Growing Up Under the Southern California Sky: A Story of Home, Change, and Why We Finally Left

I grew up all over Southern California, Ontario, Upland, San Diego, Hesperia, Pomona, Rancho Cucamonga, Fontana, and finally Lake Elsinore. If you drew a circle around the Inland Empire and the High Desert, that was my universe. Sunburned freeways, shopping centers that all looked the same, and housing tracts named after fruit trees that hadn't grown there in decades.

People asked me where I was from, and I always envisioned the sky first: that endless blue seeming to hang above every childhood memory. I loved that sky. I loved the beaches, the mountains, the heat of the desert, and the odd conglomeration of communities that somehow all knitted together as "home." For a very long time, I could never imagine living anywhere else.

But growing up in Southern California is complicated: beautiful, yes, familiar, yes, but layered in ways I didn't understand until I got older.

Life “Up the Hill”

My childhood really kicked into gear when my family moved to Hesperia. If you know the High Desert, you know why locals call everything else "down the hill." From fourth grade until I graduated high school, that plateau was my world.

It was simpler then: bike rides until the sun went down, dirt lots that turned into playgrounds, and the kind of freedom you only appreciate once it's gone. Main Street still had an old-West vibe, and in the '90s, every shop blasted country music whether you liked it or not.

What I didn't realize as a kid but am crystal clear on now was the underpinning of racism and prejudice. It was sometimes subtle, at other times blatant. I saw things. I heard things. And I was too often silent. Silence feels different when you look back at it as an adult.

There was even a day when our school ended up on the news for a fight between groups of students that the media labeled a “race riot.” An argument that began over something in the lunchroom had blown into something bigger. It was messy, uncomfortable, and a sharp reminder that not everything in my childhood hometown was as innocent as my bike rides made it seem.

From Dirt Roads to Concrete Jungle

Later, we moved down to Pomona, and the culture shock was instantaneous. I went from a place with dirt roads and no streetlights to the crowded edge of Los Angeles County. Pomona was full of families that had escaped the city to get away from gang culture-only to have those same problems follow their kids into the suburbs.

I didn't feel like I belonged there. I said as much to my mom. But eventually, I found my footing. That's what Southern California does to you-no matter how chaotic it gets, it embeds itself into your routine. Weekend beach trips, mountain escapes, endless drives on the 10, 15, 210, 91-you become part of the rhythm.

But unless you're wealthy, you don't get the California people dream about. You get the real one: gorgeous in places, rough in others, expensive everywhere. A place where paradise coexists with parking lots and wildfire smoke.

California made me who I am. I'll always love it. But loving a place doesn't mean it's the right place to stay.

Fault Lines at Home

When I reached my thirties, life had changed in ways I never anticipated. My parents' thirty-year marriage crumbled pretty much overnight, and since both my partner's parents and mine were inseparable for decades, the ripple effects tore through both sides of our families.

We moved an hour away to get space.

Even as an adult the reasons behind my parents divorce cracked my world as the seems. The nostalgia I had carried for years suddenly felt heavier, shadowed by questions I didn't have any answers to.

Rebuilding trust after something like that doesn’t happen in one day. I'm still working on it.

Home just wasn't home anymore, especially not the kind of home in which I wanted to raise my own children.

A Growing Discomfort with My Country

Even before the family drama, I had always been the kid who spread a map across the floor and dreamed about living somewhere else. Not visiting, living. At the time, I didn't know what it meant; I just knew the world felt bigger than the desert I grew up in.

Then came 2016.

People who I had known for years started flying flags that made my stomach twist. Casual conversations turned into landmines. Relationships were straining. Values clashed. I wondered how everything had changed so fast, or perhaps… how I had missed the signs all along.

And then came the pandemic.

We took it seriously. Wore masks. Homeschooled our kids. Listened to health experts. And for doing the most basic, responsible things, we were ridiculed. Strangers yelled at our kids in public. A man screamed at me in a grocery store. A woman slammed her cart into mine because I thanked the cashier for wearing a mask.

I walked back to my car shaking, thinking, This isn't how a community should behave.

At one point, we even hung a political flag outside our house, something we'd never done, just to show that not everyone in our neighborhood agreed with the chaos happening around us. On Halloween, someone ripped it down, snapped the pole in half, and threw it in our yard.

At that point, something dawned on me: I was really afraid of the people I lived among.

Not because of politics, but because of what politics had done to them.

The Long Planning Phase

While the world shut down, we started researching everything about leaving: immigration paths, visas, costs, schools, healthcare, jobs, budgets-even grocery prices. Yes, including peanut butter-don't judge.

We did spreadsheets. Watched webinars. Read blogs. Followed forums. Made checklists. Crossed them off. Made new ones.

From afar, New Zealand felt composed, organized, and kind. We watched daily briefings with a sense of awe and disbelief. Now that we live here, we have come to understand there is more to the story--frustration, criticism, complexity--but one thing remains true: a lot of lives were saved.

Meanwhile, a friend lost his father to COVID back home. The hospitals filled up, the morgues overflowed, and refrigerated trucks lined up outside the medical centers in what felt like a country unraveling.

Some didn't notice. Some didn't want to.

We noticed.

And the question that had whispered to me since childhood finally spoke loudly:

“If we don’t go now… will we ever go?”

Why We Finally Left

Life in California wasn't bad. We had good jobs, a house, friends, a routine, and a plan.

But I continued to wake up with that feeling of uneasiness.

Is this it?

Is this who I want to be?

Is this where I want my kids to grow up?

Is this the life I'm willing to settle for, simply because it is familiar?

Eventually the answer became clear: No.

I've learned something since we left-no matter where you go, you take yourself with you. But the place around you still matters. Culture matters. Community matters. The energy of a country affects how you live, how you parent, how you breathe.

California raised me. New Zealand healed me. And somewhere between the two, I finally became honest about who I am, about what I needed.

This is a blog about not leaving California because it was awful, but about realizing when a place that you love no longer fits the person you are becoming. Sometimes, the most important change you can make is simply to listen to that voice that has been whispering inside you since childhood: There's more out there. Go see it.