Starting from Scratch

Yesterday I had to answer this question: out of a list of a dozen countries, rank in order of preference those which you’d be happy to be living in this time next year.

This was not one of those Facebook quizzes which tells you the seventies song that most reflects your personality or who you were in a past life.  This was a real question which tells me where I may well be living in a year’s time.

How do you answer a question like that?  There were some obvious non-starters: South Africa and Romania, for example.  I suspect the queue to get into Romania is quite short.  India, China and Japan: fine countries but a bit too much of a cultural (and linguistic) leap with the four children and all.  Germany: I spent two years working in the Jewish community and no.  Josh keeps trying to tell me they’re very sorry and all but still no.  I was keen on France because of the five years I spent hearing about le boulangerie in high school French but it turns out they only want people who can parlez-vous Francais which puts le spoke in le wheel for sure.  I’m awesome with the Mon Dieu! and the oh la la! but Josh is the one with le earning capacity and voila, that’s the end of that.

Which leaves Dublin, Vancouver and Edinburgh.  They all speak a variety of English and Josh and I have been to all three over the years and liked them.  Vancouver is my favourite city of all time with its mountains and beaches and the Sea to Sky highway to Whistler where you get pancakes and mulled wine.  Edinburgh has castles and is in the same country as Perth which has a tea shop where you eat cakes for charity which is a Nobel prize-worthy concept if ever there was one.  We’ve lived in Dublin and have at least some familiarity with the strange traditions like everyone wandering around all day with a big grey dab on their foreheads.  That one was quite a puzzler and we just assumed that aliens had landed until the Irish flatmate got home and explained Ash Wednesday to us.  Plus we know the location of the Marks and Spencer chocolate department, home of the also Nobel-worthy lemon meringue bar.  And we have an anchor baby, an Irish-born child which back in the day guaranteed the whole family residency and may still for all I know.

Why, you may be asking yourself, are we planning our family’s future by throwing a dart at a map?  Well. It all started back in January.  Josh and I were sitting in a cafe in Whatawhata drinking Che Guevara Revolutionary Cola

 

 

and Josh got an email notification from a recruiter from Amazon.  He ignored it because it was basically spam.  The guy had Googled for programmers and come up with an old LinkedIn profile that Josh set up a couple of years ago and hadn’t looked at since.  The recruiter, Todd, said that he could see that Josh does object-oriented programming and would he like to interview for a job at Amazon?  Now, seeing as pretty much all programming since the turn of the century has been of the object-oriented variety this is like saying ‘I see that you own a pair of sports shorts.  Would you like to try out for the All Blacks?’  So we didn’t give it another thought and carried on our merry way to the beach.

Josh, though, had been a bit bored and frustrated at work so he eventually replied to Todd and asked for more information.  It turns out that Amazon, based in Seattle, are looking to expand by hiring people from Australia and New Zealand.  Because they have been expanding for twenty years already they have used up all the programmers in North America and need some colonials to pad out the numbers.  So Josh agreed to a phone interview with Todd, which lead to a technical interview and then an invitation to their three-day long ‘recruitment event’ (because, Americans – why hold more interviews when you can have an Event?) in Auckland in February.

After the first conversation with Todd Josh asked Uncle Google what it’s like to work for Amazon.  It’s a huge company and there are websites dedicated to ex-employees telling their stories.  As with diagnosing your own illnesses on the internet it might have been better not to go there.  The general consensus seemed to be that it would be preferable to have no job at all.  In fact one lady who’s now homeless says she’s much happier than she was working for Amazon.  The phrase ‘soul-destroying’ came up quite a bit.

This gave us pause.  There were very clear themes coming through – long working hours, unrealistic expectations – and it seemed like a big risk to take given that it would mean complete disruption for all six of us.  All of our children have wonderful friends, they’re all in good school situations, we’re living the life we wanted.  You’d need a good reason to leave that.

So when Josh went to the Recruitment Event he was ambivalent.  It was a free night in a posh hotel with an open mind at best.  They insisted people were to dress casually and not wear a suit, which helped.  And then he was converted.

 

 

The first evening was a series of presentations by some of the twenty (twenty!) Amazon employees who were there.  They talked about the projects they’re working on, the teams the new recruits would be joining, life in Seattle and working conditions.  Most of it was confidential but Josh told me what he could remember, safe in the knowledge that I don’t understand a word he says.  This happens a lot when we talk.  It might even be a metaphor for our whole marriage.  Anyhoo, he was very excited by it all.  The recruitment team were clearly well aware of Amazon’s reputation as the world’s worst employer and went to great lengths to assure everyone that the issues had been addressed.  Some of the people presenting were Kiwis and Aussies – always a good idea to bring people who can communicate with the natives – who talked about relocating.  They covered a lot of ground.

The next day Josh had a five-hour long technical interview.  They spent five hours giving him problems to code the solutions to on a whiteboard.  He was mostly dead by the end but managed to drag himself home with the free petrol after the free dinner and tell me he hoped he got the job.

A week later they offered him a job in the team that he’d liked the sound of, along with a salary that equates, in New Zealand dollars, to more than twice his current salary.  There was a lot of fine print to read through because, compared to Americans, we’re kind of spoilt in terms of labour laws here.  We’re used to the idea of someone needing a reason to fire you, and giving you warnings and notice and similar.  Americans don’t believe in that sort of molly-coddling.  Like most jobs there, this one is ‘at-will’ employment: you can be fired at any moment, effective immediately, without any reason at all.  If Josh were to leave before two years were up we’d have to repay the money they spent on relocating us (and we’re talking tens of thousands of dollars) and the signing bonus which makes up a hefty chuck of the salary.  So we didn’t just type YES in 32-point bold and press Send so hard the bottom fell out of the laptop, although it was tempting.

The truth is, for the last few years Josh has been earning at the top of the salary scale for what he does in Hamilton and we still have the Pioneer Woman lean times despite our best efforts.  I’ve been doing a lot of relieving this year and by the time we were into week four and I’d already had to cancel several days of work due to sick or injured children it had well and truly confirmed that even a part-time permanent job isn’t an option for me just yet.  We have enough children that there’s always someone needing me for something.  Josh could earn more in Auckland but we can’t afford a house there – I don’t understand how anybody can, unless they bought it a really long time ago – so it didn’t look as though anything would improve in the forseeable future.

It was a lot to weigh up.  A settled life which is a known quantity versus an adventure, a gamble: if all goes well we’ll have a great time and never have to worry about money again and if it doesn’t we’ll lose our house here and end up with debts we can’t repay.  Fifteen years ago Josh and I took a backpack each and went to the other side of the world without a thought, and it was great, but four children is a big responsibility when you’re talking about changing pretty much every single thing about their lives.

We talked to people who have taken children to live overseas and they were all encouraging.  The consensus was that kids are resilient and the experience outweighs the disruption by far.  So we said yes.  We will keep our house to come back to in a few years and in the meantime we’ll take whatever adventure is going.

Even with a signed job contract Josh still has to go into the lottery to get a U.S. working visa.  They say he has a 70% chance of success in which case he’ll be going to Seattle in October  – visa processing takes six months because they have to make really sure they only let nice people in; they don’t need any more terrorists as they already have a police force – and we’ll all follow after Christmas.

It’s the other 30% that gives rise to the question of whether we prefer the lemon meringue chocolate section in Dublin or the cake-eating for charity in Scotland.  If the visa is not approved they will employ him in one of their other locations and try again for America the following year.  Josh’s pick if this happens is to stay here and work for the Seattle team remotely, which would give us the American salary without the pesky business of having to go anywhere.  While I do love the idea of paying off the mortgage a bit faster I’m also very taken by the prospect of being somewhere else.  Who turns down the chance to live in a new country for a year?  Not me, that’s who.  Unless we get to the Romania and South Africa end of the list.  I think they probably don’t do a lot of eating cake for charity there.

 

Until mid-May, then, when the lottery results are announced, your guess about where we’ll be next Easter is as good as mine.  This makes things a bit difficult to plan.  I’m constantly having thought sequences like this: ‘I’d better go and tidy up the garage a bit.  But hang on, if I’m going to have to chuck it all out in six months anyway I might as well not bother.  But I don’t know for sure and it would be handy to be able to get to the car without having to take a running jump.  I think I’ll go and read a book and eat some cake’.  You can see the problem.

The biggest issue, as you’ll no doubt have realised, is that I don’t know whether or not to put the ram in with the ewes.  If we’re going to be here a bit longer I want to be able to keep eating roast lamb.  If we’re not, there’s no point in letting Big Mama get knocked up.  It’s a real puzzler and I don’t think the U.S. Immigration Service quite understands the urgency.

I won’t say I don’t have qualms.  Last time we were planning a future by throwing a dart at a map we made a decision not to live in America while George W. was in charge because most of what he did was so objectionable.  That’s no longer a problem but it’s been replaced by another concern: the moral issue around choosing to live in a country knowing that as foreigners we’ll be treated better than a large proportion of the existing population because we’re white.  I do have a problem with that.  New Zealand is far from free of racism to be sure but we’re not even close to being in the same league as America.  Recently the media has reported several stories about people being killed by police for the crime of Being on the Street While Black.  Do you know how many people have been killed since January 1 this year by law enforcement officers in the U.S? Over three hundred.  Three hundred, in three months.  Last year’s total was 1,100 that we know of but because each of their 18,000 police departments is autonomous and none are required to keep count it’s probably higher.  It seems to me that a country whose police officers are not required to keep even a rough tally of how many people they’re killing has some very serious problems.

Seattle is a relatively safe city where 55% of residents aged over 25 have university degrees.  We’ll be able to turn a blind eye there to all the bad stuff just as most other white Americans must be doing and it bothers me that we’ll be among the privileged in that respect.  If we were not white we would not be considering going to live there and it doesn’t sit right with me that we can choose to take up an opportunity for adventure and greater financial freedom because of the fact that Josh and I happen to have been born, to no credit of our own, with the colour skin that people shoot at less frequently.

I suppose that’s a worry for another day.  We’re in the hands of fate now.  Que sera, sera.  I might as well go and gaze at the ewes and weigh up the lambing question because that, at least, I have some control over.

 

 

 

Yesterday I parked outside Countdown, went in to the service desk to pick up my groceries (previously ordered on the internet) and took them back to the car.  As I was putting them into the boot a lady from the car next to mine approached and asked me if I’d had someone else watching my children while I did this.

You see, I had committed the cardinal parenting sin.  I left children alone in a parked car.

I was gone for less than six minutes, I could (and did) watch the car the whole time through the glass front of the shop, it was the middle of the afternoon with plenty of people around and when I came back Noah and Cassia were laughing away uproariously over whatever probably toilet-themed conversation they’d had going.

This lady was very polite.  She opened with the question about someone watching them from another car to give me the benefit of the doubt.  When I said no, but I was only gone for a handful of minutes she said that would be long enough for someone to take them.

Really, I said?  Really?  When was the last time she had heard of children being abducted by a stranger in Te Awamutu?  Well, she said, there’s always that once.

Children in New Zealand, I said, tend to be in danger only from people they know.  Random abduction, let alone from the well-populated Countdown carpark in Te Awamutu – a rich farming town with very little noticeable crime at all – doesn’t happen often enough for it to be something that I’m fearful of in my everyday life.  I’m not bringing my children up to be scared of the world in general.

She was not convinced.  She left thinking, I imagine, that I was one of those irresponsible people who shouldn’t be allowed to have children at all.

What I should have said, what I wish I’d thought of saying, was that it was a good thing that she did.  Yes, I was unrepentant and probably didn’t respond the way she hoped, but  she was certainly right and brave to bring it up with me and I hope she’s not put off doing it in the future because there are many children left in cars in very different circumstances and some of them do need the help of strangers.

I did think about what she’d said though.  Of course I did.  You can’t have someone show such unambiguous disapproval of your actions without reflecting on whether they might have a point.

The conclusion I came to is that I’m very comfortable with what I did and I will not be changing that particular behaviour.  Before you all frantically Google CYPS’ dobbing-in hotline number, let me explain.

It’s about applying some rationality to evaluating a risk.  When I was a new mother all those moons ago I did as this lady expected me to be doing now: I worried about everything that could possibly happen to my baby, no matter how unlikely, and for good measure I worried about plenty of things that couldn’t possibly happen, equally.  And it just about did my head in.

I know it’s a natural thing for new mothers to do.  My first baby had the endearing habit of waking every 45 minutes in the night and every 20 minutes during the day for the first six weeks.  Then, she suddenly got the memo – it might have been the many threats of leaving her in a cardboard box on the steps of the local church that did it – and started sleeping through the night.  Not me, though.  No.  I was still waking every 45 minutes convinced that the lack of crying meant that she’d died in her sleep.  I would lie awake listening to the silence making deals with God.  Please, just don’t let her die until my mum’s seen her (we lived half a world away at the time). Just let her be all right until she’s met my dad.  I’m sure anyone who’s had a baby knows the kind of thing I’m talking about.  Much later when she was a big fat bouncing thing I remember having a meltdown because I’d lost count of the number of scoops of formula I’d put in her bottle.  It was a huge disaster.  If there was one less she would wake hungry in the night and her whole sleeping pattern would be wrecked forever!  If there was one more it said right there on the tin she’d get dehydrated and die!  And no, I couldn’t just tip it all out and start again because have you seen the price of this stuff?

Not unusual for a new parent.  But it’s not sustainable to latch onto every tiny possibility of doom, however remote, and try and control for it out of anxiety.  That’s how you get to be a nervous wreck and not enjoy the ride.  I have seen this happen to people.  I have seen parents make life-altering decisions out of fear and miss out on all kinds of wonderfulness as a result.

Somewhere along the way I got to realising that not all risk is created equal and you might as well concentrate on the ones that matter.  Risk is not some airy-fairy thing where if it’s a possibility for someone somewhere in the world then you should worry that it might happen to you.  It is quantifiable.

If I’m going to lose my children on a supermarket trip it’s far – hugely – more likely to be in a road accident than by abduction.  So I take every possible precaution, every single time, to mitigate that risk.  In twelve years and four children I have never driven any of them so much as a metre without them being properly secured in the appropriate child restraint.  Even my older children, one of whom is almost as tall as me, sit in the back seat unless there is absolutely no alternative, which is very rare, because there is very clear data showing that they’re more likely to survive an accident there.  There is also clear data showing that they need to be in a booster seat until they reach a certain height.  Amy and Daniel were both ten and a half when they reached this height and they sat in a booster seat on every journey until that day.  I believe the risk of harm on the road is real and I take it very seriously.

When you get to the issue of random abduction, though, the risk level changes a bit.  Most people my age or older will remember Kirsa Jensen and Teresa Cormack back in the eighties.  Both horrific cases, absolutely.  But few and far between.  I can’t recall off the top of my head any cases in recent years – decades, even – that didn’t turn out to be perpetrated by someone who knew the victim. Even then, most abducted children are taken not from roadsides or carparks but from their own homes. And I do have conditions when I leave my kids in the car.  I wouldn’t leave Noah or Cassia if it was just the one of them.  I would certainly never leave a baby, or a toddler too young to have fluent language in case they did happen to need help.  It has to be broad daylight and with plenty of people around.  I wouldn’t leave them outside Pak ‘n’ Save because you can’t see outside from inside so easily.  In fact I probably wouldn’t do it anywhere except our local Countdown or the village Four Square.  And let me point out that everyone leaves their kids in the car outside the Four Square.  If I go there after school I leave all the windows down and the kids happily chat with their friends in the cars on both sides whose parents have also left the windows down.  It’s an important part of village social life for the little ones.

While it would be nice to be able to bring up our kids to feel that the world is a safe place, in fact it isn’t so that wouldn’t be doing them any favours.  The next best thing, I feel, is to teach them to look for danger in the right places.  This was recognised some years ago in the education system when someone realised that the stranger danger strategies that we were taught in the eighties weren’t very useful because the vast majority of deliberate harm that comes to children comes from people they know and probably live with.  The curriculum was replaced by the far more relevant Keeping Ourselves Safe programme which aims to teach skills that can help children in any unsafe situation, and to empower the child to protect themselves rather than teaching them to run and hide from the evil man offering a Crunchie bar. (I remember thinking, oooh, a Crunchie bar!  I would definitely give that serious consideration!  Which wasn’t the aim of the lesson, I’m pretty sure).

I don’t want my children growing up thinking the world as a whole is a scary place.  People like the lady in the carpark would probably say the place for letting them feel safe is at home and the time for teaching them wariness is out in public.  Is home so safe though?  We have a trampoline like everyone else, probably including her.  Those things are not safe by any measure.  They account for an average of 160 ACC claims a week, some of which are for permanent spinal injuries, and statistically it doesn’t make much difference whether you have pads and nets or not.  My children are more likely to come to harm on the trampoline in their own back yard than in six minutes in a car at Countdown by a large margin, but I still let them use it.

Because we live in the country my children don’t have the option of walking to school but if we lived in Te Awamutu that’s what they’d be doing.  Noah is seven which is old enough to walk to school without me, depending on the distance.  I have no idea whether Carpark Lady would frown upon that too but plenty of people do allow seven-year-olds to walk to school without an adult and I’d argue that, because there are usually roads to cross, they’d be in more danger than Noah was while sitting in the car at Countdown.  People don’t seem to frown on letting kids walk to school, though; in fact there’s kind of a thing going on recently about moving away from driving them everywhere and letting them go for it on their own.  Which I whole-heartedly approve of.  If it was practical for us I’d teach Noah all I could about road safely on the daily route and let him go.  Would I be nervous?  Yes – because of the roads, not because of the possibility of abduction.  Would I still encourage it?  Of course, because you can’t live in fear of every scary possibility.  You weigh it up, you do what you can and you cross your fingers for the rest.

Sometimes the things that sound the most scary are not the things we should be the most scared of.  I have read of several cases recently of people being injured by out-of-control cars hitting them on a footpath, including one this very week.  In that time I have read of zero cases of stranger abduction.  So if I had taken Noah and Cassia out of the car with me, along the walkway on the edge of the carpark and into the supermarket, statistically I would have been putting them at greater risk than by leaving them strapped in their seats in the car.  But would Carpark Lady have thought this was a good reason not to do it?  No, because as parents we have a far greater instinctive fear of our children being stolen by a stranger than of them being hit by a car.  Not that we would wish that on them either, but it’s not as dark and mysterious so it’s not as terrifying.

I think this may be partly why the anti-vaccination movement gains the traction that it does.  In New Zealand something like 8% of us are not vaccinated and some of those will be children of parents who aren’t against it but just haven’t bothered.  So it’s really a very small minority but they certainly punch above their weight in terms of publicity for their cause.  I’m sure there are many reasons but it seems to me that partly it’s because the supposed harm that comes from vaccinations is just more scary.  There are no credible studies linking vaccinations conclusively to either autism or leukaemia, but there don’t need to be.  Just the suggestion is enough.  Given the choice between an incredibly remote possibility of cancer and a far more plausible chance of measles or mumps, it’s a very natural instinct to choose the mumps because it’s just less frightening.  I absolutely get that.  I vaccinated my children because I can read and think and observe, but I really did have to fight against the little niggle in my mind that said, autism!  So much worse than measles! So much less likely but so much scarier!  In fact, truth to tell, I might have wimped out altogether except that Josh, also able to read and think and observe, has no such qualms.  He’s even better at quantifying risk based on numbers than I am and doesn’t have the pesky maternal instinct thing going on.

So there you have it.  I appreciate the lady in the carpark showing concern for my children and I admire her for doing what is undoubtedly the right thing in challenging me on my actions.  I have thought over my reasons, which I guess was her goal, and I am satisfied with my decision.  I will not be doing that particular thing any differently next time.  Do I want my children to know that cars, bikes and trampolines are dangerous?  Hell yes.  Do I want them to feel scared of the local supermarket carpark?  No.  I have weighed up the risks and I’m happy that that isn’t something I need to be teaching them.

Have a safe day, and please know that I’m not looking for a debate about either my parenting skills or my opinions on vaccination.  If you take issue with either of these feel free to express that but please do it on your own blog, not in the comments on mine.