“Well, I wish I could say the rest was as magical but the next two and a half years or so were tough.  We lived in 5 different cities.  Luckily Ellie wasn’t in ‘regular school’ yet.  She just seemed to thrive on all the constant newness and excitement of first Detroit, then Atlanta, followed by Chicago, Phoenix and finally, San Francisco.  Ellie and I made the best of it but it was really tough.  Joe was making his name in his company because he’d become the point man for establishing new markets, but it was taking its toll on me and um, on us.  I would just start to settle in and it would be time to move.  I was lonely.  Well anyway, just before Ellie was about to start first grade our luck changed.  Joe’s company landed 7 different markets in Europe.  He got a huge promotion and we got a wonderful townhouse in London.  It was the perfect place for Ellie to start school.  It was a great community and I was even able to take classes at Cambridge pretty regularly, I even audited a class at Oxford.  We spent our weekends and school vacations exploring all over Europe.  It was amazing.

Tina paused and sighed and then continued.  “We spent three years in London and after that Boston for 2 years, which I also loved, Toronto for a year, and Sydney for a year, but when Ellie was starting high school, I really wanted her to have some type of stability so I went back to Chapel Hill and Joe spent about 18 months working throughout South America.  After that, Joe got a job in Seattle and we committed ourselves to Ellie staying put until she graduated high school.  Joe traveled a lot and for about a year Joe worked in Portland and we kind of had two homes, but it was worth it. Ellie was able to stay in the same high school for three years.  Joe moved to LA about six months ago to start his new position but I waited until Ellie started at Stanford.  Well… and here I am.”

“Wow Tina, all that moving around must have been really hard on you.”

“I guess some of it was, but in many ways I wouldn’t have traded it for anything.  I guess that’s easy to say now that I know how amazingly Ellie has turned out.  I always worried that it would damage her in some way, so I always worked really hard to be sure that she felt safe and, I don’t know, connected.  My parents and family have been a great help with that too.  They would visit us wherever we lived and my mom would always come and spend time with me to help me get settled.  In a lot of ways I think it’s made Ellie and her, and she and I, for that matter, a lot closer than we would have been if we had lived around the block from each other.  It was tough on my parents when their 17 year old daughter, their over achieving, ‘perfect’ daughter, their third child with scholarships to four different Universities and an acceptance letter from Harvard came home and announced that she was pregnant and marrying the father of the baby, who by the way, they hadn’t met”.  Tina paused and looked up at Bette.  “Um… well anyway I guess I did it again.  You ask a simple question and I start spewing at the mouth…I’m sorry Bette.”