Just Visiting, part 3

For the kids and me, life continued as usual. Julie was in fourth grade and Lisa in first grade at Westover School in Stamford, CT. We lived in a three-bedroom, seventy-year-old Tudor house on a busy street, which we’d bought in 1983. I was working as a part-time general assignment reporter for the local newspaper, the Advocate, covering community news, writing a weekly article on the nearby town of New Canaan, and doing theater reviews. I had made a nice deal for myself, getting about $400 a week for about ten hours of work, because I worked fast. Reviews were an extra $50 apiece.
Before having children I had worked as an admissions officer at Pace University in Pleasantville, NY, and as a sales rep for Mobil Chemical Company, but once I had Julie I decided to stay home. While raising the kids I had always done some kind of freelance work—copy editing, proofreading or writing. I’d started doing reviews for the Advocate in 1989. After a while they gave me an occasional additional assignment, and this part-time job had evolved in just the past few months. It was exciting for me. I was not a trained reporter, but I grew up in a newspaper family, and I was having a great time. I had a mentor on the paper, an experienced reporter who was thinking of becoming an editor. My boss, the city editor, was nice to me and appreciative of my work. But I was using babysitters to watch the kids more than I had meant to do, and I missed the occasional school play, which I had meant never to do. I was often nervous about the work I was doing, because I hadn’t been to journalism school.
Mike was enjoying Madrid, taking Berlitz lessons, chauffeured around town by Spanish-speaking PW colleagues. He had two junior consultants working with him, Raul and José. They were from Nicaragua, and they did all the talking for him at the restaurants they visited nightly. “It’s weird,” Mike told me. “Even they don’t understand the menus, because the words for foods aren’t the same here.” For instance, he said, the names of most fish in Nicaragua were different from their names in Spain.
Mike called daily and told me about the late dinners. “They really eat at ten p.m.,” he said incredulously. Raul and Jose tried to sample the local nightlife, too. They knew the nightclubs started late, so they tried going out at midnight. “Nothing was happening,” Mike related. “Then at 2 a.m.—still pretty quiet. But when they went out at 3 a.m., the clubs were packed. They almost couldn’t get their coats out of the coat check because of the crush of people coming in!”
It was not long before Juan started to talk to Mike about taking a two-year tour of duty in Madrid. The client was pleased with his work, Juan said, and the Madrid partners believed they could sell some risk management business if they had an experienced American to lead the effort. Mike told me about Juan’s approach, but we didn’t take it seriously. Though I’d always wanted to live in another country, I’d been thinking of France or England—not Spain.
As it turned out, Spain was a much better place to live than England or France would have been. We did end up living in a suburb of Madrid for two years. It was the first good-weather place I ever lived in. I grew up outside Chicago and lived in the Northeast as an adult. Though Spaniards thought the Madrid weather was awful—too hot in summer, too cold in winter—it was much milder than the American midwest or northeast. Snow might fall, but it didn’t stick. I had no idea how much psychic energy we had spent fighting winter and cold. Madrid was sunny and pleasant much of the year, while London and Paris were notoriously gray and damp. And Madrid, a lively and cosmopolitan city, was much less expensive than London or Paris. But I didn’t know that.
Though we didn’t pay much attention to Juan’s offer, he was pretty persistent, and he kept adding incentives to get us to go. It turned into a long negotiation as the deal got sweeter. PW would pay for housing, he said, and there would be a living allowance. They’d give Mike a company car—any fancy kind he’d like. They’d pay for the girls to attend a private school, the American School of Madrid. They’d equalize the taxes so we wouldn’t get hit too hard in either country. They’d pay for us to fly business class to and from Madrid, and to make a yearly trip home.
But for me, a sticking point was my job. I had just started it, it was going well, and I was reluctant to leave it. It was a big step up from the freelancing I had done. I’d been used to working in my freezing-cold basement late into the night, copyediting other people’s work. Now I worked in a lively newsroom, and I saw my stories land on the front page much of the time. I had bright and funny colleagues. I interviewed fascinating people—sometimes entertainers who were in town to perform at the arts center, sometimes local politicos. I did a story on a whole family that escaped from Somalia and was happily blending into the city’s life, and I did a story on the first bone marrow transplant recipient at the local hospital. It felt great. I was happy about what I was doing and about the recognition I was getting.
“It’s going to kill me to leave this job,” I told Mike. “I love it. It’s the perfect job for me. I can’t leave now! Six months ago I would have jumped at this move, but not now.”
“You always told me you wanted to live abroad,” he said. “You can’t turn this down. You can write while you’re in Spain. You can do travel writing, or you can find a paper there to work for.”
“I’ll never find a paper there! I can’t write in Spanish.”
“Well, maybe there are English papers there to work for. See if anyone at the Advocate has a contact.”
I agonized over this for weeks. I talked to my parents, who thought the move sounded wonderful, and to my friends, who wanted me to stay. My friend Amy Greenberg, a divorce lawyer, warned me against going. “I’ve seen this before,” she said. “It’s not safe to let go of your income. Don’t let yourself be completely dependent on Mike.”
But I wanted to go. My younger sister, Sally, had gone to France twice as an exchange student—for a year in high school and for a year in college. I had never had the guts to do that, much as I had wanted to. But now I had the chance to live in another place—and I could take my whole family with me!