The Miles Between Me. Toni Nealie
Hemisphere summer, balmy Auckland, my job and an office view of the Waitemata “sparkling waters.” I thought there was no way—no way—that I would move if he got an offer.
A remote chance, really.
We didn’t write a pro and cons list, negotiate, or think of scenarios in the future. It happened in a shimmer, between me working as a public relations executive, organizing a dump truck-themed second birthday party for my younger boy, and taking my older boy to swimming lessons and rugby practice. Sometimes life seems to happen around you, and like looking into a wobbly mirror, you can’t be sure of what you see.
GETTING SUCKED INTO my husband’s orbit was a possibility that worried me. He made television shows and films, music videos and plays, played the guitar and read five books a week. I advised clients in a media and communications agency and wrote magazine features on the side. He drove our youngest child to daycare. I led the older son’s “walking bus” to elementary school. At seven o’clock, we’d careen back into our bungalow to share the routine of dinner-bath-bed.
Our blooming existed partly because I was not financially dependent on my husband. New Zealand is, or was then, a social democracy with taxpayer-funded support for mothers and babies, subsidized early childhood education, and generous vacation and sick leave, which enabled me to work and have children with relative ease. Work gave me an intellectual high—a friction of deadlines, ideas, and power. It also provided a six-figure salary.
My mother was a single parent. The loss of her husband and the death of her parents when she was a child made my mother poor. Being without, and the accompanying lack of freedom and opportunity, made me nervous. Like Virginia Woolf, I thought about “the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and the insecurity of the other.”
On the counsel of a financial advisor, I had opened multiple bank accounts, saved for a house, set up investments, bought a house, and paid the mortgage as fast as possible. I’d gone to university and built my career to avoid dependence. In agreeing to move to a new country, I assumed my career would continue. Changing our carefully balanced arrangement made me uncertain, but I thought we’d adapt. Times had changed since Woolf wrote of the patriarchy and the dominance of the professor: “His was the money and the power and the influence.” Hadn’t they?
We took a risk when we got together, trusting our instincts that it was right even though we’d just left other relationships, working against our friends’ six-month-wait rule before leaping afresh. In our first year, we moved in together, had a son, married, and bought a house—in that order. The first lawnmower and barbecue arrived when my husband turned forty. Life was settling down for us: we’d just “done” our bathroom and kitchen. Our firstborn was settled in school. Our second son had progressed from the Babies’ Cottage to the Big House at daycare. I’d been promoted to director at work. The circus of career, family, and friends was holding together.
A bit more time to revel in the feeling of life-doesn’t-get-better-than-this would have been great—so I told my boss, just days before my husband was offered his new job. Work and family had begun to feel less like a reckless teeter-totter and more like a tentatively balanced tightrope act, quivering somewhat, but balanced. Such simple pleasures were not to be taken for granted. Perversely, we were compelled to kick start the momentum.
MY SENSE OF adventure overrode any qualms in the five months since our first trip to Chicago. Bone-eating cold—forgotten. We had both traveled and worked around the world, but not often together and not with our kids in tow. He had worked extensively in America, but New York and L.A. were the only cities I had visited. (My television cop show-informed view of the country was deficient, I knew.) I was not really a stand-by-your-man kind of woman, ready to drop my own job and friends in a flash, but I was proud of my husband’s win. The whirl caught me. “Risk! Risk anything!” wrote my countrywoman Katherine Mansfield. “Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.” How can we know what is hard until we are in the pain of it? And once there, how do we confront the truth?
A FEW MONTHS later I cleared my desk, left my office, and cried at going away parties. My colleagues gave me a Barbie doll outfit, a recipe for apple pie, a poem, and a parody of The Addams Family theme song:
She is a real lady, with hair so sleek and shiny
A dazzler for us every day, that’s Toni Nealie
A wonderful wife and colleague, a mother and good friend indeed
We all do truly love her, that’s Toni Nealie
DIVIDING OUR HOUSEHOLD belongings between a dumpster and cardboard packing boxes, we culled our possessions as we ran one room ahead of the professional packers. Husband’s vinyl collection? Dumpster. (We did not know that years later my husband would purchase a vintage record player and spend years re-creating his vinyl collection in our Chicago basement.)
Bed our youngest child was born in? Pack.
Memorabilia from travels: Nepali prayer wheel, South African bottle cap sculpture of a camera operator, jacket embroidered with cowry shells and Pacific motifs? Dumpster.
A hundred boxes of novels and art books? A hundred thousand tiny pirates, soldiers, dinosaurs, stacking blocks, farmyard animals, and Legos? Pacifica paintings? A green plastic salad spinner, albums of photos featuring my children’s first steps and first hospital trips, the blue glass fruit bowl Nic and Verity gave us for our wedding, my mother’s old pewter vase engraved with a couple kissing before a windmill, vintage bone-handled silverware, Italian plates purchased on vacation? Electrical appliances? We didn’t stop to realize that they would not work on American voltage. We hauled out the banal and the cherished alike. Pack. Pack. Pack.
The plastic corseted torso I wore as Dolly Parton to a fancy dress party? (I don’t recall saying “pack,” but it crossed the Pacific in a shipping container.)
Mosaic pot with a heart pattern that a friend made for our wedding? That we chose to store with a friend, for the time being, until our return from this “sabbatical.” My husband had secured a three-year contract. We would return. I knew that.
THEN, OUR FAMILY flew over the oceans, crossing the Tropic of Capricorn, the Equator, the Tropic of Cancer, the South Pacific, the North Pacific, continental America. We sped over the International Date Line and through seven time zones. In flight, there is no regard for the logic of hours, but I would soon discover the tyranny of clock-watching when desperately wanting to talk to my mother, waiting until three in the afternoon for her to wake up seventeen hours ahead of me. Twenty-four hours after departure, a white limo whisked us to Oak Park, Illinois—then got lost. It seemed that we had fallen into the mean streets of a television drama. The night was inky: no moon or stars visible, no lamplight penetrating the thick canopy of trees along the Des Plaines River Road from O’Hare Airport.
Poring over a map, my husband directed the driver. I peered nervously into the dark, searching for gunmen hiding behind the oaks. The driver ignored a detour, driving through a mile of roadwork on Lake Street. She woke the kids, crashing into a road barrier and taking out several traffic cones. We arrived in front of our temporary apartment tower, the orange cones still jammed under the limo’s bumper. Where in hell were we?
Oak Park, just across Chicago’s city limits, had the fine prairie homes of Frank Lloyd Wright, Victorian Painted Ladies, elm and oak-lined avenues, and the wide, grassy sidewalks that Ernest Hemingway wrote about with disdain. No nukes, no guns, gays welcome, diversity celebrated—or so we read on the Chamber of Commerce website. Two days later, we headed into the city to explore the Field Museum. Outside the Roosevelt El station was a police stakeout. Helicopters. Roadblocks. A real hostage scenario. This was no television cop drama. We had arrived in America.
All too soon, my husband and second-grader vanished into the secrets of their important work and school days, where they formed fresh relationships and learned new routines. The small human and I were left to get to know our new home. I spent hours staring at shelves of Tide and Purex, o.b. tampons, and Edy’s ice cream, searching for a familiar name.
This