Philadelphia traumatized us...

...not the city itself, but the multitude of negative experiences we had in our six years here...

Even our two boys remark that they don't like Philly. I'm sure they were also impacted by what their parents went through. I blogged all of it (and I'll include links later), but here is a recap, motivated by our quick weekend visit to see him singing in Reading!

From a chaotic year and a half of unbelievable conflict between my husband and the hard-headed and utterly inefficient Hispanic "pastor" of our close-knit but complex Brazilian congregation (immigration situation woes were the least of the troubles there) -- a conflict that was so troubling that he spent several late nights recounting it in detail to his brothers, to a point that it became a joke in our family...

...To buying a catastrophic fixer-upper house and two months later, on the day the first mortgage payment was sent, K being laid off. He was rehired, but six months later decided to walk away and come back to academia...

From having a 50% reduction in income when he started a second post-doc and facing the prospect of losing our house* (the same one we spent around 30K fixing -- roof, siding, flooring, appliances, bathroom, etc with K's severance package money)...

... To a demoralizing and depression-inducing conflict regarding our small church school where I "worked" for a year, but where I no longer was welcome to help (quite the contrary). Not to mention that the head-teacher questioned my mothering abilities and effectiveness in front of other people (the leadership of the church) behind my back and not only no key defended me, but I had no chance of defending myself against her accusations.

All that followed by an extremely hard year of cyber-schooling the boys and then... finally!!! Selling the house for a good price and moving.

Too bad the we lost our cat during the move, which traumatized me (and the boys too) even further... Sigh...

In any case, our troubles with this city and state go well beyond the always present annoyance with how the roads and highways are extremely poorly designed and how hard it is to get anywhere, how ugly North Philly (where we go visit friends & the aforementioned church) is, how bad traffic is, etc.

Of course we have good memories, good friends, and we love the cultural side of the city, but we just have a really heavy negative baggage that is associated with that time and this place. I don't know if we'll ever be able to get rid of that. Our feelings change over the years (and I have mostly gotten over losing my cat), but every time we come back we can't help but think back...

Gotta go to the concert now! I'll let you know how it goes.

* Thankfully we were saved by a renegotiation made possible by the financial crisis bail out... Phew!!