Leap of faith
Kate Blythe describes how her family packed up their lives and moved to Melbourne in the middle of the global pandemic.
Kate Blythe spent two decades building a successful fashion career in London while also raising four children with her husband Matthew. She describes how in seeking adventure, the family packed up their entire lives and moved halfway around the world to Melbourne, right in the middle of the global pandemic.
Do you remember Sliding Doors starring Gwyneth Paltrow? If you take the first train, your life goes one way, if you take the next train, an entirely different future plays out. When people ask what made us move our entire family and life to Australia during a global pandemic, I suppose it was like my very own Sliding Doors moment, with many twists and turns on the way.
Let’s take it back a year. I have worked in fashion and lived in London for more than 20 years with my husband Matthew. He is in finance and together we have been on that roller-coaster of international life for longer than I can remember. From working as a fashion journalist to editor at Net-a-Porter and most recently as chief content officer at Matchesfashion, we have been hooked on that intoxicating cocktail of London-work-family-buzz. In those years of working all hours, travelling the globe at a rate of knots and living and breathing the business I was in, we also prioritised having a family. We wanted to create a happy home full of our children, their friends, our friends and family. We have been so lucky to have four incredible children – Freddie, 13, Lilian, 10, Florence, nine, and Jack, three – who have brought the love, energy and bustling noise that we wanted so much in our lives (well maybe not the noise!)
I figured out early on that the only way to balance a career and motherhood to such a big brood was to be equal parenting partners with Matthew. That’s our secret sauce to life. We support each other and balance the ebbs and flows of parenthood and careers as a team. And together we laugh and cry (usually with a glass of wine) at the stresses, strains and love we share raising four epically cool children.
As much as I love the excitement, too, of my working life, over the past couple of years I have also had a gnawing feeling that there was an adventure on the horizon for us. I remember after giving birth to our youngest Jack, in 2018, I lay in bed, feeling so in love and content (and amazed that we had a bonus baby) that I barely watched the film on in the background. However, soon it caught my attention.
The 2013 movie, Adoration, starring Robin Wright and Naomi Watts, was a world so far away from my own, set in the most glorious coastal location in New South Wales. I envied that sense of freedom and adventure that I could only dream of. We were in the washing machine of life after all, and here, right in front of me, was a world of serenity and the epitome of living life in the moment. As the Covid pandemic hit with shocking force and London slunk into its first lockdown, I kept thinking back to that film, and couldn’t shake the feeling that something was going to change for us.
It was during lockdown that I started discussing my next career move with my husband. There is one role in Melbourne, I said, as chief marketing officer at Mecca, which could be amazing. Don’t be mad, we both said, who would move their entire life to the other side of the world in the middle of a pandemic? Oh, how we laughed. However, once I started talking to Jo Horgan, founder and co-CEO of Mecca, her energy and passion drew me right in (along with the Byron Bay backdrop on one of our calls). My sliding door moment was right in front of me, and yet making a decision of this magnitude
at this pivotal moment in time was complex to say the least. The whole family needed to be on board. As London started creeping out of the first lockdown, we raced down to the South of France to my parents’ house on the first day of the UK-France air bridge. It was here, drinking local rosé and breathing in the balmy summer air after months of intense homeschooling, that we started to plan.
With the relief of distance from London and an enforced break from our chaotic pre-Covid life, we could come together and make a decision based on everyone’s feelings. Could we really move to the other side of the world and start afresh? Would the children settle in at new schools and make new friends? Would we be able to create a home full of energy, happiness, laughs, dancing-in-the-kitchen memories in the same way we had in London? Why, above all, would we be so mad to do this, right now? We phoned friends, ex-colleagues, mentors and I cried talking it over with my mum. We eventually started to feel that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity we could not miss. Freddie, our eldest, wanted to go with every ounce of his curious teenage soul; Matthew, like me, felt compelled by an adventure that broke up our norm; Florence, a confident cool cat in any situation, was all in; yet Lilian rightly worried she would miss her friends and family. The moment I said: “Yes, we are coming,” to the team at Mecca, was an overwhelming moment of for us all.
Very soon, everything moved at pace. Visas were processed, our travel exemptions were lodged, our London home was rented out. As we packed up our home to be transported by sea to Melbourne, I was filled with trepidation. I had heard stories of entire crates going overboard (my wardrobe has been curated over two decades of working in fashion after all) but we had to push on. We didn’t really take no for an answer either. The removal guys said we couldn’t take our marble table with us – too heavy, too fragile, too difficult. Yet that didn’t hold us back – it was a total nightmare to ship, and it did have a specialist crate built around it, but it arrived in one piece.
We also embarked on our Covid-safe farewell tour to say goodbye to our loved ones. The UK had not gone back into lockdown by this point; however, cases were rising, and we had a short window to say goodbye to everyone before we no longer could. The rules changed and we were only allowed to sit outside restaurants in groups of six. I can’t tell you how hilarious and heartwarming it was to see our friends and family huddling under blankets and wearing their ski coats, pretending to enjoy the drizzling October rain as they cheered us off, just as they were sliding back into a cold winter lockdown.
Saying goodbye to our families was brutal as the realisation that international travel was months, even years, away hit. After all the tears had been cried, we all started to feel ready. On the day we were leaving, I woke up early with adrenaline flowing through my body. We had already come so far. We had our visas in place, our travel exemptions, our negative Covid tests. We had found a new home in Brighton, Melbourne. We had said our farewells and our love yous. All we needed to do now was get on the plane. Four hours early, two emotionally wrung-out adults and their four children arrived at Heathrow airport with our documentation and 18 pieces of luggage. The lady on the check-in desk was not particularly empathetic however, and spent two hours grilling us and weighing every piece of luggage. She also scrutinised our visas, Covid tests and anything else she could. As silent tears rolled down my cheeks, we were finally allowed through to the gates and my daughters squeezed my hands tight and told me not to worry – “it will all be okay, Mummy”. Once we made it to the airport lounge, Matthew and I drank a glass of champagne in three enormous gulps. We were finally on our way to a new life, a new country, a new adventure in unprecedented times.
Those 24 hours flying across the planet were contemplative and momentous. Looking at my family, all wrapped in blankets, watching movie after movie, it dawned on me that after months of planning, plotting and thinking about what was to come, we were either all mad or just bravely bold. I felt a huge responsibility, yet also immense pride in my family for their stoic resilience, those hands squeezing mine telling me it will be okay as we all jumped in with both feet.
Upon landing in Sydney, we were swept off to our quarantine hotel. Our 14 days inside are hard to recollect as each day blurred into the next as we played board games, made 1,000-piece puzzles (never again!) and were overwhelmed by the generosity of friends who delivered toys for the children and treats for us. Every day we had tests and our temperatures taken. Jack would wait by the door each morning with his finger out, ready for the doctors to take his pulse rate. It became part of the fun. And did you know that when the hotel says that we could have one 30-minute session of exercise a week, that is not actually true, as every second counts and it takes at least 10 minutes to go up and down in the lift! Those sessions of sun-blinding fresh air in the two weeks were always a bit of disaster too, with one of the children falling over during a game of chase and another losing the only football we had so we spent all 20 minutes looking for it. The children were allowed to stay in their pyjamas, which they loved, and we watched every episode of Friends from beginning to end. It wasn’t all bad, I have to admit, as we had a small balcony in our three-bedroom apartment (the benefit of being such a large family) and Florence even declared our confinement as the best two weeks of her life.
We have never felt so deliriously happy when we were finally released and could start the final leg of our epic relocation. We arrived at our new home and our friends Sarah and Matt, Carly and Scott had set it up with ready-made beds, fresh towels, food in the fridge, wine in the cooler, balloons, flowers and welcome signs over the doorway. Our house was already a home and we were blown away by the effortless way our Australian friends welcomed us in as if we had always been part of their worlds. Soon the kids were inviting new friends for sleepovers, I had figured out my train route to the office (and what a Myki card is) and our new life, with new schools, new routines and lovely friends old and new, is immensely real.
Even before the pandemic, I dreamt of waves, sand and the calming sea air blowing away all our stresses, and here we are now with a reinvigorated sense of exploration resetting our life rhythm. Eventually, after months of soul-searching and blindly taking a leap of faith to move to the other side of the world, our five months here feel like five years. Would I recommend doing something like this to others? Maybe not during a global pandemic, yet when life gives you lemons, make lemonade every time.
We were in the washing machine of life after all, and here, right in front of me, was a world of serenity and the epitome of living life in the moment