Moving To Another Country. With Kids. And Cats.

This isn't going to be easy.

Picture me. In Newark Airport, at the TSA check. Shoeless and unbelted. Surrounded by a mob of restless travelers. My family and I are rebooting our lives and moving to Germany. It’s been in the works for a very long time, and now…the day has come. Our flight is in a couple of hours. Everything I own in the world is either:

1. inside a shipping container, at sea somewhere on the Atlantic, or

2. inside eight pieces of luggage, which have just been X-Rayed.

My wife and daughters have also just been X-Rayed. Or whatever that scanner machine does when you pass through TSA. They’re waiting for me on the other side. But I have a problem.

Two problems, actually.

from top to bottom: Lola and Pippa

Look, I love our cats. But a move of this scale—it’s overwhelming. Cats only add to this burden. They’re the opposite of service animals. They’re disservice animals.

We adopted them 13 years ago. They’d been rescued from the rough streets of the Lower East Side. At this stage in their lives, I wondered if they even wanted to start over in a whole new country, where they don’t speak the language and the European litter boxes are so much smaller.

Wouldn’t it make my life their life easier if we returned them to their ancestral home? An opportunity for them to enjoy their golden years in the city of their birth? And besides, the Lower East Side has gotten a lot nicer!

I floated this idea to my wife. She didn’t go for it.

And so now, on top of everything else—the kids, the luggage, the months of preparing to sell our house, posting our old stuff on Facebook Marketplace, getting ghosted by potential customers on Facebook Marketplace, the nine-hour flight ahead of us, and the empty house in a Bavarian village we barely know...on top of all that, we have to transport these two furry monsters across the ocean.

Each cat is contained inside her own little carrying case. I have one case in each hand. But the TSA won’t let me walk through the scanner machine this way. Apparently, our cats are potential terrorists. And so I will have to:

1. take the cats out of their carrying cases,

2. place the empty cases on the conveyer belt to be X-Rayed,

3. and walk through the scanner machine

4. while holding a cat in each arm

5. in the middle of one of the most chaotic places in the world

6. without my pants falling down

7. (because my belt is also a potential terrorist).

This is how AI imagines the situation. It is highly inaccurate.

Reader, I don’t know how I did it. I was like Neo from the Matrix. The world went into slow-motion as I pulled my terrified cats out of their cases, one at a time, lobbed the empty boxes onto the conveyer belt, without dropping either cat, then carried them, dangling under each arm, past the shouting TSA agents and a million other frustrated, shoeless travelers, through the scanner. I got a lot of weird looks.

Here’s how it started:

My wife is German, I’m American. We’d lived for the past 15 years in the US. Things were good for us there. We’d launched our careers. And bought a house. And had two children. But as much as we loved our lives in America, we felt that Germany was the better place to raise children.

Moving is never easy. Throw young kids and old cats into the mix and it gets even more complicated.

The ordeal with the TSA was only one example. After we arrived in Germany, new headaches began piling up. Buying a new car. Getting registered with the town. Navigating the punishing German recycling system.

It’s as easy as 1—2—763

I’m not gonna lie. There have been moments when I’ve wondered if this move was a mistake. Yanking the kids out of their happy lives. Dropping them into a whole new place, where they don’t know anyone and don’t speak the language.

These doubts are normal. Every big change comes with big questions. Are we doing the right thing? Is it too late to change our mind? Are my cats going to claw my face off and escape into the bowels of Newark Liberty International Airport?

But what’s the alternative? Listen to the doubts? Stick with what you know? Those options start looking really good when you’re neck-deep in worries about the uncertain future. But they also come with perils of their own.

Because a life without risk is a life of regret.

This is the trade-off you make when you stay in your comfort zone. You avoid all kinds of scary uncertainty. But you also spend your life wondering...

What if?

What if I’d asked that girl out on a date? What if I’d taken that job? What if I’d moved to that far-off city, even though I didn’t know anyone there? Every time you step into the unknown, there’s the possibility of falling. But there’s also the possibility of discovering something great.

I don’t know how our new German life will turn out. And unfortunately, the technology doesn’t exist to check in on the alternate timeline, the one where we stayed in America.

But I do know THIS:

It’s been nine months, and our kids are loving it so far. They’re already speaking the language better than I do. And our 5-year-old daughter claims that she’s found her future husband. He’s in her kindergarten class and he seems very nice. I’ll let you know when we pick a wedding date.

We’re mostly moved into our house. Our light fixtures still look like this—

—but at least we have furniture to sit on, and a table to eat at, and beds where we can sleep.

In the eight months since we arrived here in Germany, we’ve made some incredible new friends. We miss our old friends, of course, and our old house. But we’ve already booked our first trip back to the U.S. We’ll be flying into Newark, and this time, we won’t be bringing the cats.

I’ll see you next week!

Lee

PS: I write books for kids. They’re funny and adventurous and one is going to (hopefully, maybe) be made into a movie someday. They’re also available as audiobooks. Some are even Audible Originals. To find out more, check out…

PPS: Want to share your own travel disasters or tips for rebooting your life in a new place? I’d love to hear them!