Episode 48: Transcript

"Eliza Fendell and Jeff Oberg moved north after Florida started messing with their kids."

Doug French: I have to say, I'm feeling a little vindicated about our banter issue.

Magda Pecsenye Zarin: Because we got like eight responses?

Doug: Because the vast majority of those responses saying the banter is just fine, thank you.

Magda: All right, well, that's fine.

Doug: Besides, there's plenty to talk about. You had a college reunion. I'm getting my lawnmower fixed, the one your landlord sold me for like 40 bucks 13 years ago. I interviewed for an improv troupe. Didn't get it.

Magda: What?

Doug: There's an audition for an improv troupe for this new brewery-slash-comedy joint that's going up. But anyway, I had a great experience. Nice people. We chatted a bit about stuff afterwards, so who knows?

Magda: Okay.

Doug: I thought you'd be more impressed by that, but all right.

Magda: Don't make me say this on tape.

Doug: Go ahead. Say it.

Magda: I don't like improv comedy.

Doug: No, you don't like bad improv comedy. You don't have to come.

Magda: I know. But I mean, this is like you're telling me like, “Oh, I made this amazing recipe. It's the best liver and onions I ever had.” “Okay. I'm glad you liked it.”

Doug: It's less about the subject matter. It's more about the attempt. I was very happy to just go ahead and launch myself into the breach.

Magda: Yes, that you put yourself out there. I'm glad about that.

Doug: Especially, and it was a sign, it is across the street from the place where I'm getting my lawnmower fixed. I think that's the math teacher in me. If I'm compelled to do two things that are a long drive away, but they're across the street from each other, I should do them both.

Magda: That makes a lot of sense.

Doug: So tell me about Reunion in 30 words or less, because we've got to keep this banter down before we talk about Eliza and Jeff.

Magda: Well, it was my 30-year college reunion. There was just a lot of eating and a lot of laughing and a lot of hugging, a lot of drinking, a lot of dancing, a lot of reminiscing.

Doug: Right. And how big was the crowd, would you guess? What percentage of potential alumni showed up?

Magda: I don't know. It totally depended on the class. Like we didn't have a ton from our class there, but there were a lot of women I knew who wanted to come but couldn't because they had children that were graduating from high school or college that weekend. Whereas there were a ton of women there from the class of 74. It was their 50 year reunion. And they're all like, you know, around 72 years old. So they're not dealing with kids in high school or college. A lot of them aren't working anymore, but they're still in good health and can travel. So they got a big turnout.

Doug: Well, the reason I ask that is just, you know, reunions kind of turn a corner after 25. And in my case, you know, UVA is super big. So we basically break them up into two weekends. We've got 30 and under and 35 and over.

Magda: Okay. Well, I mean, you have much, much, much bigger classes than we have.

Doug: Right. But I mean, the interesting point is when you make that switch from the 30th or everyone's younger than you to the 35th when everyone's older than you, it's a bit of a culture shock, I got to say. There's a whole different vibe. There's lots of snow on the roof and lots of really slow motion dancing. The dancing, I think, is the big change. And speaking of Bryn Mawr alumnae, we had Eliza and Jeff on to talk about their big move as political refugees.

Magda: Yeah, exactly. So Eliza's a year behind me from Bryn Mawr. We've been friends since the mid-90s. And she said the year before I moved in with Mike, “oh, by the way, we've decided to move to Massachusetts, not far from you. In a month.” And I was like, what? Because they had lived in Miami for, I don't know, like 20 years. And you'll never believe why they moved.

Doug: Because of Ron DeSantis?

Magda: Well, I mean, yeah, because of DeSantis and because of all the crap that was happening there. And they have a child that is non-binary who was suddenly not able to get health care or mental health care anymore. And their kids were not able to have their needs met in school. At all.

Doug: It's kind of this weird mindset where if you just enact laws saying that people don't exist, that they'll just stop existing or they'll just self-deport as that family did.

Magda: Yeah. It's interesting. They talk about the fact that they were able to, like everything sort of lined up so they were able to leave. But they understand that there are people who can't leave situations like that.

Doug: All right. I'm getting depressed. But I think... What I liked about this discussion, though, is I like the detail they went to. I mean, if you decide you're leaving a state and you're not sure where to go, the elimination round is kind of a fascinating discussion. 

Magda: Yeah, well, I mean, you know, if you're leaving a state because it's not safe for your trans or non-binary kid there, like, you already have eliminated a whole lot of other states where it's not safe for trans and non-binary kids.

Doug: It was like an LSAT game, wasn't it? Remember when we used to teach those? Yeah, exactly. And the whole big thing was, like, you think there's a billion options, but there's actually only, like, four.

Magda: Right. Right.

Doug: So yeah, the decision was actually remarkably quick and fulfilling. I mean, that's the best part is the kids are doing so much better now. She was like, we have this IEP and it's like, “oh yeah, we'll take care of it.” And she started crying.

Magda: Yeah. They [the kids’ new school in Massachusetts] just acted like it was no big deal because it really wasn't.

Doug: Yeah. I'm hearing a lot of birds where you are. Are you in a bird cage right now?

Magda: Oh my God. It's bird central.

Doug: All right. So what do you think? Is that a good amount of banter?

Magda: I think that's a good enough amount of banter.

Doug: All right.

Magda: We should put out another poll and get people to tell us if that was the right amount of banter.

Doug: Listeners, thank you for enduring this banter. By the way, what I decided to do is I'm going to put a little note saying when the banter stops. So if you are really cripplingly averse to banter, you have means to avoid it.

Magda: “When the banter stops,” that sounds like a Kristen Hannah book.

Doug: I was thinking more of Shel Silverstein.

Jaunty theme music fades in, plays, and fades out.

Magda: So, hi, Jeff and Eliza. This is Jeff Oberg and Eliza Fendell, and they are, I would say, regular people. They've been friends of mine for a while, who recently made a huge, huge, huge cross-country move for their kids. And I've heard you guys refer to yourselves as political refugees.

Jeff Oberg: That's accurate.

Magda: So do you want to talk about sort of what was the situation that became so difficult that you even started thinking about moving?

Jeff: Well, first, Florida. Florida was when we moved there in 2004 was a pretty purple state. And it got steadily weirder, and not in a good way, over the time that we lived there.

Eliza Fendell: I think that there are two main pieces here. One was our kids' mental health. And then the second one was our kids' educational opportunities. And it's really hard to put one over the other because they both were impacting our kids kind of an equal measure.

Doug: And how long ago did you make this move?

Eliza: August 2022. 

Jeff: Yeah.

Doug: All right. So year and a half, you moved from Florida to Massachusetts. So when the time came to look around for places to land, what was that process like? 

Jeff: Our middle child is non-binary. And Florida, for people who remember in 2021, 2022, was debating the “Don't Say Gay” law.

Eliza: February 2022.

Jeff: Yeah, it was when it ultimately, I think, passed. And one of the provisions in that law made mental health professionals mandatory reporters. So if your child were to come out to their therapist, the therapist was required by law to report that to DCFS. [DCFS is child protective services in Florida]

Eliza: It was not any single thing, right? There was a series of little triggers that all kind of happened and that added up. So that law went into effect. But the way that we found out about it was that all of our different children who were seeing specialists for adolescent health or for gender dysphoria or for stuff like that, suddenly all of the providers were exiting the state. And suddenly canceling appointments because they could see the writing on the wall. And that's really, I think, how we kind of found out about like, okay, we're finally getting traction, getting good mental health, people are feeling better about themselves, etc. And suddenly, wait, what do you mean there's no doctor, there's no more appointments, and we can't find another doctor? But because we knew and understood what the Florida legislature looked like and that the bills would pass.

Jeff: And that the governor would sign them. There were no guardrails for children who did not conform to a strict gender binary, who were at all not cisgendered, heterosexual. I mean, tick all those boxes or else there were going to be problems for kids. And their families. Because one of the parts of the law that thankfully did not survive judicial review, was that if your child comes out as transgender in any way, shape or form, you get your kids taken away. You go to jail. I mean, that was the goal of that law. Thankfully, that didn't survive. But, you know, we couldn't take that chance with our kids and our family.

Eliza: There was another really critical piece because we were definitely in a position of privilege. And again, I go back to kind of timing. So Jeff was handling a lot about like the doctor's appointments and suddenly not being able to get traction on doctor's appointments. And then on the work side, my office had made the decision. We'd been remote, of course, because of COVID, but they made the decision to sell headquarters, and they issued the official message that we would not be going back to the office and we would be staying remote as knowledge workers. And it was interesting how those two moments kind of came together in the space of like two or three weeks.

Jeff: Yeah.

Eliza: And I really felt it was like one of those Working Girl moments where you take one piece of information and another piece of information and suddenly you have like a whole new concept. And the concept for us became, okay, if we don't have healthcare for our children that meets their needs and we're no longer restricted because of work to live in a specific place, what does that look like?

Magda: And that's a really interesting, I think it's all because of the pandemic, right? 

Jeff: Oh, yeah.

Magda: Number one, all of this just hateful legislature and the big surge behind hurting kids and creating these traps to catch parents in was really accelerated by the pandemic. And at the same time, the ability to move and go someplace else was accelerated by the pandemic too. Also, you weren't as embedded in your local social community because of the pandemic.

Eliza: I think for me, that was the biggest area of sacrifices.

Jeff: Yeah. I mean, that third point, and part of the reason we were able to successfully make this move is because Eliza and I have always been very good at building the We've never had a problem building a community and it's always hard to leave it. But when your options are do the right thing for your kids or let your children suffer, for me at least, it was a pretty simple choice.

Eliza: Yeah, but I think my community through COVID, I actually expanded my community through COVID. So a lot of my female friendships that were really important to me, I had built through volunteering. And all of those volunteering opportunities had just kind of moved online. So whether it was volunteering in Girl Scouts at the board level, all of that was easy to move online. I belonged to a professional women's organization, that moved online. I was mentoring, or facilitating, I think is probably a better word, a group of nonprofit executives that moved online. And then I leaned into my alumni association. As you know, Magda, that can be very addictive. And so that helped strengthen and build community for me. And that was all online.

Magda: But that meant it wasn't as difficult to think about leaving the house, the neighborhood. Did you have really deep communities around your kids' schools?

Eliza: There are two points. So we had one kid who was in public school. 

Jeff: And that's a whole thing on its own. But I do know this. You're not supposed to spend middle school inside with your parents. And that's what he did. He did middle school basically at home. So COVID hit the end of his sixth grade year. He moved to a completely new school for sixth grade, didn't get the support he needed through IEPs and 504s, and then was so advanced and they didn't take our word for it in math that all through sixth grade while he was still in person, he didn't get a schedule because they kept moving him up in math. And so he didn't get a permanent schedule until second semester and COVID hit two months later. And so he never had the ability to build community in his new school while he was there. And then he went home. Then he did awful hybrid because South Florida public schools went back in session October of ‘20. And so poor teachers were having to teach a classroom full of kids in masks, and then also teach the ones at home. It was not a great education experience. And then we opted for the second year. So seventh grade was hybrid. And then eighth grade, we just chose the all-virtual option because it was so awful. And he didn't want to go back to school that he hadn't built any community in.

Magda: Especially when they weren't even giving him a schedule because they didn't know what to do with him academically.

Eliza: Correct.

Magda: I feel like middle school is so challenging because the social aspects of it are so weird and sort of constantly in flux that if the academic part isn't just sort of boringly regular, it can really push kids kind of over the edge. 

Eliza: I think the purpose of middle school is to teach you how to fail when the stakes don't matter and to be able to get up and go back and face your peers and realize it's not the end of the world. And when you do it remotely, you lose all pieces of that.

Doug: It's a social thing too. It's the interactive. You're first starting to kind of push-pull with your own personality. You're developing your own sense of ego, your own sense of give and take with social interactions. And if that's gone... then you get to high school and you're lost. 

Jeff: And we see that with his high school class. I mean, he's in person here in Massachusetts and he's building his community here. But just the entire high school class, all the kids that “we did middle school during COVID cohort,” there are some clear social milestones that they missed.

Eliza: Yeah, we've been working a lot with him on how to take an in-person school friendship and translate it to a friendship beyond the boundaries of where you are with the person. How to invite somebody over to your house or how to set up a hang. You know, those pieces like that you would have probably figured out, Doug, to your point in the translation from separating from your parents setting up play dates to you setting up hangouts. Like that's middle school. And he missed that.

Doug: I mean, COVID fucked us all up one way or another. I mean, I think that's a universal problem that we're all coping with and rebuilding from. But in this particular situation, we're talking more about how individual fiefdoms, individual states are separating in terms of their policy, so much so that you felt you had to move to get away from it. And I think that's the real issue that I'm kind of gobsmacked by, the whole idea that a state becomes unlivable.

Eliza: Our middle child, who was non-binary, they were struggling with all the health care not being available to them because of state policy. And then our youngest, who has learning disabilities, but then is disproportionately gifted in math. 

Jeff: Enormously gifted in math.

Eliza: The school couldn't meet the needs. And that was a whole other odyssey where- 

Jeff: It took a year and a half of me harassing the principal of his school for two to three days a week to get the IEP ball rolling in Florida.

Magda: That's illegal.

Eliza: Yes, we know. And then we needed to hire lawyers to finally have the sit down with Miami-Dade Public Schools to even get the support, which in the end, they had no solutions for us as to what they could provide for high school, except “apply to these magnet schools in a lottery system and if he gets in, then we can support him, and if he doesn't, then we're not quite sure what your recommendation would be.”

Doug: Yeah. And what kind of medical diagnoses have there been, if any? 

Jeff: Our youngest has a processing disorder around written language. Now, he's gotten a lot of support since the diagnosis and he's doing much better. And he is, I think, above grade level now with reading and writing. But he was two grade levels back in eighth grade when he got his testing originally done. You know, he was reading and writing on the level of a sixth grader.

Magda: So I have to say, I don't think that that's that unusual. Like, it sounds like in Florida, they just didn't even know what to do with this kid. And to me, it's like–

Jeff: It wasn't that they didn't know what to do with it. The psychologists and the education experts and these people all knew what needed to be done. They just didn't have the resources to provide it.

Magda: Aha. All right.

Doug: Does Massachusetts have those resources?

Jeff laughs.

Eliza: So first of all, we were in the fourth largest school district in the country in Florida. What was interesting to us is where we lived in Florida, everything is done on a county level. School district is on a county level. Infrastructure set up is on a county level. And so that makes a difference versus in Massachusetts. everything is done on an individual town, village, city level. And so the school districts are much smaller and much more politics–

Jeff: Tailored to the local population.

Eliza: Correct. It's totally tailored. Like our middle child will be graduating in three weeks and it's on town green and the whole town shows up to graduate their graduates.

Magda: And how many kids are in their class?

Eliza: 166.

Magda: Okay. So yeah, there you go.

Jeff: I walked in to register our kids for school a few days after we arrived here. And I mentioned, oh, by the way, you know, one of our kids has a has an IEP. What do I need to do to get things started? And she says, “oh, nothing. I've got it taken care of, I'll talk to the person who's the head of our IEP, whatever the program's called.”

Eliza: “He'll be in touch.”

Jeff: I got a phone call within two days.

Eliza: No, no, no, no, no. Two hours. He called us that afternoon.

Jeff: I'm sorry. He called us that afternoon. I mentioned in that conversation that, oh, by the way, our middle child, who also has some concerns. And he said, great, I'll get them both set up for testing. They both had testing done within two weeks. We had a meeting within three.

Eliza: But the part that really, they took the plans. First, they took the plan.

Jeff: Yeah, they took the plan from Florida.

Eliza: They took one look at the plan for the youngest and they said, “Would you mind terribly if we just redid all the testing?” Yeah. No, no, we wouldn't mind at all. They're like, “We'll put this plan into effect, but we just don't think it's really complete testing. So we just want to redo the whole testing. And plus it's outdated.” We're like, yep, yep, we know. So that one was great that you paid for and we paid completely out of pocket in Florida at an exorbitant amount. 

Jeff: Oh, dear God. 

Eliza: I mean, it was great testing, but the school district can't do that. And then we come up here and we got as good testing–

Jeff: We got the same suite of testing that we paid, I don't know, I think it was three grand for in Florida. 

Eliza: Per child. 

Jeff: Per child.

Eliza: And then here it was done through the school district as it's supposed to. They begged to redo it. They implemented as quickly as possible. And this was the thing that got me, like. You know how you know your kids, like you know who they are, you know how they tick, and you know it's not always clear to the outside world how they operate. When the psychologist who did the testing in the school district here in Massachusetts, when she started breaking down how my kid ticks and how he operates and what challenges he must be experiencing. I mean, I don't cry that often, but I was in tears because I finally felt that somebody saw my kid for how his brain works.

Magda: Yeah.

Doug: Well, if you want to cry now, that would be great ratings by all means. 

Jeff: Yeah, yeah. We'll see what we can do about that for you. 

Doug: I mean, in general, I love four-person conversations because they are chaotic. And Magda, you're going to have a field day with the transcript. 

Magda: Oh, yeah. You're going to have a field day with the editing. Okay. I want to just break in here for a moment to say your first child was not sort of languishing in a box when all of this was happening. 

Jeff: He was in college. 

Magda: So he was doing fine in college. You know, kids always have their own foibles coming through high school anyway.

Eliza: He carried a lot of trauma from Florida. So he identifies as gender nonconforming. And only last summer did he go through all the therapy to deal with kind of what he calls the internalized baggage that he carries from just having that South Florida existence.

Doug: Well, here's the question, all right? Because you have three children now. And when you decided to have a family, because this podcast is all about like, “wait, how did this happen?” You know, I mean, when you are outnumbered by your children, you know, you're playing zone defense, and each of them has something that they're going through in this way, cognitive issues. non-heteronormative, however you want to categorize it. How do you as parents ramp up your abilities to accommodate your kids' needs so that you can represent them and advocate for them?

Eliza: I think it really started that we were on our own journey, right? So we like to call that the diagnoses in our family is kind of alphabet soup because like throw some letters together and we've got it. It started kind of with our journey. So yes, we had children and then we kept having children.

Jeff: And we had another one.

23:05

Eliza: And that was fine and everything. But, you know, yeah, at one point, you know, we were crazy because we had three children, five and under. And that's just physically taxing and a lot.

Jeff: Emotionally. 

Doug: You went for it. 

Jeff: There are years we don't remember.

Eliza: I have no memory of ever taking my children to the Lion King, but they proved to me that I did because they pulled out- 

Jeff: Pulled out the playbill from it.

Eliza: The playbill. It was like, no, Mom, we went. There's that component that sometimes you just put one foot in front of the other and you don't even realize what you're doing until it's hindsight, like 10 years later, and then you have gaps. We were dealing with a lot ourselves, right? Jeff got diagnosed in his mid-30s with ADD.

Jeff: Yeah.

Eliza: And we are so thankful for the psychiatrist that diagnosed him with ADD because his advice was, hey, when you get this diagnosis, this is going to have a huge impact to your marriage and to how you interact in the world. I don't care how strong your relationship with your spouse is, you might want to think about getting some marriage counseling. And so that kind of started like... a 10-year marriage therapy for us.

Jeff: Yeah. 

Doug: And how far into your marriage did this happen? When did the diagnosis happen?

Jeff: The diagnosis was 11 or 12 years in.

Eliza: Oh, to our marriage.

Jeff: To our marriage, yeah.

Eliza: 15 to our relationship.

Jeff: Yeah, 15 to our relationship. 

Doug: Did that surprise you at all, Eliza, having known him for half your life at that time?

Eliza: No, but a lot of things became super clear. Like, you know, now we can have lots of jokes like, how did I not know he had ADD when I purposely scheduled our wedding date on the anniversary of the day we met in person so he'd have fewer dates to remember? Maybe it was a clue.

Jeff: I don't know. I mean, it sounds sketchy to me. 

Doug: So it sounds like you were born to accommodate neurodivergence. 

Jeff: I wouldn't say that. I would say that Eliza is... 

Doug: I rescind the question. Never mind. We'll start over. 

Jeff: I would say that Eliza is very tuned in to the people she cares about and works very hard to be supportive of them, regardless of what's going on in their lives.

Eliza: But I will say our eldest child changed who I fundamentally am because he is a wonderful but super-quirky kid. And I had to figure out, was I going to be the kind of parent that I thought I would be, or was I going to be the kind of parent he needed me to be? And that was clear like 12 months in. But that was a growth odyssey for me in a way that I look back at who I was pre-parenting 22 years ago now, and I don't recognize who that person was. It really cracked me open in ways to have to think about things differently.

Jeff: Everybody has the parent they think they're going to be. And then you have kids. You know, and if you're observant at all, if you're empathetic at all, if you're smart at all, what you realize is that, oh my God, this child is an actual person. 

Magda: Right.

Jeff: With actual ideas and views on the world from an age long before you think they're going to have ideas of their own and views about the world, but they do.

Eliza: Jeff was so amazed at how opinionated our middle child was about shoe selection at age four.

Jeff: Oh my God. 

Doug: Well, the reason I ask that is people who are listening to this are relating to your situation in that we have children whose needs I couldn't have possibly anticipated. I have to stay ahead of the game so I can advocate for them when I need to. And your story is of a particular interest because you've taken extraordinary steps, moved across the country, and successfully created a better life for them. And so I want this to be a primer on how this current situation came to be.

Eliza: Our eldest child, because of his physical disabilities when he was born, faced a life or death situation. It's really easy to make decisions in a life or death situation because you choose life. That was the decision we had to make. Do we have surgery and he has a chance to live, or we don't have surgery and he definitely dies? That's not a choice. You just, yes, you sign the paperwork. But that paradigm sets you up to think about a lot of other parenting decisions in a really different way. So when the law in Florida was facing us, this wasn't a new decision that we'd had to make. It was definitely a situation of like, do we stay in a hostile environment where we are seeing the impact to their mental health? 

Jeff: Already. And it's about to get worse.

Eliza: Yeah, and it's about to get worse. And we know the statistics in the trans community for suicide, especially among teenagers. And now we won't have access to the care they need to support them. It's a non-issue. You're like, okay, I choose health.

Doug: Well, it sounds like, yeah, there's a bit of a baptism by fire there to the point where you were poised to act when you needed to act.

Eliza: And then I think there's one other piece. You talked about three children. So the one thing that we learned about with three kids, they don't all line up neatly for transition points. It just doesn't happen because you're dealing with too many factors, right. There's an exponential factoring when it comes to three plus kids. And so I think that because our eldest was at college and we were down now to two and And one was at a transition between 10th and 11th grade. And one was between 8th and 9th grade. We know in the few moments that we've had where everything's lined up, we know to jump on those moments. So we knew that the transition between 10th and 11th grade, it was either we jump now.

Jeff: Or we wait until after graduation.

Eliza: Or we wait two years. and we could see how quickly Florida landscape was changing within a few months, what would it look like in two years?

Jeff: Because we genuinely started talking about this in probably February or March of ‘22. I, at the time, was like, nope, we got to move. And Eliza says, well, let's see how things play out.

Eliza: I said, let's do our research. That's really different.

Jeff: Okay. Okay.

Doug laughs.

Eliza: So we started talking in February about it. And then we did our research and we set a deadline when we would make a decision.

Jeff: Yeah, we did.

Eliza: We'll make a decision by 4th of July, kind of claim our independence and

Magda: There are going to be people listening to this who are like, wait a minute, you decided that you needed to make a decision by 4th of July for a school year that was going to start at the end of August. Like that is already so much more risk-tolerant than a lot of people.

Doug: And that's my question I asked at the top of the show, like when it came time to choose a landing spot, because you're talking about all of these wonderful things that your children are enjoying now, did you know those were going to be in the place where you landed or was, are some of those parts surprises?

Eliza: No.

Doug: You were like, happy accidents? 

Jeff: We knew for a fact that moving from Florida to Massachusetts, our children would be in a better educational environment.

Eliza: Okay, but you have to go back a step, right?

Jeff: But let's go back a step.

Eliza: So we had to put in our criteria. We had to decide what were the criteria that we were going to go through about where we were going to land. So number one criteria was it had to have trans-friendly legislation. Well, you know, trans-friendly legislation cuts out most of the states in this country.

Jeff: At that point in time, I think it cut out 43 states.

Eliza: Right?

Doug: Wow. Really? 

Eliza: Yeah. 

Jeff: Yeah.

Magda: Minnesota, Massachusetts, and California. And I think it was like–

Eliza: Colorado.

Jeff: It's important to remember that this was not a lack of trans-hostile legislation. There had to be trans-friendly legislation on the books because a number of places that lacked trans-hostile legislation when we moved have it now.

Eliza: So that cut down the number of states immediately, right? And then the next piece was, okay, of those states, which one have excellent educational systems?

Jeff: Yeah, I think we were at Virginia, Colorado, and Massachusetts at that point.

Eliza: Maryland.

Jeff: Maryland? Maryland, too. Okay.

Eliza: Maryland, Massachusetts, and Colorado.

Jeff: Yeah.

Eliza: Then we looked, okay, where do we have family and or support systems in place where it will be easy to plug in and have community? But then that left Maryland, Colorado, and Massachusetts. And then my boss said, “We're happy to have you move. We're thrilled to support you in this, but our headquarters are East Coast. I am going to ask you to fly back.” And so we were like, bye-bye, Colorado.

Jeff: Yeah. That was sad for me. I love Colorado.

Eliza: Lovely to visit, but not my style.

Jeff: Yeah.

Eliza: And then the last real piece of criteria was my father is aging. He has dementia. And Maryland, we had a really strong family by choice support system because we'd lived in D.C. in our early 20s. And then Massachusetts, we had my sister. So yes, we did our research, but having criteria of the things that you value in place makes your decision-making a lot easier and a lot less overwhelming.

Doug: Just so I'm clear, your dad is in the DC area?

Eliza: No, no, no. He was in Florida with us, but we wanted to be able to move him. And so because my sister lives in Massachusetts, that tipped the scales so that my father could be close to both of us.

Doug: Great. That's a huge deal. As Magda and I will tell you, we each have parents very far away.

Magda: So I didn't realize that there were other places you were looking at. I thought it was your sister was here. And I should note that your sister lives in the town right next to the town that I have moved to.

Doug: Did you guys like rekindle your friendship because of that? For example, do you think you would have come to the wedding if you hadn't moved to Massachusetts and kind of reconnected with her? 

Magda: I don’t know, I mean, we were–

Eliza: Magda was the cool kid that doesn't realize she's cool. I was not the cool kid, have never been the cool kid, and that's just fine. You don't always have to be the cool kid. So I think that we rekindled our connection through the Alumni Association volunteering through COVID that moved online. And then, yeah, it just seemed like we were both landing here kind of at the same time.

Jeff: Basically, yeah. 

Doug: When you talk about the experience your kids have had since you moved, how much of these benefits did you anticipate and how many have been happy surprises? 

Jeff: The IEP, 504, we knew that stuff because we were looking at a number of different towns to live in before we moved up here. And I talked to representatives from several of the schools and all of them were very forward. “Oh, okay, you have this thing going on. Thank you for letting us know. We will have a plan in place. It will be taken care of.” We also knew moving from Florida to Massachusetts, I'm 90% certain if we were to put our children in the worst school in Massachusetts, it would still be better than any school we could have put them in in Florida.

Eliza: Well, and then there was a third factor, which was we had one kid coming from an independent school in Florida that's nationally recognized. And we had the other one coming from the Miami-Dade virtual public school system. And so, those two, we were really looking for how can we provide the better education for both. I think that we got lucky.

Jeff: Oh, yeah.

Eliza: Because a lot of it, then the other factor was I wasn't going to buy a house sight unseen because I may be many things, but I'm not that level of crazy. Yes, I can uproot our family and we can move across the country between 4th of July and end of August, but we're going to rent. So then that determined which school district we ended up in. But, of course, we controlled which towns we were willing to look at rental properties in.

Magda: And the dogs were a limiting factor, too.

Eliza: And we had two large dogs, which were an exceedingly limiting factor. That is correct.

Doug: And how old are the two younger kids? 

Eliza: Now 16 and 18. 

Jeff: One's graduating from high school.

Eliza: That's not an age. 16 and 18.

Jeff: Yeah, fine. Fine. 

Eliza: Graduating from high school is like an experience, not an age.

Jeff: It happens when you're around 18.

Eliza: Not for everyone.

Jeff: I know. 

Doug: So to what extent were the kids involved in this conversation or up to Massachusetts?

Eliza: They were involved in the conversations early on. We didn't need full buy-in. At the end of the day, we're still the parents. But some level of buy-in, which they were like, “yeah, get out.” And we advised them kind of like, once we knew the states we were considering, like we talked to them about that. And then we took them through, once we decided on Massachusetts, we took them through kind of virtual tours. of different towns. It's amazing. YouTube has so much online to be able to watch, right? Like, oh, let's discover this town. Let's discover this town. And especially like tours of the high schools that they would be potentially going to. And that really helped deal with like some of the anxiety that unknownness might bring. I probably brought some of my professional lens, because I'm in change management, to that discussion. Like the way that you address anxiety and unknown is just by making things less unknown. Since they've been here, I mean, I think actually since our middle child is the one that's graduating, we've been attending a lot of “last ofs” type of thing during the last couple of weeks. And I think their last voice is, The recital that was earlier this week, I think the teacher said it best, was, “I can't believe you've only been here two years. Your contributions feel so much greater than two years.” Which surprised me given that this is a town and a school district where people go from kindergarten all the way through 12th grade.

Jeff: Yeah, most of their peers have been attending the schools in this town since they started attending school.

Eliza: Right. And that's two grammar schools, one middle school and one high school. I mean, it's not large, right? So these kids have all known each other. And yet the welcomeness, the ability for our kids to take on leadership roles, be included in things, join things. It's just like I've never seen a transition happen that fast. It was just so interesting that my kids just two years in could still get that same experience here.

Doug: The two really adventurous children are still in play.

Eliza: Oh, yeah.

Jeff: Yeah. 

Doug: Well, now, so you spent 18 months in Massachusetts. How have you seen your middle child kind of blossom in this new environment, and what discussions have you had with them about what their experience is?

Eliza: The experience has been one of just relaxing into self.

Jeff: Yeah.

Eliza: I mean, there's a lot that I love about South Florida. There's the vibrancy, there's... 

Jeff: The multiculturalism. 

Eliza: Absolutely. Diversity, for sure. But there is very strict gender normative... 

Jeff: Lines. 

Eliza: Ways that you show up physically. And they rejected a lot of femaleness or femininity pieces. And it's been nice to see as they've come back to Massachusetts that they've just kind of relaxed into their body and they are who they are. They do have a name they have selected. They've been using it for, we've all been using it for five years.

Jeff: Four or five years now, yeah. We keep offering to help them transition and change their name and they are ambivalent about it.

38:40

Eliza: And that's an interesting transition because in Florida, they were so invested in changing their name that their Girl Scout Gold Award was actually about helping people–

Jeff: –legally change their name in the state of Florida, which is a difficult and arduous process. 

Eliza: Unless you're getting married.

Jeff: Unless you're getting married. And then it's super simple.

Eliza: We've now moved to Massachusetts where you can just show up on your local city government page and there's just a link and you just fill it out and then you have to post something in a local newspaper and then you're done. And they haven't moved to do so. And now, like recently, we had a conversation. They're like, well, I don't know that I will. And part of that is because it's been so easy for them. The school just automatically uses their name of choice and it's not an issue.

Magda: That's so interesting to hear. It must have been really, really gratifying to you guys to be observing it happening.

Eliza: Yeah, I think it goes back to the same experience that I had with our youngest in terms of the psychologist seeing him through his learning challenges. It's the community is just accepting of who they are, however they're showing up. They feel seen just as they are.

Doug: Well, now that we've established that your plans for the Massachusetts Chamber of Commerce.

Jeff: Sorry. 

Doug: I mean, it's a great story. And I think that's why I was really excited to talk to you today. Just because any time you can frame something as a success story, which I see this as, you kind of want to lay out the breadcrumbs a bit for other people to recognize this is possible. It's a shame it has to exist. It's a shame that our individual states, given the decline of overall federalism, You know, it's a shame now that these decisions fall upon individual jurisdictions and make things that much more difficult. If someone listening here has a similar problem, what kind of advice would you give them? What have you learned that you didn't anticipate apart from the fact that happy things happen?

ELiza: Be willing to do the sacrifices that are needed. The part that we haven't talked about, I mean, obviously we come from a place of financial privilege that we could do this. But it still wasn't without hardship. And we tapped our 401k to do this. We took out loans for our eldest’s college that we didn't freshman year just so that we could finance the move. We had extreme privilege that made this all possible. The families I worry about and the teens I worry about are the ones that it's not possible because their job is in person. They don't have those means and they can't move and they're at the mercy of the state. So at the end of the day, if you can move for your kids, all of you will benefit. When you take the steps to make it so that your family can breathe, we're individually happier. And I never thought I'd say that about someplace with winter. Ever.

Doug: So many more long pants. Parkas.

Eliza: I just think it's funny that you got here and the winter started to be less severe.

Jeff: Oh, yeah. That has been a thing.

Eliza: My brother-in-law says it's the Florida effect. And I said, I'm not responsible for global weirding. I'm sorry.

Magda: People here have this sort of memory that in their heads, this is a very cold, very snowy place. And I have not experienced this at all as having been anything except mild winters.

Doug: Well, you also mentioned to Eliza that now the family is reunited in a bit. You say your father is coping with dementia right now. How long has that been an issue in the family and how's that going as far as caring for him?

Eliza: He was diagnosed 12 years ago, 12, 13 years ago. He's at a center specifically for Alzheimer's care. It's amazing when you move from a state that rejected Medicare to the extensions of Medicare through the Affordable Care Act, and you move to a state that embraced it, that his cost of living on a monthly basis, even through the care center, is significantly less. We didn't put that into our mental calculations in the move, but he is getting better care for less money. And that eases our burden completely.

Doug: What kind of care is that? What kind of care does he need? And how often does he see his grandkids?

Eliza: No, he's living fully in an Alzheimer's locked place. He doesn't, he, he, he's moved through all the stages of, of, you know, anger, denial, et cetera, et cetera, independent living through COVID. He then ended up having to be transitioned into full care. And now he lives in a, 

Jeff: In an Alzheimer's specific facility that everybody there has Alzheimer's. It's a topic for another time, but it's a brutal disease.

Eliza: COVID robbed us of the last couple of years of my dad as his own person because we couldn't rely on him to be strict about masking and those pieces. And again, when you talk about prioritizing the health of your children, because our eldest, one of the physical disabilities he had when he was born was his trachea and his esophagus were connected and he needed surgery to repair that. So he's always been more prone to respiratory illnesses. enter COVID where suddenly, I mean, we just, we saw that as an existential threat to our family. And we were, I mean, we locked down full stop. We completely locked down in a state that didn't that much. And so for us, like, I just, I couldn't risk seeing my father because I didn't know what he was going to bring into the mix. And I couldn't risk that for my son. And it was again, it was one of those like critical life moments where you think the idea that I would ever have to pick between my father and my child is not the thing you want to consider.

Magda: Right.

Eliza: This was the real thought that we had four years ago. It was I don't see my dad and I know I'm going to not get those last years with him or I have to prioritize my son, my son's health over my father's health. Now, we got lucky. We were good friends with an ER doctor. And if anything happened, she said she would go and she would sit with him. So I at least knew that I had like that piece because I knew I couldn't do it.

Doug: Yeah, that's the crux of the sandwich generation, right? When you have to weigh these things, as horrible a process as it is. How has your grieving process been along those lines? I mean, you've kind of watched him slip away. How have you processed that?

Eliza: I think there were two pieces. So my mom died 10 years ago of leukemia. And it kind of coincided similarly time that we started to notice my dad's decline. So in some ways, I feel like I lost my mom and my dad kind of at the same time. So that grieving process kind of coincided. And then I think Jeff is right. During COVID, the way I prepared myself for the idea that he would get COVID because he was living in a Florida retirement community. 

Jeff: And he wasn't paying attention to anything. 

Eliza: And we couldn't guarantee that he was paying attention. So I kind of had to go through that mental process of like, okay, he's gone. Having said that, of course, physically, he's not gone. But by the time we came out and we could then revisit and vaccines were in place and so on and so forth, he'd lost a lot. You know, he doesn't know who I am anymore, et cetera, et cetera. So I really kind of lost him through that process. And I grieved him through that process. And now, obviously, he's still someone I physically recognize and I still care for. But it's like an echo of who he was.

Doug: That's an extraordinary thing to grieve someone who's still here.

Eliza: Yes.

Doug: My aunt just died of Alzheimer's about two months ago. And she's had this and lived in a facility like that. Now, Jeff, we haven't talked about your family much either. I mean, what's your status? What are your parents up to, and to what extent are you involved in their care? 

Jeff: My parents live in rural Wisconsin.

Eliza: Jeff's dad is a retired physician, and they are very tight in the physician community in the town that they live in, which is very hospital-centric. That and the dairy is the income for the town, the hospital and the dairy. So I don't know that you can get more Wisconsin than that. But, you know, they're both still very mobile. And my parents were a good 10, 15 years older than Jeff's parents. So we're going to do this in stages, the sandwiching in stages.

Doug: When you see what Eliza's gone through and recognize that you might be a phase behind Jeff, what are you gleaning from all this? And how are you preparing for the inevitable, whatever happens?

Eliza: Well, your parents are better planners than mine.

Jeff: Yeah. My parents are much better planners than Eliza's. Eliza's dad was an entrepreneur and just kind of always assumed he was going to entrepreneur his way through whatever he was doing.

Eliza: Yeah. His retirement plan was that my mother was going to outlive him.

Jeff: Yeah. And then she was going to collect life insurance and that's how that was going to work.

Eliza: Jeff's parents have planned what our involvement is supposed to be and has informed us. And we have all these sealed manila envelopes that were sent via certified mail with legal documentation. And when specific episodes happen, is when we are supposed to do things, and we haven't hit any of those yet.

Magda: Are you supposed to not open the envelopes until certain things happen?

Eliza: Accurate statement, Magda. Accurate. 

Magda: Do you have any idea of what's in those envelopes, or is this like you guys are going to be living inside the movie Knives Out?

Jeff: No, no, no. Let me put it to you this way. I've never been terribly good at listening to my parents, and that's about all I'll say on that subject.

Magda: Okay. 

Eliza: We look at kind of like dealing with my parents as like the trial run and the research phase.

Jeff: And that is the other thing. We will be much better prepared for whatever comes next with my parents, just because we've been through a lot with Eliza's already.

Eliza: It's weird being the eldest in both families.

Jeff: Yeah.

Eliza: Because we're the ones that encounter things first.

Doug: Are you? That's interesting. 

Jeff: Yeah, that was a fun thing.

Magda: You couldn't tell from their jockeying for dominance?

Doug: Just like you and me. And I used to enjoy the fact that when we had just the one child, we were a family of three oldest children. 

Jeff: The big mistake I see a lot of people making is they assume that if anything changes in the circumstance or in the way that something happens, that all prior knowledge is now no longer useful. But you can always adapt what you did last time to whatever's going on this time or learn lessons from the last thing to help you through the next thing. They may not be, you know, it may not be 100% compatible, but it will at least give you the option to figure some things out.

Eliza: Well, and play to your strengths.

Jeff: Yeah, absolutely.

Eliza: Right? Like, so I'm really good at the storytelling people connective piece. So I hold that piece. My sisters kick ass at filling out forms.

Jeff: Which is a skill, A, in and of itself, and B, thank God somebody is.

Eliza: And if something needs to be done and executed in person, Jeff's our guy, right? And then our brother-in-law, oh, thank God, he just raises our spirits. He's responsible for feeding us and nurturing us and providing drink. And so like, it takes all four of us- 

Magda: He’s also a little more calm.

Eliza: Yeah, no, he's totally more zen. He's jovial. So it helps. So he raises our spirits when the rest of us are tearing our hair out. So we've learned, like, you've got to play to your strengths. And I think, you know, Jeff and I have done that throughout the course of our relationship. You know, you just, you got to figure out what you're good at and then just do more of that and not try to play in the areas that you're not as good at. And then the parts that are really challenging, because definitely we can't cover everything, then we try to do those together. You think that's right?

Jeff: Yeah. Yeah. 

Doug: So here's my question then, which has been more beneficial to your marriage, 10 years of couples counseling or two decades of caregiving? 

Jeff: Oh, the 10 years of couples counseling. We wouldn't have made it through two decades of caregiving without the, without the 10 years of couple counseling.

Eliza: Well, but we did like 10 years, then 10 years of marriage counseling and now 10 years.

Jeff: Yeah. Yeah. No, no, no debate there. Look, the story I tell about our couples counseling is we had some friends who were going through some stuff in their marriage and we referred to our counselor. And their response was that our counselor was really expensive. And then they got divorced. And the husband in the couple was complaining to me at one point about how much they were spending on the divorce. And it was 10 times what we spent on our very expensive counselor. 

Elliza: Right. Let's be fair because there are very good reasons to get divorced. We just didn't have those. What we had, what's that movie phrase? Like a problem to communicate. Like there's some fun phrase that I'm not good at.

Magda: “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”

Jeff: Yeah.

Eliza: We had a lot of that.

Magda: What movie is that from? Doug?

Doug: Cool Hand Luke.

Eliza: We had a failure to communicate effectively. So we needed to find better communicative strategies. That's what we did. We, we, we built out our toolbox and,

Magda: That other couple didn't need to spend any money on couples therapy because the idea that staying together was not worth the money to them, that was their life or death decision, right? I'm sure they would rather have not spent the money on getting divorced. Like your ideal situation is you don't spend the money on staying together and then you don't really have to pay very much to get divorced either. 

Eliza: Correct. 

Magda: Yeah. Right. I feel like we had an arc in this conversation and it's come to kind of a natural conclusion. Like there's all kinds of other stuff that we could talk about. Like we could talk about menopause. We could talk about living in a neighborhood where some of the streets are so steep that if there was a deep winter, you'd be completely fucked. Mike and I, every time we come to your house, Eliza and Jeff, there's one street and one of us says, “Oh, I wouldn't want to have to drive up that in the ice.” 

Eliza: It's the hill that comes down. That's why I always remind myself that the street goes in two directions.

Magda: Exactly. So usually we ask people, Oh, if our listeners want to find out more about your story, where should they go? But I mean, I don't know. Do you have like, are there online resources for like people who are having the sinking realization that they're going to have to uproot their entire lives to save their kids? 

Eliza: I will plug one resource. If you're in the state of Florida and you are looking to legally change your name, please visit the transsocial.org website and see the amazing work of TransSocial as an organization and of our Gold Award Girl Scout, who I don't think realized how revolutionary their Gold Award is.

Jeff: Pretty sure they still don't realize it, but we're going to not push that button right now.

Eliza: But it is their work of making it easy for people who are trans in Florida and want to legally change their name so that it aligns with how they recognize themselves and that the world can recognize who they are. All the resources in one place.

Magda: That's delightful.

Doug: The other resource is I-95. Yes, I-95, the route out of Florida.

Eliza: It's true. You know, it's interesting to us that we live about the same distance from I-95 now as we did when we lived in Florida.

Magda: I think we should put in a plug for I-75 because that also goes down into Florida and it takes you up to Michigan, which has active protective language for trans people also.

Jeff: So the other part about our trip up here is that we got on I-95 about three miles from our house and then drove that all the way up here. You know, just one road. Thank you, Eisenhower, I guess.

Doug: So the question is, how many South of the Border signs did you encounter?

Eliza and Jeff together: All of them!

Jeff: Yeah, I think we can make a plug for South of the Border as well.

Doug: That's for those of you who aren't familiar with I-95, just be prepared for a lot of sombreros once you get down to the Carolinas.

Eliza: It's where we always stop for ice cream.

Doug: Absolutely! Well, Eliza and Jeff, it's been great to talk to you about this. I'm really glad this potentially problematic journey has worked out okay for you. And I'm really glad you guys came on. Both of you came on to offer your alternate realities and how you perceived it.

Jeff: I would say we could have made this move and it could have ended badly for us if we hadn't focused on the stuff that was going well. And it's not in kind of a Pollyanna way, but just things got better.

Eliza: We did spend the first two months waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Jeff: Oh, yeah. And then we learned what the other shoe was.

Eliza: Winter.

Jeff: Yeah, winter. Winter is the other shoe.

Doug: The other galosh.

Eliza: My sister and I joke that my family's de facto motto is, “there's never a cloud so dark that we can't find the silver lining.” And I kind of take that approach to transitions because if you don't focus in on that silver lining, the darkness of the cloud will completely overwhelm you. If we spent too much time thinking about how big a thing we were doing, we wouldn't have done it.

Doug: And that's, I think, an overall theme for much of our discussions, the idea of just be open to change and be prepared to handle it once it comes and recognize that change is inevitable. So you might as well put your elbow pads on and roll with it.

Eliza: That's the truth, I think, for Gen X. We have experienced so much change so rapidly. And I know that our kids are experiencing it at an even more rapid pace, and I can't even imagine that. But that's the piece, Doug, is, you know, our grandparents would say, you know, death and taxes. But I think for us, it's death, taxes, and change.

Doug: Where's your family from, Jeff? Where's that surname come from?

Jeff: Sweden.

Doug: Lovely. I went to Sweden two years ago, and the only time in my life I was pickpocketed. In the Stockholm train station.

Eliza: Wow.

Doug: Yeah. 20 years in New York, not once. Then I go to Stockholm and zoop! But the cool part is I kept my passport, and everything I needed was in my phone. I was on my way to the airport.

Eliza: Oh, thank God.

Doug: And I still got home without my wallet. I thought it was unbelievable. Anyway, Eliza and Jeff, thanks so much for coming on to talk about this and congratulations. I wish you all the best. It's an inspirational story and I appreciate you sharing it.

Eliza: Thank you.

Jeff: Thank you.

Eliza: We don't think of it as inspirational, but if it can help someone, certainly that's worth it.

Jeff: I don't think inspirational stories ever feel inspirational when you're in the middle of them.

Doug: Yeah, from the outside, it's a great story, and I'm really glad that it's out there. Nothing like real life to help galvanize a pairing.

Jeff: Yeah. 

Doug: And thank you for listening to Episode 48 of the When The Flames Go Up podcast with Magda Pecsenye Zarin and me, Doug French. Our guests, plural, have been Eliza Fendell and Jeff Oberg. When The Flames Go Up is a production of Halfway Noodles, LLC, and is available on all the usual platforms and at whentheflamesgoup.substack.com. We are a listener-supported enterprise, so please subscribe for our weekly episode every Wednesday and for our Friday newsletter. If you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, please leave us a review there. That helps a lot. Thanks again for listening. We will see you next time. Until then, have a great week. Bye-bye.

Magda: I'm about to sneeze.

Doug: I thought your ears were popping.

Magda: Maybe not. No, I was like.

Jeff: Thank you for the warning.

Magda: He was reading out that last part and I could feel it. And I was like, “oh, God.”