It's not the cost of living. 

It's this.

By Holly Nilson-Clay
May 7th, 2026

I dropped a whole bottle of martini extra dry on my head. Don't judge.

A full, unopened litre bottle, straight from the top of a cupboard. It didn’t smash when it hit the floor, which I still don’t understand, but my head did. There was blood everywhere.

Before this, it was a completely normal evening. I’d just put dinner in front of the boys, which they were eating whilst watching Wild Kratts, and in between trying to keep an eye on my emails and Slack, I reached up to grab the bottle like I’d done plenty of times before. I was only planning to put it in the fridge to chill before my husband's arrival in a few days time (we love a good gin martini). This time, it slipped and landed square on top of my head.

I called my sister, who lives downstairs. No answer. I called my mum. No answer. Then I called my dad, and he picked up. He was at home with her, but she hadn’t heard her phone as she was cooking dinner. However, she was here within minutes.

My sister came home around the same time, so between them it was handled. My mum took me to the hospital to get a stitch in my head, and my sister stayed with the boys, made sure they finished dinner, got them to bed. Everything just carried on, business as usual. I didn’t really have to think about what to do. It just… happened.

And afterwards, that’s the part that's stuck with me. Not the bottle, not even the blood, but how quickly it was handled, how automatic it felt.

Because that same situation, a few years ago, would have looked completely different. In fact, it did, minus the martini.

We moved to Germany when the boys were barely one and two, and we didn’t know anyone. One day my back went, completely. I'm not talking a little sore or uncomfortable. I mean it went, properly. I was on the floor, couldn’t get up and home alone with our two tiny boys.

I remember lying there trying not to panic, trying to work out what I could actually do, and the only option I had was to get my nearly two-year-old to pass me my phone so I could call my husband. And then I just had to wait for him to get home.

It took him about half an hour. In that time, if anything had happened to the kids, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything. I couldn’t move. 

That’s the difference. Not the specifics of what happened, but what was available to me in that moment.

In Spain, it was handled without much thought.

In Germany, I was on the floor with no one to call except my husband, who was half an hour away.

In Los Angeles, it would have sat somewhere in between. There were people I could have called. But it wouldn’t have been immediate, and it wouldn’t have felt automatic.

That gap, between having people around you and not, is much bigger than it sounds.

We did eventually build a support system in Germany. Good people, people I trusted, people who helped. But it took time, and even then it never quite felt the same. I was always aware that I needed to get back, always conscious that I was asking something of someone, even if they never made me feel that way.

There’s a difference between having help and having people who are simply part of your life. People you trust without thinking, people who don’t feel like a favour, people who just show up. That difference is easy to underestimate until you don’t have it.

Now, life looks very different. If I have back-to-back work in the evening, my mum will come over and handle dinner and bedtime. If one kid is sick and the other needs to be somewhere, there’s someone who can step in. If I need a break, I can ask. Sometimes that just means a quiet house for the night. No TV in the background, no bedtime routine to get through, just a bit of space. And I don’t feel like I’m imposing, or like I need to rush back.

When people think about moving abroad, they tend to focus on the visible things. Cost of living, schools, healthcare, weather - all of the things you can research and compare. What you don’t really see until you've made the move, is how much of your day-to-day life depends on the people around you. Not just who they are, but how close they are, how quickly they can show up, and how naturally you can rely on them.

That’s the part that doesn’t show up on paper.

And in practice, it often matters more than the numbers.