• After much planning, I followed my boyfriend to Tucson and enrolled at the University of Arizona.
• He left shortly after, which meant I was alone and brokenhearted in a new, unfamiliar city.
• I stayed for years, got my degree, and learned to love the Southwest.

When I was 26, I moved to Arizona with the boyfriend I'd had since high school.

We spent a year planning the move since we'd be going 900 miles away from where we grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I wasn't so worried, though. We'd supported each other through major life events and made decisions together for the better part of a decade.

Together, we'd backpacked throughout the Pacific Northwest, driven from California to Maine and back in a Volkswagen bus, and camped under the stars in 35 national parks.

Although I had no connection to Arizona, my boyfriend's family wanted him to move there to care for his ailing grandmother in Tucson — and I would've followed him anywhere.

Plus, after attending community college in California, the University of Arizona seemed as good a place as any to finish my final two years of school.

So, off we went to live on his grandmother's sprawling desert homestead.

My boyfriend left Arizona before my classes even began

When we arrived, I got my Arizona driver's license and established myself as a resident to access a sizable in-state tuition discount.

However, just days before my classes began, my boyfriend told me he was moving back to the Bay.

I wanted to punch him, but really, I was mad at myself. I'd ignored a carnival's worth of red flags over the years — lying, cheating, stealing.

Now, here I was, alone for the first time in a decade, stuck in a new city with no friends, a truckload of self-pity, and a broken heart.

After he left, I spent those first few weeks of school miserable and lonely, with my eyes perpetually red and swollen from crying. I felt like I was being tested. How much did I really want to stay in school? Enough to navigate this parched, alien wasteland alone?

Still, I stayed. I was determined to be the first person in my family to graduate from college, and I'd do it before I turned 30, with or without a boyfriend.

Although I struggled at first, I fell in love with my new city and state

Having been raised in a bay-side town, I felt like a fish out of water in the Arizona desert. Everywhere I looked were signs I was far from home — stabby cacti, piggish javelinas, and pack rats that would build a nest in your engine block if your car sat too long.

Eventually, though, it got harder and harder to stay sad in one of America's sunniest cities.

I dived into my studies, joined the university writing center, and began tutoring kids in reading at a local elementary school.

I moved into a studio apartment two blocks from campus and had a fling with the political-science major who lived next door. Within a few weeks, I was riding my bike everywhere and spending hours swimming and studying at the massive campus pool.

My appreciation and fondness for the state grew as I learned about the Southwest's rich Indigenous history and culture and took road trips to nearby historic towns like Bisbee and Tombstone.

I started making friends, venturing out, and exploring the natural beauty of the Sonoran Desert. I camped on Mount Lemmon, hiked the Santa Catalina Mountains, and drove deep into the desert at night to see the stars.

Two and a half years later, I'd graduated with a bachelor's degree and fostered a genuine love for the Southwest. Although I later left Tucson to take my dream job in Seattle, I'm grateful for my experience.

I never imagined I'd grow so fond of Arizona, but it's where I found myself, accomplished my goal, and made lifelong friends.

This move taught me I can turn any challenging situation into something wonderful — and that even a Bay Area Aquarius like me can fall in love with a desert.

• The hardest part of divorce was being without my kids, especially during the holidays.
• I felt overwhelmed with pressure to compensate by making them extra special.
• Relaxing on what I thought the holidays were supposed to look like has allowed us to start new traditions.

I sobbed as I sat surrounded by the remnants of Christmas morning — half-eaten cinnamon rolls, discarded wrapping, and little piles of presents my 3 and 6-year-old daughters stacked up before they left to spend the rest of Christmas break with their dad.

I was still getting used to sharing custody, and the hardest part was being without them, especially during the holidays.

This was my new normal

It felt so wrong, but it was our new normal, thanks to a divorce and custody order specifying that we would only spend every other birthday and major holiday together.

I was devastated, my mom guilt was in overdrive, and I felt overwhelmed with pressure to make the holidays better than ever, to compensate for my children's suffering, our lack of time together, and what I perceived as my failure to fix everything.

I set unreasonably high standards for myself in the hopes of making every Christmas better than the one before — more gifts, extravagant decorations, and fun, memorable experiences. It was exhausting, I never felt good enough, and I was spending money I couldn't afford as a single parent raising two kids in one of the nation's most expensive cities.

In my quest to make up for what we'd lost, I'd unwittingly turned half the year — from Halloween through their first-quarter birthdays — into my own unwinnable marathon of misery.

I was setting a poor example for them

It took me a while to understand that our enjoyment of these special days was inversely proportional to the size of my ever-growing to-do list, but once I did, there was no going back. Especially when I realized what a poor example I was setting for my daughters by reinforcing the patriarchal message that women, especially mothers, are responsible for everyone else's joy, even when it means abandoning our own.

Moving forward, I decided to change my approach and relax my death grip on what I thought the holidays were supposed to look like. Most importantly, this meant reducing the number of items on my to-do list so I could spend more time just being with my kids and savoring their easy, childlike joy.

This may sound simple, but it's just not. The expectation that moms create an abundance of magic is so ubiquitous that we're not often aware of how we surrender to it.

I changed how I did things

So instead of spending time I didn't have putting up lights I couldn't afford, we packed into the car and drove around listening to cheesy Christmas music while admiring our neighbor's decorations and drinking to-go cups of hot chocolate — not the kind you film yourself making from scratch at an Insta-worthy cocoa bar with 10 toppings, but the kind you buy for $3, mix with warm milk, and call it good.

Instead of competing with my ex-husband to buy the best gifts, I finally admitted to myself that I would never be able to match his budget and decided that it was in fact a win to let him buy the laptops, smart phones, and sneaks, while I focused on more affordable and traditional gifts like books, music, and pajamas.

As I began to prioritize my own needs, I realized that the religious holidays my ex-husband favored were less important to me than nature-based ones like spring equinox and winter solstice, which relieved even more competitive pressure. This was also an important reminder that holidays are just an arbitrary day on the calendar, and we could celebrate anytime.

Later, when my daughters were in high school, I gave them cash for birthdays and Christmas instead of spending hours searching for the perfect gifts. They loved being able to buy what they wanted, and I loved saving myself the time, effort, and worry that they wouldn't like my selections.

As a single mom of two daughters, the freedom to adapt and reimagine the holidays on our own terms was the gift we needed to truly enjoy them.