More On Our “Why”

Pretty much everyone looks at us like we’re crazy when we tell them we live in our RV with two kids. I get it, it definitely felt crazy at first. But it also feels right for us! The last five years have been a rollercoaster, to say the least, with Dave’s business requiring him to travel and be away from home for months at a time. But it was the accumulation of those stressful months that led us to uproot our family and move into the RV. Here’s a glimpse of what the past five years have looked like and the reasons we finally made the leap.  

In 2018 I had just decided to go back to school full time to finish my bachelor’s degree and leave my job. We were living in Cozad and with Dave’s demanding work schedule we decided that if I continued working on top of commuting an hour to school and having evenings dedicated to homework, Payton wouldn’t be getting much attention or time with either of us. A lot of you parents have finished degrees while working and parenting around the clock. Kudos to you! It would be so hard and utterly exhausting to maintain a good balance between all three. But we were fortunate enough to be able to make the decision for me to stop working for a while in order to work toward my personal goal.

There were a few curveballs thrown at us in 2018 that were out of our control so it was a pretty difficult year to begin with. And on top of those things, that Fall Dave also followed a hailstorm to Colorado Springs and was set up there for a few months. He was doing work for someone who didn’t have the greatest reputation for integrity, but it was a slower Spring and Summer for work so he took what he could get. He was only able to come home every other weekend because he was afraid that he would lose his spot to someone else if he left (which eventually happened).

It was hands-down the hardest year on our family and especially on our marriage. His living in an Airbnb for 3 months with a group of guys who had no-so-great habits and reputations added a hundred miles to the already-vast distance between us. The demands of this particular gig left me feeling very alone and abandoned even though he was doing what he had to do to support our family. This was the first difficult year of his traveling for work that led us to wonder if there would ever be a way that we wouldn’t have to spend months apart. Moving into an RV, however, wasn’t on our radar at all at that point.

The next few years were kind of a blur of him traveling and me solo-parenting until I finally finished my degree in December 2020. Then in the Spring of 2021 I started a full-time job that was the best and worst thing that I could have done. We learned a lot about what our family needed, the importance of intentional presence, that being “busy” and productive is NOT what God intended for us as humans, and it led us to where we are now; but the toll it took on all of us was intense.

The job was a lot of fun and fit my personality and work style perfectly. I got to work independently for the most part, and it was a lot of planning, organizing, and coordinating some behind-the-scenes operations for weddings and other events. I loved it. The problem was that I was working 6 days a week on a salary that didn’t add up to much more than minimum wage. I held out hoping that I just had to show some grit and determination. But in my determination, I was left spread thin and unable to pour anything at all into my family.

I was at work all day and then in the evenings I felt I had to be constantly available for my job, answering text messages, replying to emails, planning for the next day or weekend event, and had little left for anything else. I was ordering takeout almost every night because I just didn’t have the capacity or energy to cook a meal, let alone clean up a sink full of dishes at the end of the night. I wasn’t spending much quality time with Payton and felt so very alone in all of it. Payton and I were in a constant state of Survival Mode. I went through the motions of doing morning routines and nighttime routines, checked off the boxes on my to-do lists, and made time to take Payton on an occasional breakfast date, but I was never able to slow down and be present. I was constantly trying to pour from an empty cup.

Meanwhile that year, Dave was working in Kansas and only able to come home on the weekends. (Side note: this is the year we decided to buy our first camper for him to stay in instead of hotels and airbnbs; the cost of a hotel stay for 6 months would have been outrageous!) ((Another side note: the silver lining of him staying out of state was that he was doing work for a body shop owned by a great family who ended up becoming friends. Every year we’re low-key praying that a hailstorm hits their town again, especially now that we can take the whole family in the RV!))

So in the middle of all of the chaos and the demands of our jobs, Payton’s behavior started reflecting the instability and her parents’ lack of presence. She was angry often and had meltdowns frequently ranging from moderate to severe. To give an example, there was one afternoon my sisters came over to hang out and Payton was acting out and refusing to listen to me. I had her go to her room to decompress and to avoid an impending meltdown. She stomped to her room, slammed the door, and a few minutes later we heard her little folding chair being thrown up against the wall. (She had never been an angry little girl before that year and hasn’t since that chapter of our lives has been gone. It just goes to show how much our fast-paced lifestyles can affect our kids’ mental health.)

My sister made a joke that when we open the door she would be climbing up the wall like she’s possessed. Making a joke about it and laughing it off eased the pressure at the time, but what it came down to was that her outburst didn’t mean that she was a bad kid or that she had a behavior disorder (or that she was possessed). It was a result of the instability and lack of intentional parenting that came with Dave having to be gone for such long periods of time combined with the demands of my full-time job.

This was the year we both came to the realization that we needed to make some major changes, and probably the first time we’d started to wonder what it would be like if Payton and I could travel with him in the camper. But we had Payton in all-day Pre-K in a really amazing school that Fall so we never had a serious discussion about it. Instead, we decided that it would be best for all of us if I left my job and put more focus on Payton and home. After that, things started to get much better with her. And I had this deep-rooted feeling that my priorities were aligning more with what God had in mind for me.

That next Spring of 2022 it hailed in some towns around home so Dave didn’t have to travel hardly at all, which was a huge blessing because I was pregnant with Quinn and sick all of the time. We had briefly talked about living in the RV that year, but because I was pregnant and he was working close to home, it wasn’t something we were ready to do. He was able to do most school drop-offs when I was the sickest and I did pick-ups in the afternoons. She was also in three dance classes and piano lessons that I had to manage as well, and we eventually dropped one of the dance classes because it was just too much for her and she started to show signs of anxiety again. (In a future post I’d like to talk more about how it seems that the constant rush of everyday activities on top of all day school seems to be causing an increase in stress and anxiety in kids. If you have any thoughts on this, leave a comment or message me!)

At the end of the school year this last year there were some hailstorms in Kansas that we anticipated Dave having to travel for. The stress began building and I was coming to terms with the fact that I would soon be solo-parenting not one, but two kids now, one of them a baby. It just didn’t sit well. And I tend to think in problem-solution terms. If we have an issue, there’s most likely a solution.

We went camping for a week around Memorial weekend, and it was during that week that I finally pitched the idea to Dave: we could upgrade our RV to something more livable, homeschool Payton, and travel with him to keep our family together. It took a few days of weighing pros and cons, but we only needed one pro to push us in the right direction: keeping our family together.