[As the United States government continues to be dismantled, and very basic commitments to other nations and peoples are thrown in a barrel and lit on fire, and displays of vindictive cruelty toward the most vulnerable are cheered on with sickening gusto, I hear more and more reports of friends and acquaintances making preparations to leave the U.S. permanently.
For years now, my BAAW has been asking me, “What’s our plan if things go really south?”
Because I am basically simpleminded and basically cheerful, my response has been to smile and nod and make sounds that mean something like, “Jeez, kid. We’re not really going to get there.”
Well, we seem to be there, or close enough.
For our part, we go home in a couple of months. I’ll continue to write about MFA stuff the way I have been in hopes that it remains useful to you. Whether you are planning to leave the United States for good, or you are thinking about your own DIY sabbatical, or you are determined to dig down deeper where you are, I wish you courage, luck, and cheer.]
My BAAW has always been good about encouraging us to clean the house before we leave for a little family trip. You hate it at the time, you just want to get out the door and hit the road, but then ka-ching! You feel like a COMPLETE GENIUS when you get home and all the beds are made, the sink and the dishwasher are empty and all the dishes are put up, the floor is free of clutter and socks. What a lovely place! Who are these lovely people?
You do the small annoying things now so that you experience exponential gladness and relief when you get home.
Leaving for this trip was a little like that. Only much, much more complicated.
Back in December, I made “a partial list of our champagne problems: difficult decisions, leave of absence, passports, place to live, renters for our house, painting and packing, more decisions, getting rid of the endless crap, phones and bills, leases and mortgages, insurance and DMV, decision fatigue, cars and utilities, appliances and repairs, cleaning and cleaning, money and money and money and money….”
Your circumstances are of course your own, so you will have your own set of maybe-champagne-maybe-just-PBR problems to navigate if you’re going to put together a DIY sabbatical, but herewith, a few notes on some items that we had to consider and which you might as well….
Difficult decisions
All things money and job are of course super-hard to get squared away, but in some ways the hardest part is just figuring out where you’re going—and why?
My dad got a little sketched out at the possibility of us going to Mexico, given the widespread and horrifying and catastrophic cartel violence. As someone who spent more than a decade living and working across Central and South America, he was definitely qualified to give advice on this front, and he did, suggesting we at least consider a half-dozen other countries. Honestly, some of what he said had me kinda shook. (Thanks, Pop.)
But in the end, we stuck with Mexico. It’s beautiful here. It’s affordable. There’s a culture of public decency here that is so lovely to experience.12 Many parts of the country are quite safe.3 And we wanted to be close to the U.S. in case, for example, something happened to one of our aging parents and we need needed to return quickly.
And at the end of the day, my “raíces mexicanas” might be “antiguas,”4 but they are not nothing. I wanted the kids to have a real connection to the place we would be living. I especially wanted them—and myself—to come away with much better Spanish.
Point being, as a family, just getting to “OK, it’ll be Mexico for sure” was the work of, what, maybe a couple of years of talking, reading, dreaming?
And then the question of “OK but where in Mexico?” was its own saga. My BAAW def did the lion’s share of the work here: it was a lot of reading and thinking to try to find someplace that could be a good place to land for the entire family.
Maybe you can make decisions on a faster timeline—hell, maybe you don’t have a choice. We did have a choice, and we were slow about it. All that deliberation was worth it for us, but it took real effort to get there.
Leave of absence from work
I get emotional thinking about this one. My boss, with whom I’ve grown close over the years, is herself getting ready to retire. Years ago, I brought her the question of a sabbatical, and (after she finished laughing mercilessly and wiping tears from her eyes) in the end, she chose to postpone her own retirement.
OK it wasn’t ALL about me—I’m just not that important, and there were a number of other factors at play—but it was at least in part an act of profound generosity to me personally. She is holding my job for me, and put a million pieces in place to fill the gap, and was eternally gracious and warm and supportive about it all, in order to afford me this respite from 60- and 70-hour work weeks and allow me to come back to the work feeling refreshed and renewed. (Doesn’t that make you want to cry a little?)
I am uncommonly lucky in my colleagues. I work with the kindest and most generous people you could imagine—pretty sure I somehow landed in the top one percent of human beings to spend my working days with. But it was untold hours of meeting and planning to have everything set up for a peaceful handoff.
Passports
My BAAW called this early: If that SOB wins, there’s going to be a rush on passports.5
We were all either expired or in need of first-ever passports, so the goal was to get everyone taken care of very, very early, in one fell swoop, with plenty of time for slow processing at the federal level, or errors in the application, or glitches, or, say, the dismantling of the federal government. (Actually, didn’t see that one coming.)
It was a pain to pull together all the paperwork and kind of hurt to pay all the massive fees, but because I had *ahem* done a meticulous job of prepping everything, we went to the post office and, with the help of a truly lovely USPS worker, sailed through with flying colors.
The U.S. State Department page currently says routine processing takes four to six weeks. If you too have an expired passport or have never gotten a passport, take a page from the BAAW playbook and start gathering your documents now?
Place to live
My BAAW found us a place to rent on Facebook. The landlord doesn’t speak English, so an early test for me was to have a long call with him entirely in Spanish. I was hella stressed about it, and took a bunch of notes beforehand, e.g.,
How do you say “utilities”?
How do you say “wire transfer”?
How do you say “Just so you are aware, sir, a big part of this conversation, at least on my end, is me trying to verify that you are a real person and not a scam artist who cons people out of deposit money by posting phony houses on Facebook”?
Anyway, the conversation went well enough, and he was clearly a legit human being with a house to rent, so we waited to have the lease in hand and then went for it.
A note on that: People here seem to be pretty light on the formality of leases, but we asked for one, the landlord airmailed it to us, and it’s been very helpful to have in hand when we’ve needed to negotiate for repairs and things.
Renters for our house
This turned out to be just a complete gift.
My BAAW reached out to friends in academia and we got connected with a lovely little family from outside the U.S. who were going to be in town on a Fulbright for almost exactly the duration of our planned sabbatical: kismet!
They are super-sweet and kind, and having their rent payment cover the mortgage on our house has been not just helpful but essential.
Painting and packing and cleaning and fixing
We had lived in our house for more than ten years and we were overdue for a refresh. We wanted the people who would be in our house to have the nicest version of it we could offer them. And per the above, we also wanted to come back to a spruced-up place!
But my God this was exhausting. We started months and months ahead, and in retrospect, it was not early enough. After we had arrived in Mexico and were still newly here, we spent weeks saying, “Holy shit! All that work was worth it! We actually pulled this off!” And it was real-slash-heartbreaking when one of the kids said something like, “To be honest, I secretly thought we were never going to get here. I was just doing all the stuff because that’s what we were supposed to do, but I was convinced it wasn’t going to happen.”
Anyway, unless you are comfortable with having strangers living in your space RIGHT NOW, it’s worth thinking about what puzzle pieces would need to fall into place for you to be able to walk out the door. Start early.
Getting rid of the endless crap
In that vein, maybe you are one of those admirable psychopaths who ruthlessly throws out any possession that doesn’t, like, “spark joy”? Not us. And we try! My BAAW makes a point of trying hard to only bring objects into the house that are worth the trouble of possessing them, things that are not in fact total c-r-a-p. She pulls together a bag of donations weekly. But it turns out even this is not nearly enough.
Just to point the finger at myself: I had accumulated A LOT OF CRAP. Sorting all that crap took a long, long time. It was lonely. It was boring. It was… vaguely shameful?
I would like to be a new person on our return. I encourage you to learn from my mistakes: go find your most shameful piles of clutter and sort them TODAY!
Bills
We knew we had to be on point with money if we were going to forego a monthly paycheck for this whole time.
On the bill front, this turned out to be a very good occasion for doing a deep dive on all the little forgotten monthly and yearly charges that you put on a card and forget about. We had definitely gotten into that place where there were a bunch of goddamn subscriptions we didn’t want, didn’t need, weren’t using, and out of busyness and inattention, we were just forking over the dough on. It was another place that felt kinda shameful (“Are you effing serious? We still pay for that?!?!? And I’ve never just tracked them down and cancelled the damn subscription?”), but weirdly therapeutic/cleansing to have done.
Do it!
Cancel that shit!
Money and money and money and money
I have yet to map this out for paid subscribers, but I’ve gone on long enough for now.
More soon, but in the meantime suffice it to say that a little does indeed go a long way here, and that if we can pull this off, anyone can pull this off!
Start today!
You’ve got this!
In a way that a lot of estadounidenses could really take a page from, especially right now.
That’s not to say that in private, things are all good. (This is incredibly dark—beware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femicide_in_Mexico.)
I try to read the local paper every couple of days, and while folks tell me that the violence here in town goes underreported because it’s bad for business, the violence in towns and cities that are 30 and 60 and 90 minutes away is graphically reported on, and it’s some of the scariest shit I’ve ever seen in my life.
I get a lot of confused “So… are you from here?” kinds of questions, and this is my default answer.
I’m paraphrasing here, people. She’s too classy/attentive to language to actually call anyone an “SOB.” But I’m not!
Loving the deets! Inspiring!