People move for many reasons like getting a better job, leaving a place of poverty, or even to escape family drama. My reason was quite different: chasing a dream that my mom has had for several years. My family loves Disney so much that before we moved to Florida we went at least once every year (sometimes even three times a year). We have been going to Disney ever since I was five years old.
One trip, we decided to look for houses just to see what the houses looked like in Florida. They have a lot of bright green foliage, palm trees all around, and the houses themselves looked very different from what I was used to.
My mother wanted to move to Florida so bad ever since I could remember, and the fact that we were looking at houses made her day. We pulled up at a house in Celebration and my mom fell in love. As we were driving by it my father said, “Give them a call and see what happens.” This was a huge mistake because the realtor she called conveniently lives two houses from where the house was. She gave us a tour of the house and my mom was hooked, but my father was hesitant. After all of this we went home and we eventually moved to Florida after my sophomore year of high school.
The first month living in Florida was amazing! We got annual passes to Disney World, played so many golf courses, and sometimes went to Universal. My mother loves shopping so every time we went to Disney we always came home with so many clothes and merchandise. This gave my parents and I the brilliant idea of starting a personal shopper business and a social media page all about Disney. We started on tiktok posting videos of all the new merchandise every day gaining a lot of traction from fellow Disney lovers.
Imagine being two skinny people in a crowd of wild Disney vacationers shopping for stuff. We got trampled, and pushed around very often when it was busy. The one struggle that made this business so challenging was there was only two of us and we had so many orders, this caused people to get impatient and start to look for other shoppers. While there was some bad about this business, there was still so many positives to it. For instance, we could go to Disney every day, my mom could basically shop for free, and we got to go to almost every seasonal event that the Disney parks had. This business was fun but it wasn’t the first plan we had.
Before all of this started my mom was trying to get an actual job. You might be asking yourself, “it must be easy because everyone is hiring,” WRONG. Every job in Florida declined my mother for some reason, even though she was highly qualified for the job. Not only that, but the pay for most of the jobs she was applying for was only $12.50 an hour! This was outrageous and the wages were impossible to live by. Hoping this business would help, we started it in hopes she would not have to work for someone.
My dad, on the other hand, was working remote from the job he has up in Massachusetts, which pays well. My mom was discouraged about this, but we stayed positive.
A few months later, we finally started to get in the groove of things. After school, I would go pick up my mother from the house and drive her to whatever park she needed to go to. I would help and we got almost everything done. After that, we would go home and my father would bill out the people that paid for the items, and then my father and I would box them up and then drive to the post office to ship the boxes. Sometimes on the weekends and on Fridays my father would join us on the adventure.
On average, we probably spent four hours at one park per day, depending on how much stuff we needed. We would go to more than one park in one day on busy days, sometimes all four. I really enjoyed this experience with my family, but the grass is not always green.
My family was not making enough money to sustain a good balance. In contrast, when we lived in Massachusetts, we were making a lot more money with both my mom and dad working. I could see that my mother and father were getting really annoyed doing this every day. I told my parents one day that I want to go to college up in Massachusetts and they agreed with me that was a better option.
Perfect timing, as my mom was looking at jobs and noticed that her old position at the Tewksbury Library was open. She took this opportunity and they happily hired her back. One problem. remained, we were still living in Florida. Making the very hard decision she took the job and we moved back to Massachusetts, where I’m originally from. Now I can see my friends every day and I get to be with my family.
Although being a part of my mother’s personal shopper business was fun, we missed home deep down. Moral of the story is to chase your dreams even though they seem very unreachable.
