We Moved to Milwaukee Without a Plan and It Broke Everything Open

July 2025. Moving truck. Two kids. Two dogs. Minivan pointed east. We bought a house sight-unseen — Mike did the FaceTime tour, I nodded along from 1500 miles away and said yes because at some point you either trust your partner or you don’t. No friends waiting for us. No real plan beyond “let’s try something different and see what happens.” We were either brave or completely unhinged. Jury’s still out.

Why We Left California

I loved Long Beach. Genuinely. Perfect weather. The food is insane. The beach is literally right there. You just walk to it.

But the cost of living was eating us alive. Not in some romantic “struggling artists in California” way — in a “both of us working full-time plus side gigs just to pay for a house with thin walls where angry neighbors pound on the wall because our kids exist” way. We wanted a yard. We wanted space where Miles and Zelda could be loud without someone threatening to call the landlord. We wanted our life to not be constant financial panic.

That’s not a California problem. That’s a California prices problem, and those are two very different things.

Mike’s Midwest and he’d been talking about going back for years. I’m California-through-and-through and’d never lived anywhere else. The idea terrified me. But there’s this weird moment where terror and excitement feel identical, and you just pick one and commit.

The First Month Was Brutal

I’m not going to make this sound romantic. The first month in Milwaukee, I cried. A lot. Like, ugly-crying in the Target parking lot because I couldn’t find the cereal aisle.

Miles was adjusting to a new school. Zelda was adjusting to a new school. I didn’t know where anything was. The house needed work. I missed my friends. I missed knowing which taco place was the good one without Googling it.

Then It Started Clicking

Somewhere around month two, I stopped comparing Milwaukee to California and started actually seeing what’s here. And it’s good. Like, unexpectedly good.

The coffee shops. I’m not being precious — I’m from Long Beach, where good coffee is a cult. Milwaukee’s got shops that compete. Shorewood’s got shops that compete. I found my writing spots in weeks. Three different coffee shops now where I can sit for four hours and the staff doesn’t make me feel guilty for not buying another latte. (I do anyway.)

Lake Michigan isn’t the Pacific Ocean. It doesn’t pretend to be. It’s huge and moody and beautiful, and the kids are obsessed. I run along the lake path and my brain actually clears — probably because there’s fewer people and more space to think without the constant hum of social media playing in your head.

The community is smaller. Which means people actually know each other. Shorewood feels like a small town that accidentally got built next to a real city. The librarians know the kids’ names. The hardware store guy asks about the dogs.

I didn’t think that would matter to me. Turns out it does.

What It Did to the Work

Nobody tells you this part: moving breaks your routine so completely that it breaks everything else open.

In California, I was grinding. Marketing for other people’s companies. Building other people’s systems. Too busy and too tired to build anything of my own. I was stuck in the machine.

The move forced a hard reset. Not cute. In a “everything you were doing before doesn’t work anymore, so you either figure something new out or you break” way.

We had savings. We had lower expenses. For maybe the first time in ten years, I had actual time. Space. Headspace.

I don’t think any of that happens if we’d stayed in Long Beach. Not because California’s bad for building — obviously it isn’t, millions of people build things there. But I needed the disruption. I needed to be uncomfortable enough to stop drifting and start actually choosing.

Nine Months Later

Miles has a school that gets him. Zelda’s thriving. OohBae Kitchen is real. I’m teaching and writing and building stuff instead of just surviving. Mike is happy in a way I haven’t seen in years.

The winters are exactly as bad as people say. January was a personality test I failed spectacularly. But you get a good coat, you learn to layer, and you realize Wisconsin winter has one weird side effect: there’s nothing to do but work and drink coffee. So you either get productive or you go feral. We’re split down the middle.

Was it chaotic? Absolutely. Scary? Completely. Do I regret it?

Not for a second.