It's funny. My sister and I were both born and raised in rural Illinois. In 2006, she moved to California, and in 2007 Mrs. Inkstain and I moved to North Dakota. We both moved to pursue job opportunities that significantly improved our lives. Our parents miss us terribly and visit whenever they can. (When it was just us, I noticed California was a somewhat more frequent destination than N.D. I wonder why... I went and had the first grandkid though to tip the scales).

My mother is a supervisor at an answering service that employs a lot of people who think they are poor but are actually lower middle class and refuse to scale back their spending. They ask her "How could you let your kids move so far? I'd never let mine/My parents would never let me."

Her response: "We raised them to do exactly this. What was the point of teaching them to be adults if I didn't really mean it?"