Help me get my family on board - moving Florida to Michigan ...

Reading this (through the cloud of ellipses...dude, limit those going forward in life), gave me a different take on your situation. I think you are really puffed up about the fact that your employer thinks highly of you and is rewarding you. You want to reap those rewards and you are struggling with your personal happiness and financial improvement meaning unhappiness for your family. It's a legitimate struggle and it's okay to not want to turn down the opportunity, but I would be cautious about reframing it as "no other option" "must move" and "killing me". Making it sound inevitable when it's really only inevitable because you want everything your way is going to drive a wedge between you and your wife and kids. Your wife's concerns are real. Michigan is cold and gray for a good portion of the year, which is challenging for people with sunny dispositions let alone someone who struggles with depression.

There are rarely only two choices in life. I'd sit down with your wife and ask her (and friends and family, if needed) to help you brainstorm other possible solutions. You know that old saying, If momma ain't happy, then nobody's happy? You wrote: My wife is livid. She has a history of depression, difficulty making friends & has told me just before we moved down here (15 years ago) that she'd be a happier person in a warmer climate (as we're from Philly & know all about cold/snow). You also wrote, I know the adjustment to the new school & making new friends are temporary problems. My wife is so against the idea, she doesn't think so... but i'm much more confident of this. My wife is convinced that she may never make friends in Michigan (but i know better... i really do...) You do not know better. My kid was 7 when her dad and I moved to Europe. She was angry on the plane. She was angry after the move. She bitterly resented it for the next 12 years, basically. And I made few friends and was depressed. We should never have moved although we moved for really good reasons. My guess is that your wife is not working because of her depression. Either way, the solution to the problem of being burned out from traveling in your job is not to relocate. It is to find another job that is local or involves less traveling. If I had it to do over again, I would never have uprooted my family. Depression is serious. Of course your wife is livid. She has told you as clearly as she can that this move will be a nightmare for her and you are refusing to listen. 3 of the 4 members of your family will be better off staying. Which means that you will be better off staying, too. Turn down the move and look for a different, local job. Wanting the move to be the solution to your problem does not make it the solution to your problem. And you may be angry about that. You are allowed to be angry that you have a wife with a history of depression and with difficulty in making friends. But it is asking for trouble to ignore what you know about your wife, your children, and what they are telling you in hopes that you "know better". It's unlikely that you know better. Ask for help from your wife and find another option, please!

Is finding a new job in Florida not at all an option? Is your wife getting a job in Florida an option? Can you spend the time from now until the end of the school year focusing much of your efforts on trying to get a new job that's better for your family instead, including at looking at moving to other low cost-of-living, warm climate areas that your wife is more interested in? You give 2 options as if those are the only two options, when it seems to me there are a lot more than that.

Michigan is THE worst state I have lived in for SAD. You wife will be MISERABLE. I have moved my kids every 2-3 years and it is hell on them. The move into middle school is NOT a good time to make new friends. Kids cling to their old friends like a lifeline. 10th grade is a hard time to move. This will be an incredibly traumatic move for your wife and kids. Do the road warrior thing.

Sorry to be blunt, but I am finding your relationship with your wife a bit peculiar. I understand why she wouldn't want to move, and believe me, uprooting a kid with special needs is a very. big. deal. (I have stayed in a difficult situation for years in order to keep my daughter in a special high school.) And it's a big deal even if said kid seems to be okay with it. For your wife to have good friends--a support network--is valuable too and not easily replaced. It takes years to build that sort of network, and if your kids aren't easy, she probably relies on her friends more than you realize. I just get the impression that you really don't understand the problems she deals with every day. It also looks like she doesn't understand your worries either. Does she understand, and does she feel any responsibility for, your family's financial problems? Has she considered getting a job herself? Does she understand your fear of unemployment? Does she get that your employer likes you enough to have offered you a path to financial solvency if you solve your employer's problem of finding staff in Michigan? My point here is not whether you stay or go. I am more concerned that you and your wife seem to be living parallel lives. You don't seem to take her concerns seriously and vice versa. To make a good decision you need to be a team. I don't know if you were a team once and you lost it, or if this has always been a problem for you, but you won't be able to make a good decision without fixing that. Difficult times and difficult decisions can force us to confront some of the more fundamental issues that we otherwise manage to ignore for years.

There is an option -- don't move!! Get a different job in Florida that's either 1. higher-paying or 2. minimal travel. You're trying to spin this into a situation where you have to move, and your boss is happy to talk you into this even though it's not what's best for you. You don't have to move. Stay put. I've moved to cities that have a reputation for being poor places to live, and found the reputation was accurate. Being surrounded by other people who chose to move to (mediocre city) set back my career and caused me to lose friends. Don't do this to yourself and your family.

>> Just fyi... we're thinking Farmington Hills, West Bloomfield, Bloomfield Hills, Birmingham, Royal Oak, Ferndale, Troy, Franklin, Canton, Bloomfield Township, Rochester Hills, or Novi... I grew up in one of those suburbs. Left for college ten years ago and I'm not going back. I don't know anyone in Michigan anymore because all my friends left too. It's boring, there aren't public spaces, and there are no jobs. Royal Oak and Ferndale are the most "community" feeling. They have small downtown areas and libraries and art centers and such. The schools are not as good - they're closer to Detroit, so the tax base is lower. If your wife will be staying at home, and has trouble making friends, these suburbs will be very difficult for her. They're sprawl and its not easy to make friends because there are virtually no public spaces. You can't go anywhere without a car. When my parents left Michigan for California to retire, they moved to the top of some weird mountain and instantly had more friends in six months than in 30 years of living in Michigan. And they both worked. >> I don't see why my wife couldn't find a easy part time job to keep her sane & help her meet new friends... The economy in Michigan is bad. Any job, "easy part time" or no, will be competed for by people who are trying to feed their families with it. I really wish I could tell you something about Michigan that would make your family want to live there, because it would mean that my home state hadn't been hit so hard by population loss and bad economy. I can't think of anything though, I'm just feeling bad that you and your family have this tough choice.

"I know kids are resilient. I know the adjustment to the new school & making new friends are temporary problems." This line of thinking was the main mistake my father made 17 years ago when he uprooted our family and forced us all to move across country for his career goals. To let you know how that turned out- I haven't spoken to my father in over a decade and a huge reason for that had to do with how he forced me to move in the middle of highschool despite no one in the family wanting to go. Some children are more attached to "home" than others and if one of your children happen to be like this and they're old enough to have established foundations where they live, they may be resentful about it well after they move out of your home and start their own lives. And I only lived there for two years! Because as soon as I became legal I moved out of that town and went straight back to "home" even though it meant living in a roach infested apartment the size of a shoebox. I realize that not all situations are the same. In my case It wasn't just the move- but the way he just didn't seem to care how the move was affecting me and how the move brought up all these tensions that we already had between us. Despite my never really feeling close with my father, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that had we not moved we would still be on speaking terms. Mainly because all those buried tensions would've never had a chance to explode the way they did during those two years of high school before I moved out for good. But the move created the circumstances for all our previous issues to come to a serious head. My mother also fell into a deep depression because she was far away from all her friends and family. So please be careful with this decision. You may think that they'll get over it and maybe they will- but that depends on a variety of factors and it's not a guarantee. I think that it mostly depends on the personalities involved more than anything- as well as your own. And your personality of- Oh you guys will get over it because you're resilient, is NOT going to help you if you guys do move. It's only going to raise more resentment because it sounds like you don't care. A few years after I graduated college when I had already cut him out of my life, he tried to email me about how now that years had passed he wishes he never uprooted the family and moved. I guess he finally realized after all those years how much his career goals and the nice big house and fancy cars really mattered in face of all the family trauma it caused. Suddenly it dawned on him that all those nice material things that he got out of the move was not worth it. I never responded to that email, because I just didn't care enough at that point. His apologies can't change the past. Instead I just deleted that email account so that he couldn't reach me anymore. That was many years ago and he might be dead now for all I know. At some point I might care enough to check and see. His other kids moved back home too after they grew and now he's in his big house with a wife that resents him for breaking up the family for his career. So... that is how that move affected our family. I realize your family is not my family, but I'm telling you this to get you out of that terrible 'they're resilient- and this problem is definitely temporary' idea. Because fast forward 17 years and that thinking is my now aging father's biggest regret. If you do move, then you need to change that attitude stat.

Have you considered moving yourself for the job and coming back home for weekend visits? Hopefully after a year you would be able to leverage that experience into a local job with either your current company or a new one. My father did this for several years - and it was hard - but it was preferable to uprooting the entire family to move to the arctic circle. A bedsit would not cost much per month and meanwhile the family can start downsizing and moving into rented accommodations in Florida (and your wife can start working?). This is just one of the times you have to put your family's needs before your own, unfortunately.