Why I’m moving to St. Louis

A dozen years ago, if you’d have suggested that one day I’d live in Missouri, I would have laughed at you. But then I met a girl.

We dated, moved in together, and eventually got married. That was over ten years ago.

Over the years we’d talk occasionally about the possibility of moving to Missouri one day. Indeed, before we ever moved in together, Velma stated two preconditions to any long-term relationship: I had to be open to having kids one day (which I was — the operative phrase being “one day”), and I had to be open to the idea of moving to Missouri one day (which I was — the operative phrases being “open to the idea” and “one day”).

Honestly, I never thought Velma would want to leave California. She’d chosen to stay here, after all. She’d chosen to work in a field conserving California’s natural resources and open spaces, its parks and wildlife and habitat and living beauty. She’d put down roots, become part of communities, made friends, joined groups, started groups! Everything signaled that she wanted to stay, including the words I’d heard one day a few years ago when she returned to CA from a vacation in MO. It had been a slightly family-dramatic time, and when I picked her up at the airport and gave her a big hug, she said with a big exhale, “Thank god I’m home!”

I didn’t realize that she’d done all of those things to get by, to stay sane. But the reason she was staying in California was because I was here. She was making the best of her circumstances, going about her life here, but she was still here because I was. Otherwise she’d have most likely returned to her home state to be near her dad and grandparents and extended family, enjoying the warm summer nights and rainstorms she grew up with.

And then we had a boy.

Ollie’s Grandpa Dave is by far the most important relationship beyond mom and dad. Grandpa comes out to California several times a year, staying for 2–3 weeks at a time, and Ollie literally counts down the days until he arrives.

When we visit Missouri, Ollie can’t wait to get to Grandpa and Granny’s house, where he is practically in charge and every day is like summer camp where the counselor pays special attention just to you. He gets to play with his cousins, swim in the creek, play with the cat and dog, and practically lives in an epic treehouse they built 2 years ago.

My wife is the most important adult in my life, and that boy is the most important person to the two of us. And they both want to be closer to grandpa.

I didn’t grow up with grandparents close by. In fact I had no family close by other than mom and dad, the cousins and aunts and uncles and grands were all thousands of miles away, and even when I’d see them for a couple weeks in the summer, they might as well still have been thousands of miles away. I got the impression my one living grandfather really didn’t like me all that much, and while my two grandmothers were always loving and nice, I simply didn’t see them more than once a year, briefly. We weren’t what you’d call a close family.

When I met Velma one of the first things she told me was that she couldn’t wait to be a grandma. “Don’t you mean mother?” I pondered. But she had been wanting to be a grandma for years, partly because she had been so close with her grandma. Grandparents get to do all the fun stuff with kids, without all the parental drudgery of discipline and dentists appointments.

Velma idealized this relationship with her grandparents, and reality or not, it was a far sight more ideal than my relationship had been with mine. But it was hard for me to comprehend its importance to her—I struggled to grok this other person’s love of her grandparents, compared to such a lack in my own experience.

When we had Oliver, it began to become clear to me how important this relationship can be. It took time to understand, and I sorrowfully accept I’ll truly never understand it the same deep way Oliver will when he’s older, but I can at least observe the powerful love and attachment he shares with Grandpa Dave.

I want him to have what I did not.

I’m more fortunate than many people because I can make a move like this. I can work for myself and I can work almost anywhere, and while I admit there will be many, many hard things about this move for me personally, with time and analysis I couldn’t claim that there were enough reasons in Column A to prevent it, when “Make Your Family More Happy” is right there at the top of Column B.

After all, once I fully understood how over California Velma was, and I realized she’d been here for over 10 years because of me, I had to admit to myself it’s only fair that I give Missouri a try for awhile.

My eyes are wet as I write some of this. I don’t want to leave. I love my friends and colleagues and I love the places I grew up in and near. I’ve lived in the Bay Area basically all my life and I still haven’t come close to seeing and experiencing everything I want to. I’ll miss the family I’ve adopted and who’ve adopted me, the familiar sights, smells, and the fresh, cool ocean air. I’ll miss mountains and beaches and San Francisco fog and Cicero’s Pizza. I’ll miss that last one so much.

But I’m not the first to leave. I won’t be the last.

I was already a traitor for leaving San Francisco almost 8 years ago, but despite how much I miss it, there were good reasons to leave there too.

My friend Aaron scoffs at ever leaving San Francisco. I can barely get him to visit Oakland, let alone joining the many who’ve fled SF’s ridiculous rents and foggy weather, crossing the Bay Bridge for good to enjoy the daily sunshine and temperatures averaging ten degrees warmer.

Yet there’s a whole discussion on Quora debating the pros and cons of living in SF or leaving for good.

This won’t be easy.

I’m leaving a blue state for a red state. Fortunately St. Louis itself is a blue dot in that red state, but outside the city it’s a vast land of Fox News watchers. I’ll miss being proud of the politics of where I live, even if that only happened once in my life, when I moved to San Francisco. I choose to look at MO politics as an opportunity for progress.

Racial inequity is very real in St. Louis, and Ferguson ignited because there are decades of social duress to overcome. I don’t know yet what that will mean for my family, but I know there’s progress to be made, and I hope we can be a tiny part of that.

For a long time I didn’t want my kid growing up in a place where he’d be exposed to provincialism, racism, and anti-intellectualism. Then I realized that all exists here in the “enlightened” Bay Area too, and it’s truly elitist and ignorant of me to ignore that there’s culture, enlightenment, and energy in St. Louis too, even if that’s to a different extent than the Bay Area.

Despite what we think, here in our bubble of Bay Area exceptionalism, there are other great places to live and work. And raise a family. The “flyover states” (don’t tell me you’ve never thought of them that way — I have too) have much more to offer than most of us realize. In fact, we have no idea.

I had no idea, until I started looking.

Things I’ll miss

• All my friends. Even the ones I rarely see. Because at least in the Bay Area I have a chance of running into them. In St. Louis the odds are pretty much like the Cubs winning the series…again.
• Redwoods.
• The natural air conditioning of the Pacific Ocean.
• The beach.
• Cicero’s Pizza. Seriously, this is the best pizza on the planet.
• Being close to, and part of, the center of human technical innovation so impactful it has the power to improve the lives of nearly every person on the planet.
• Being able to drive down a street pretty much anywhere in the Bay Area and tell a story related to it.

Things I won’t miss

• The smells (and sights) in every below-ground BART station.
• The traffic.
• Seriously, the traffic. It’s so gorram bad. This cannot be overstated.
• Ridiculously impractical housing prices.

My dearest, closest California friends. You know who you are. You’re my family, my chosen family. You’re the ones I know I can count on if tragedy ever strikes and I need you. I hope you know how powerfully loyal I am to you, despite the fact that my leaving the state looks exactly like the opposite. I just need to be there for my family in the meantime, because they need me more than you do. I’m so sorry that it seems like I’m abandoning you.

This is not farewell forever. We still have Faceworld.

The inevitable FAQs

When are you leaving?

By the time you read this, we’ll already be gone.

Is this forever?

Who knows. Maybe I’ll hate it. Maybe I’ll retire there. I honestly don’t know. Maybe I’ll be over it after the first humid summer and flee for Canada. Maybe after Ollie’s older and we’re empty-nesters, Velma and I will move again.

Will you still visit CA?

Of course! Until the water wars begin, I’m pretty sure they’ll let me back across the border. Plus, I can’t stay away from Cicero’s Pizza for a full year.

Seriously, we love many things about CA, and we’ll probably end up vacationing here.

Will you still work with CA companies?

The sort of work I do and how I do it has always been more important than where the company is. Before ever joining the tech world, I freelanced for over a decade, working with businesses and organizations based all over the world. And that was before teleconferencing was easy and affordable!

Can we visit you in MO?

Absolutely! Let’s be honest, you probably won’t. But if you ever find yourself heading our way, we’d love to see you, even if you’re just flying through. We’ll always have room for our friends.

What’s so great about St. Louis anyway?

I’ll go into that more in my next post, “Why I’m moving my business to St. Louis”, but the Midwest is not the cultural wasteland we Coasters tend to believe. St. Louis is quite a cosmopolitan city with elite universities and even a small—but growing—tech scene.