I can understand your wife’s feelings. My first job after grad school was in San Jose and I ended up spending 12 years there before moving back to the Midwest about 9 years ago. The first few years back were rough as I was constantly nostalgic for my time there. If not for my wife and kids I might have succumbed to the temptation to go back.
I have a love/hate with Cali. I love the mountains, ocean, weather, the redwoods on one side and the chaparral on the other and so much beautiful variety in nature within just a few hours drive. I enjoyed the intellectual engagement I had at work and the openness to new ideas and trying new things, the wide variety of cultures mixing from around the world is exciting and so many options for good food. I had a wonderful church community that was very conservative, in part because we all ran from the liberal parishes that were the norm.
I traded that for a small town in the Midwest where people are very practical and don’t get interested in new ideas easily, they tend to be very insular and parochial. The weather is too cold in the winter and too humid in the summer, and too unpredictable to make any outdoor plans beyond the next couple days. I can drive for hours in any direction and the scenery won’t change much, just go from slightly more hilly with trees to flatter and few trees. I don’t particularly like my coworkers but even if I wanted to go out to lunch with them, none of the restaurants are very good or exciting. The local parishes were lukewarm and there weren’t many choices with such a relatively small Catholic community in the area.
On the other hand I have learned to accept these things because it is better here, much better for my wife and kids. The world is taking an exponentially faster journey into insanity in recent years, with California as an epicenter. Many California friends have fled the state so I wouldn’t even have that circle to return to. Here I have given my family a large home with several acres to roam so that my younger kids have grown up in a radically different environment than the older kids. We are setting up a homestead with chickens, goats, rabbits and just started beekeeping. I have taken up woodworking with tools I never would have had space for in Cali. Those practical, insular locals don’t have any time for the insanity running rampant in the world right now. God has provided for our spiritual needs by building around us a community of families and clergy that are increasingly traditional. And of course the last year as our lives were only marginally changed by COVID, those left in California were living under terror of the virus and draconian restrictions on freedom that made me so thankful that we aren’t there now.
Your wife needs to give it more time. I think she is also projecting her dissatisfaction adjusting to the new place on the kids. They don’t need that stuff she thinks they are missing out on and are in a healthier environment. In the end California is no longer what she remembers it being, the last year has changed it. The natural beauty is obviously still there but the culture is irreversibly changed by current evens in a bad way.
Thanks for your experiences.
My range has been Northeast to Southwest and finally settled in the South decades ago before the 2nd wave of leftists now moving in. My experiences have been that no matter where I’ve lived, like people find like people. Small towns are stereotyped as unsophisticated and/or lacking in intellectual curiosity.
I’ve lived near universities my entire life - big and small towns. The stereotype evolved to where now it is leftist, intolerant, arrogant and indoctrinated (lacking both intellectual curiosity and honesty). Nonetheless, I have lived with/knew the few curious and intelligent in small towns, and the few conservative, intelligent, curious in college towns. We have a strange way to find each other. Some with PhDs, J.Ds., etc. - not country folk.
I don’t have a need to be surrounded by and pals with boatloads of people “who think, dress and act like me.” (It would be great only if they voted like me.) Same thing at work and church. We tend to find each other. And when I interact with lefties in common society, I extend the same politeness and manners I was taught at home, and as part of my faith to love one’s neighbor. (I am sure hey would be shocked if they knew “their enemy” was in their midst.)
I guess I am a maverick. When I went to the universities, we were taught to think for ourselves, be exposed to other people and ideas (even bad, immoral, hateful, racist, etc ideas) and learn to live (tolerate) it. I learned from great parents, and some great teachers, religious, and professors, but universities were different back then.