has been a nasty bullying incident at school for S and threats of violence towards her, as well as another theft from our home, most likely by our neighbours Moving to a safer place is seriously appealing as I am less and less enthralled by this neighbourhood. Living here, as S enters her teenage years where she might fall in with the wrong crowd and get sucked into much scarier things, fills me with fear. But we can’t live in constant fear that our children MIGHT join a gang, or MIGHT become a drug dealer or MIGHT get stabbed or MIGHT get groomed by sexual predators. These things might be just as likely to occur in a rural village (though I somehow doubt it), and catastrophising about all the awful things that might happen is no way to make a major life decision.

Would we continue to have access to post-adoption support there? To psychotherapy and so on? Probably not, but then again I have found it such a struggle to access that support here it seems hardly worth weighing up in the grand scheme of things. I am unlikely to get the kind of support I want or need here anyway, and in theory once I am mortgage-free would be able to pay for this myself privately if needed. And I believe in this day and age more and more therapists are willing to work online and do remote sessions so I think it would be feasible to find an English therapist if we wanted one.

I am also weighing up the financial choices – renting out our house here for xxx amount, paying a mortgage AND rent over there, losing xx benefits or paying higher taxes are all in the equation.

And then of course there is the support system and the behaviour management… If S is settled here after 18 months, and trashing my fridge in a rage-fuelled tantrum, what would happen if she is moved to a totally new country where she doesn’t speak the language? It could be disastrous and totally unmanageable.

On the other hand, it could be disastrous and totally unmanageable here too – I can’t predict that part. Is part of me trying to run away because it is so hard to be here right now? Maybe. In terms of a support network, we would need to build a new one, but that is true wherever we move to. And I am increasingly realising we need to move somewhere, wherever that ends up being. And in reality, most of the time, it’s just me dealing with it, wherever we are. I call my friends and vent my frustrations but can still do that from France. My cousin lives there so in a crisis I would still have someone to call and ask for help if needed, and sometimes in small villages people are more willing to help each other out. If I built a strong network and put the work in with the neighbours it could be fine.

While S has had so many moves in her life and deserves stability, she also feels the urge to move and change just like I do. There is a big difference in moving WITH her family as opposed to moving on her own to another new house, new family, new everything. She has never moved with a family together, and it could help us to cement her feeling of us as a family unit. We are also still only 45mins from her foster carer so she still believes on some level she can just go back there, so moving away could help to reinforce the message that we are family fovever.

There is just SO MUCH to consider and weigh up on both sides of the line, and I am doing my best to talk it out with as many people as possible to try and hear as many different perspectives as I can to help me decide. Ultimately, whichever choice I make could end up being the wrong one, there are no crystal balls, but I feel after 2 years in this disaster house, and this shitty neighbourhood full of thieves and stabbings and so on, and throwing in the recent nasty stuff that S has experienced at school that staying here isn’t much of an option anymore. So if we have to move somewhere, why NOT France?

I will continue to noodle it all about as much as I can….