Things just got real

Last Friday early morning I took my wife Sheryl to the airport so that she could begin her long journey back to Taiwan. That marked the start of what should be a challenging, and I hope rewarding, year here on Prince Edward Island. For all practical purposes I am now an unemployed single parent of two kids.

We’ve been planning this move for years now; saving money, taking on new responsibilities, and making time for experiences that we had procrastinated on. But as my early morning inspiration Jocko Willink has said, the best laid plans don’t survive contact with the enemy, so in the end in order to make this plan a reality, one of us had to stay behind working (we made the move realizing that I likely would never work in a job in Prince Edward Island like I had in Taiwan or China). I could have gone back to China, but there are few jobs as stable as my wife’s, so she volunteered.

We have experience living apart from my year in China, but I was home frequently, just a 90 minute flight away, so this will be very different. We won’t see her but twice this coming year.

So far, other than some boredom on the kids part, something I hope will disappear when school starts, everything seems to be going fine. They are experiencing some culture shock and some communication issues, as am I. It will be a good chance for them to learn some independence, something lacking in their lives in Taiwan, and I can be assured that they will survive, if not thrive, no matter how many mistakes I make.


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