People imagine this stage as removal quotes and a date on the calendar. That part is real, and it turned out to be the easy half. The work that actually decided whether we would still be here happened years earlier, in an ordinary week, and there was nothing to show anybody while it was going on.
If you had come to our house in Scotland during the years we were preparing to leave, you would have found no sign of it.
There were two children, one very small and one still small, and days that were shaped entirely around them and around nothing else. Feeding, sleeping, the shopping, the running of a house, a week that repeated itself and absorbed almost everything either of us had. Nothing on the fridge. No date on anything. No folder anyone could have opened. If you had asked me directly whether we were moving to Portugal I would have said yes, and then I would have been unable to point at a single thing to support it.
I have thought about that a great deal since, because I have met a number of people standing in exactly that position, believing they are doing nothing. Almost none of them are.
The wrong word
I think the word planning is what causes the trouble. It suggests a concentrated stretch of arranging, quotes and forms and appointments, ending in a van on a driveway. That stretch does exist. Ours came eventually, and it was as brisk and unlovely as everyone says it is, and it took about six months.
But by the time it started, the outcome had already been decided. I have come to think of it as arranging rather than planning, because none of it was the thing that determined whether the move would hold. The thing that determined that had been going on for years, quietly, underneath an ordinary life, and it produced nothing visible for almost all of that time.
The years when nothing appeared to be happening were the years that decided it.
Nothing to show
I spent a long time inside that stage feeling I was standing still, and I think the reason is that it gives you nothing back.
Every other part of a move returns something. Packing produces boxes. Arriving produces a door and a key. The years before all of that produce no evidence at all, and nobody warns you what that does to a person. There is no progress to report when somebody asks. There is nothing to tick. You are doing the most consequential work of the entire move without a single indication that it is working, and the absence of evidence begins, slowly, to feel like the absence of movement.
It is not. But you should know in advance that you will be doing it unencouraged, because that is what makes people stop, rather than the difficulty.
You are doing the most consequential work of the entire move without a single indication that it is working.
The second door
For a long time I thought planning meant laying out the steps of a departure in the right order. I now think that is the second question and not the first. The first one is where in your life you currently have no choice. Where there is exactly one route through something and no second one. Where you would be a beggar, if the thing you are relying on failed to arrive on time.
We had already learned this the expensive way. We lived in Portugal once before, and that stay ended not because we chose to end it but because my right to be there was fragile, the situation moved around us, and there was no other door to walk through. So we went home. Nothing about it was dramatic. All of it was avoidable, and what it taught me is that the real work is not assembling a plan but building options underneath one, so that whichever way it goes you are choosing rather than hoping.
That is what the Scottish years were for. There was a route into Europe being built for our family the whole time, slowly and with long silences in it, and I did not undertake it because we had a date, because we did not have one. I did it because I understood, without being able to explain it properly at the time, that I did not want to arrive at the day of the move holding nothing. It was not a plan. It was a position.
The real work is not assembling a plan but building options underneath one, so that whichever way it goes you are choosing rather than hoping.
The year he wanted to go
A long wait does not stay outside the house, and this is the part I have not seen written down anywhere.
My husband reached a point, about a year before we finally went, where he was ready to leave everything exactly as it stood and go the following week. He was not being reckless. He had simply come to the end of what waiting he had in him, and I understood him entirely, and there was a real part of me that wanted the same thing.
I held us where we were. Not because I was calmer and not because I was more certain, but because I could see something from where I was standing that I do not think he could see from where he was standing, which is that a move made before the plan is finished carries the unfinished plan across the border with it. The house not yet sold. The paperwork still open. The loose ends that go on pulling. The tug backwards in a first year is stronger than anyone expects it to be, and every unfinished thing behind you is a rope.
So I would say plainly that if you can move cleanly rather than partially, wait until you can. And if you are the one holding the ground while the other one is ready to go, that is a normal shape for this stage. It is not a disagreement about the life.
Every unfinished thing behind you is a rope.
A Tuesday
Nothing announces the end of it.
Ours finished on an ordinary evening at the kitchen table, with the children in bed and the plates still where we had left them. We said out loud that we were going, and that we were starting tomorrow, and it took about a minute. Nobody made a speech. Nothing in the room looked any different afterwards. I went up not long after and I slept ordinarily, and in the morning it was still true, which is the only part of it that surprised me.
I have thought since that this is probably how most of them end. Years of something nobody can see, and then a Tuesday.