My Mid-life Interrupted: How a family gap year abroad with her
husband and kids saved Megan's sanity
A curious thing began to happen in my hometown of Austin, Texas. It started the month before our family sabbatical in Costa Rica was due to begin. The birds. I'd be at work, where I was supposed to be listening intently to the stories of my therapy clients, but the louder voices would be those of the songbirds outside the office window.
Were they really getting louder, I wondered? How had I never noticed this before? It was distracting. It was delightful. It was a harbinger. It was my attention being pulled to some place just outside the familiar walls of my life. I had to know what was calling.
The birds were a nice break from the craziness of our final days in Austin, where I often wondered what the hell we were thinking six months ago when we sprouted the idea to take a family gap year abroad.
To reduce our belongings to six suitcases and four backpacks. To purposely grind the forward momentum of our family, personal and professional lives to a halt.
At a time when it made no sense at all to take a break, to stop. We have responsibilities. In our 40's, amazing eight-year-old twins and a dog. We have a 1,000 square foot house that we have owned for 10 years and outgrew (by North American standards) 8 years ago in a lovely neighborhood.
My husband and I are both psychotherapists who spent the past decade building a successful private practice. And yet, despite our desire to live an uncomplicated, wholesome family life, the song of our last decade had been “more, more, more, better, better, better, faster, faster, faster.” Now I find that I can't dance to that song anymore. I just can't.
So, we decide to step away for a year, to see how our comfortable life looks in the rear-view mirror, to give our children an experience of cultures, languages, and foods outside of the comfortable bubble that they know. We decide to take a family gap year abroad!
We commit to open up to what is unknown, unexplored, and unscripted in the life of our family and ourselves. Me? What do I want out of this? I want to gain some insight into some unsettled feelings growing louder inside of me over the past year that I struggle to understand or tame.
Maybe it began when I fell down the stairs. That was over a year ago. That's when the chronic neck and shoulder pain began that failed to respond to my interventions. I began saying, "This life is not sustainable,” without really knowing what that meant.
My body told the story of this life not being sustainable, but I didn’t know how to respond skillfully. I tried to power through. I tried to keep up. I talked with friends. I tried to pretend. I tried to numb the discomfort, to manage the stress. I tried to cleanse.
I went to doctors, therapists, and healing experts who offered me temporary feelings of hope and well-intentioned remedies. They were all lifeboats that worked for a while, but they all had leaks.
I began to feel like a fraud at work, aware that I had no solution to the problems that plagued both my clients and myself. I had lots of empathy, but I felt useless as an emotional sherpa, navigating the terrain of modern-day life.
- We aren't meant to receive information about all things going on in the world at all moments through a news feed that never sleeps.
- My iPhone gets more eye contact than my husband or kids
- I feel constantly in motion, yet disconnected--from myself, from others, from life’s purpose.
- I am burdened by our stuff.
- I need more space, more quiet, more stillness.
- I don’t have time to think anymore.
- I am overstimulated--socially and emotionally.
- I am ultra-connected to everyone and everything, yet I've never felt more alone.
I was too lost in it myself. I was genuinely puzzled and surprised that I wasn't fired much more often by my clients. To date, the only plausible explanation I have for this is the power of empathy and feeling understood, rather than "helped."
Planning a Family Gap Year Abroad
The planning of our family sabbatical began with my husband and I taking a weekend away. From within the quiet warmth of a cabin in the Texas Hill Country, we began writing out our vision and values for the year. The mission was fairly simple. We wanted more slow time. We wanted to live in closer alignment with our Buddhist spiritual values. We wanted more time in nature. We wanted rest and play. We wanted to practice our Spanish. We wanted to engage what was different, uncomfortable, and foreign in other cultures with open and curious minds. We wanted to be with our children more and relearn from them how to face the world together with fresh eyes, creativity, and wonder.
Sounds nice, but how does one actually stop the music of her busy middle-aged life and leave as a family? Are we just running away from reality? Shirking our responsibilities? I quietly wondered: Is it really fair to take my kids along for the ride of my mid-life crisis roller coaster? These were the questions and fears that accompanied our planning about how to step away for a year and to see how our comfortable life looked in the rearview mirror.
Letting Go, Purging & Experiencing Release
We leased our home in Austin for the year, sold many of our belongings, subleased one therapy office and let another one go, planned for the time away with our clients, searched for our home base abroad and decided on the small town of Atenas, Costa Rica. We sold and saved and planned for financial worst-case scenarios. We exchanged plans to buy a bigger house in our hip Austin neighborhood for a year of travel in countries with a lower cost of living.
The experience of purging our belongings was both cathartic and the true beginning of our adventure in my mind. It was surprisingly fun for our family to reverse gears: to shift from a long-term state of accumulation to one of release. My body registered the newfound freedom and lightness with a loosening of the areas of chronic holding and tension.
We predicted and worried that our kids would cling to their belongings and suffer over letting them go, as they did every spring cleaning past. We were wrong. In an epic garage sale/giveaway that lasted 12 hours, our children happily sold and gave away their toys. They saved a few items to bring on our journey–some prized stuffed animals, a box of legos, and some art supplies. Not once have my kids mentioned even one of the hundreds of toys that they released almost a year ago. And I struggle to recall the belongings that I most agonized over. This year, we have all experienced an explosion of creative energy, and I believe it is directly connected to letting go of our stuff.
We were fortunate that our friends and family were very supportive of our decision to travel abroad and many even came to visit! As we were planning to leave, the most common refrain I heard from others was how they would love to do something similar but it just felt impossible. It’s true. There are so many moving parts—career, kids activities, schools, financial burdens, medical care, aging parents, and more—that make it legitimately hard to plan a family gap year abroad at this stage in life as a family. It really feels impossible when you are sitting in the center of your swirling life contemplating a change, but that is a feeling worth challenging.
Traveling with a family is different than traveling solo or without children. We move slower and cover less ground. We have a home base where the kids go to school and we maintain an online private therapy practice. It is true that we have recreated another family dance in a different place, but the rhythm suits us well and our daily life aligns with the values that we reclaimed.
I begin to transform my therapy practice from one with walls to one with wings...
As for travel, we have been able to leverage the different school calendar in Costa Rica to enable slow travel during school vacations. We have embraced last-minute flexible travel adventures in ways that previously seemed impossible and the price of a plane ticket often determines our next destination. We spent the month of December traveling through Thailand and Cambodia, which was the trip of a lifetime for all of us. In January, we lived in Mexico, visiting various cities and spending time with extended family. During another school break, we spent an amazing ten days in Nicaragua, which we wished could have been longer. And we have enjoyed shorter exploratory trips all over Costa Rica from our jumping-off point of Atenas.
Now I know what those songbirds outside my office had to offer. I have been a therapist for almost twenty years now, but like a beginner, I am mainly in touch with all that I do not know about the messiness of being human. I return and rebuild, humbled, clear, still uprooted, yet mysteriously grounded once again.
AND now I begin to transform my therapy practice from one with walls to one with wings.
Hi! I'm Megan...
I am a psychotherapist, clinical supervisor, and clinical consultant with 20 years of therapy experience, helping people improve their relationships and create emotional wellness. I work with adult individuals and couples.
My clinical approach is compassionate and direct with a single-minded focus on helping you take meaningful steps to achieve change.
https://www.meganbarneszesati.com/
