There's a sort of conspiracy out there, I think, to present life-changingly important, huge things as boring so that people won't know about them and won't change their lives, and keep paying attention to things that are not life-changing and ultimately are fucking boring. (I may be in a minority of one here but a high-cost dramedy about Rupert Murdoch and his shitty kids is a weird thing to invest dozens of hours of your life into.) I say this with the proviso that I am doing life-changing things in three languages that are not my own so very likely I'm missing things that are obvious to the natives, until they come to me as a big surprise or revelation. Or I just keep missing them - I like the way we've chosen to live our lives but I do sometimes get chills thinking about all the shit that's just going straight over my head. All the unknowns, known and unknown. Fuck me, what am I fucking up right now that I have no idea I'm fucking up?
Anyhoo. That's all a long-winded way to say that this week we found out the finer points of local capital gains tax law, which is leading us to sell up here instead of rent out. There is obviously a depth of relief here that I can't even quantify, a fucking Lake Baikal abyss of relief, that we won't have to faff around with the cost and the worry and the risk of running a furnished rental from very far away, which in itself would be life-changing. But even more than that is the consciousness that when we sell, we are functionally done with this country, or at least this region. The few friends I made despite the handicap of the pandemic have all moved away from it. And our town - oh man, especially with the dressings of spring upon it, our town is beautiful - but, like the beautiful town we left behind in Oz, there's no compelling reason to come back to it. When we leave, when we sell, it's not a chapter in a book ending, it's the ending of a Part. (OMG. Part. Parting. I just got it.)
Now, that's weird enough for me. And the F-word had his first real professional, living-on-it success as an artist here so I guess it will be weird for him. And the Monkey King has a real sense of place here. But it's Godzilla my heart aches for. There's a certain irony in that, because the reason this move went from fantasy to reality as far as I'm concerned was him, and concern over how the rest of his childhood and education goes - a concern that his primary school teacher of four years shared. The F-word and I can't really pinpoint the moments our moves from Europe to Australia, and then from Australia back to Europe, were decided. But I can pinpoint the moment I decided we were moving away from here - during a parent-teacher conference when Godzilla's teacher told me he was too smart for the general stream, but that the academic stream would crush all his curiosity and intellectual initiative. To hear your own suspicions put into words like that by the person who was most in position to know. . . anyways. That's when the decision was made, as far as I was concerned.
All of that notwithstanding: Godzilla loves this place. He loves his school, he loves a couple of his friends, and beyond that, he's used to it here, and that's huge for a kid. He didn't bat an eyelash when we switched towns when he was younger, but now, we are separating him from his fabric, and he's sadder than he is excited about what's coming, and my heart just aches for him.
Something similar happened to me at his age - something my parents, I assume, thought about very carefully, in terms of it being for my sake. At least partly - one part of it was certainly not for my sake at all and they should have seen that; I suspect after so many years of kids, many of them stressful beyond my current and probably future comprehension, they were tired of weighing their decisions in terms of what was good for their kids. Decided to do something just for them. Well. Nearly 40 years later, I'm still angry about it, because it was a fucking blunder. It was a bad idea. Two bad ideas at once. There are children starving in the world right now, I'm conscious of my lifelong privilege, but at the same time it's not an exaggeration to say their decision blighted my childhood. Didn't do them much good either.
This decision started for me as an escape hatch for Godzilla from premature academic streaming but there's no doubt I'm super-pumped for it as a lifestyle change. It's for me, this move, absolutely. For us - the F-word is even more pumped than I am. And I'm nauseated when I think that we might be repeating my parents' blunder beat for beat. At the same time I'm confident it's the right decision, or at least the rightest decision available. And we have been and will keep scrambling to find ways to make it easier for him, which from memory my parents did not. But it's only him, looking back 40 years from now, who will know if it's a giant fucking childhood-blighting blunder or not.
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