Thank You Hannah Montana

Last weekend my husband and I took our daughter to see the Hannah Montana movie. We’re all huge fans of the show and knew the movie would be great but we had no idea the affect it would have on us.

With our four year old sitting happily between us we watched anxiously wondering whether Miley would continue to live her double life or give it up for something else. But something happened about midway through the movie. It stopped being about Miley/Hannah and became about us. At one point my husband and I looked at each other both in tears. The storyline in the movie seemed to parallel what we were going through in our own lives. Our daughter looked at both of us like we were nuts but we didn’t care. Let me explain what happened.

Both my husband and I are chronic people pleasers. It’s a blessing and a curse but it is who we are. Family is always first with us and we’ve spent a lot of time over the years working hard to try and make everyone happy.

Before we got married my now husband and I took a trip to Michigan where I’m from to meet my family and friends. He immediately fell in love with the place. Everything about it. The people the places, all of it. I was so excited he loved it as much as I did and we vowed that some day we would make it our home. Unfortunately since we both want to make everyone happy, he worried about what his friends and family would think of him living there and I worried about what my friends and family would think about us moving back there. Thirteen years, three cross country moves and twelve addresses later we have been so busy people pleasing that we lost ourselves in the process. We realized that we will never make everyone happy and now that we have our daughter it is about giving her the best possible life we can give her.

Over the past year we’ve talked a lot about where we will make our permanent home. Our daughter is starting kindergarten in the fall and we wanted to settle down before she started school. After weighing all of the pros and cons we finally arrived at the decision that we’ve wanted to be in Michigan all along. We’ve never let ourselves follow our own dream and have let others talk us out of it for one reason or another. So the moving plans began.

During the past few months our conversations have been about how peaceful we feel for the first time in our 15 years together because we know we are doing the right thing for us this time. We know we are giving our daughter a childhood she deserves in a place where she can be safe and happy. I know that I can share experiences with her that I had as a child and see them again through her eyes. We will be blessed to have family and friends around who love us and will be much closer in proximity to my husband’s family in Connecticut so that we can visit them more often which was very important to us.

We couldn’t be more excited about our move in just a couple of weeks and can’t wait to start this new chapter in our lives.

The lesson we’ve learned is to never let anyone steal your dreams. It’s ok to want to make others happy but you can only do that if you make yourself happy and do what’s right for you. If you can do that everything else will fall into place.