Get ready for our most heartfelt post where we spill our guts about our feelings and talk about how life's changes can shake up our wellbeing.🥹
It feels as though I’m in the middle of a hurricane or a sea storm where you try to breathe but everything around doesn’t seem to let you. Moving abroad can be exciting , but also suffocating at times. Even more when you split the time between a full time job, raising a toddler, keeping your dog alive and organising everything for the famous D day: the day we officially move to a new country. The day we got confirmation that we were going to a new country was very exciting. But as seasoned expats, we knew planning was crucial to the success of this endeavour. We’ve done that 10 years ago when we moved from Brazil to Canada and prior to that, from Brazil to Spain.
The thing that made us more anxious this time around, was our daughter and our dog. One thing is moving abroad as young adults, with a couple of belongings and lots of enthusiasm . Another thing is doing it in a stress free manner for the whole family. Well, I can attest that stress-free is the impossible task.
As much excitement one can have for a project like that, the worries about decluttering, organising paperwork for the family, special paperwork and certificates for the dog and trying to keep up with the routine so the little one doesn’t feel much the changes around her, for sure it affects all of us somehow.
Ok, but first things first: How did we end up in Sweden?
We always liked the idea of experiencing new cultures and actually living it. The notion of being part of a new place and experiment everyday a new way of working, studying and living is something that fuels up our existence. Ok, too philosophical maybe but reality is, we ever felt at ease in our so called home country. Never felt completely home.
Thus, when we met, we instantly had the connection that moving abroad, was the great goal of our lives. After our first attempt living abroad, from Spain we moved back to Brazil to reset and find a new place to call home: Canada! For almost 10 years Canada has been our home and we did fell in love with Canada. It was an amazing country for immigrants to start a new life. And still is one of the most open and organised countries in the world in terms of welcoming immigrants. They really need people to fill up those freezing lands, furthermore, they need talented and skilled people to help spin the economy wheel.
We started our Canadian lives in Toronto and after 4 years, we moved to Montreal. Although we loved both cities, during the pandemic we made a huge mistake to move from the city to the suburbs. We though that we needed a bigger space, the dog and our daughter would enjoy a big backyard and we , could try to have that Canadian suburban life, where you need a car to go everywhere. Wasn’t our lifestyle and we struggled to see it when we made this decision. Don’t get me wrong, we had this beautiful detached house, with humongous backyard (the dog loved it) but we, as working adults with a baby, no family around to lend us a hand, we didn’t gauge the amount of work it would require to keep the house functioning. Here’s our season by season challenges: winter time we had the brutal winter and all the snow removal; during beautiful autumn, we had an absurd of leaves falling that we had to rake and collect so the grass wouldn’t die or the backyard wouldn’t smell as a sewer due to the rotten leaves. During spring, we had pollen and muddy grass after the winter defrosting. Summer, oh short Canadian summer, we loved it, but it was so short and sometimes was time for travelling to visit family, so no keeping up with the yard nor the house.
With all that, we were a bit torn about the idea of keeping up with this suburban life that wasn’t cut for us. We then decided that going back to live in a condo in a more urban area would be more suitable to our lifestyle. With roaring real estate market prices (read here our post about real estate market on Canada), we knew we wouldn’t be able to get back to the city, unless it was a different city. Then, we started to look into options: back to Toronto (laugh nervously…the most expensive city in Canada), then other cities in Ontario, like Waterloo or Ottawa were great options.
Well, and Europe always sounded nice to us. Sweden, honestly wasn’t on the radar, but a job opportunity came and we decided to grab it. The goal was to get there, start a new life and if we didn’t like the life there, we could stick around for some time or get back to Canada. Which was always a good option for us. Like I said, we always felt at home in Canada.
The months before arriving in Sweden: It all started with the confirmation that husband got the job in Stockholm. Immediately we stared to plan the next months and list all the things that needed to be done and gone: gathering the paperwork for the visas; ponder the options of renting vs selling our house; selling the car, organising documents for the dog to travel and start researching for daycare and a place to stay.
Luckily, Jose’s new job, they had a relocation service that helped a lot with the Sweden side of the things.
So for us, it was more about getting everything sorted on the Canadian side, which wasn’t a simple task.
Like I said, we had to make a few decisions about the house and talk to the bank about the remaining of our mortgage, we still had a good amount of debt with them and selling would free us of this but meant that we wouldn’t get much on the selling of the property. Whereas renting, we could keep the house, but we would have to manage the tenants from abroad or get an agency to take care of this. We made the math and it was easier to sell than rent, although we wanted to keep something in Canada.
With the decision of selling it, I started the declutter process slowly. Although I knew that on the final weeks and days in the house it would be difficult to get rid of some things, I wanted to make it in a way the the little one wouldn’t feel much what was going on. And here, my friends is when I really understood how much a toddler is capable of understanding things around them. We, as adults, or at least me, tend to think they don’t always understand what is happening but they do.
The only thing is that they don’t exactly know how to express that. Once some furniture started to “disappear” from the house, she started to ask: where this, where that? And I had to explain to her that we were going to a new house and we wouldn’t need most of the things there. But this didn’t make a good impression and her behaviour hanged (for worse) dramatically.
About our belongings, the reality was that we didn’t want to ship all our Ikea furniture to the land of Ikea. It seemed a bit stupid, to say the least. We just took the essentials. And even though I’ve worked really hard to make it smooth and talk a lot to the little one about the move and the new place we were moving, it was extremely difficult for her to understand it.
After all the sorting, packing, organizing, we got a decent deal on the house. Now was just making life adjustments here and there, till the day we would travel.
Jose was already in Sweden at this point, and myself, little one and dg stayed to finish up the packing. We decided to do that for 2 reasons: I wanted to stay at my job until w would travel and we wanted t keep little one at daycare as much as possible.
In that sense, we succeeded, as the routine was almost normal, except daddy was missing. Friends are an amazing thing and this is something I’ll always absolutely miss the most from Canada: the good people that crossed our lives and made such a difference even more in our final weeks in the cold lands. the last things before setting foot to the new country, was to sell the car and get dog’s paperwork.
We are adjusting to life in Sweden. We’re learning the language, getting kid enrolled in daycare, getting the notion of the living costs here. It's not necessarily good or bad, but we feel a bit out of sorts. We're in the process of establishing a new routine and exploring everything that this beautiful city of Stockholm has to show t us. One thing I can say (spoil alert to another post here), their pastries are out of this world!
Soon we will find our way here and get life on track again…till the next adventure, maybe!
ciao!
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