You can move to Barcelona

This is my favorite story in all the world, though I have never read it. I was told it was too complicated to pick up and move to another country at my age (47) and with children. Packing a bag and heading off to Europe was for college students taking a semester abroad or retirees with a decent nest egg, free of the things expected of responsible adults who are trying to advance a career and/or parent young kids.

Turns out, you can do it anyway.

You can break your lease in a sunny, rent-stabilized apartment in a nice neighborhood in Brooklyn and pull your kids from two excellent NYC public schools that you worked very hard to get them into. You can get rid of most of what you own and pack up the rest.

If you want to move to another country, find a way to do it.

For my husband and me, the reasons to leave the U.S. for Spain far outnumbered the reasons not to, and the obstacles that would discourage most people were surmountable when we realized we could tackle them one by one. The possibility of “failure,” whatever that might be (I’m still not sure), somehow seemed much less scary to me than staying in the same place.

For more than a decade, we fought against the rip tide of New York City life that sends so many adrift. It was a struggle, one that wasn’t producing much success. My husband and I had been treading water for several years, making ends meet, but we didn’t have much room to enjoy life outside the daily grind. Moving to another country wouldn’t be without its challenges, but the idea that our income would go much farther somewhere else and we would be exposed to lots of new and interesting experiences enticed me.

Until the COVID pandemic hit, I had played it pretty safe in my choices of career and places to live, and stayed relatively close to my parents and sister. By the time I started researching our destination, Barcelona, in 2021, I imagined the adventures the four of us would have, and I became hooked on the possible next chapter in our story. I wanted to know what happened next.

Paper model of La Sagrada Familia in the window of Tiffany on Passeig de Gràcia, Barcelona