Has anyone ever felt a yearning to go back to where they grew up ?

[slet]

Nc for this.

I grew up in a city, let’s call it city A. Met DH when I was a teenager, who is from city B. The two cities are only about 40 mins apart. When I was a teenager and in my 20s, I definitely saw city B as much more aspirational and cooler than my home city, and when DH and I got married, we bought a house in city B. We both still work in city B so it is more convenient to live here for work. Now we live just outside city B in a very “naice” area which is seen as fairly prestigious, although I’ve never really felt the area was “me” but we have a lovely home and friends locally and our dc are settled in school (early secondary) .

However, more and more I feel a yearning to go back to city A. I have felt like this for a few years. My parents live there so we do go there fairly often and we are also big supporters of the football club of city A (I know some people won’t get this but it is quite a big deal!). City A is also undergoing a bit of a renaissance with lots of investment and is becoming quite cool. I feel a strange sort of guilt towards it, as if it has taken me too long to realise what a special place it is. I have got a bit obsessed by it. I follow social media accounts about it and go on local forums, more than I do for my own area!
I feel ashamed that I moved away when I was growing up and thought i was too good for it. I realise what an idyllic childhood and adolescence I had growing up there. If I hear people from city B making lighthearted jokes about city A, I feel defensive and annoyed in a way that wouldn’t have bothered me in the past. I can’t explain it, but I feel a real longing for it. People would think i was nuts to feel this way as it’s perceived as quite a gritty place and very different to the area I live in now.

The other thing that has happened is that my dear dad has recently become terminally ill. So I feel like a lot of my feelings about city A are bound up in this too. We have had lots of conversations recently about him growing up there, the pubs where he and my mum went in the 1970s and all his memories of the place. This has definitely increased the feeling I have about the city but I was having these feelings anyway.

I feel like I can’t decide if these feelings are just silly, rooted in nostalgia and sentiment, given my dads circumstances at the minute, or something I should actually act upon, dh would think it was totally madness to move to city A now, and uproot ourselves when we are settled and happy where we are, with dc in school. It is only 40 mins away after all! But I can’t help feeling this longing to move. Facing the prospect of my parents mortality, i find it hard to imagine not having a concrete link to city A like I do now. I feel like without that I would feel weird and untethered. I sometimes think about moving back in the future, maybe when dc have left home.

I guess what I’m asking is has anyone experienced this kind of thing before? Did it pass? Or did anyone make the move? Am I being totally irrational because of what is happening with my dad?

Yes. I grew up in rural north wales. I couldn’t wait to leave and have lived all over the world and am now happily settled in a UK city. I don’t regret leaving for a second but now I yearn to go “home” once the DCs have moved on. Even though by then I don’t expect to have family still living there. DH remains unconvinced!

I still live where I grew up so does DH

No. Where I grew up doesn’t exist any more except in my memories.

It was a rural village miles from the nearest town. Now the village is just a suburb of the town and the house I grew up in demolished to make way for a housing estate.

@Conundrumseverywhere It’s not a reflection of everywhere. I agree it’s a reflection of some run down seaside resorts that didn’t need all the guest houses that didn’t offer family accommodation. Holiday needs moved on.

I don’t want to live where I grew up. I’m only 40 minutes away but have no connection to it these days. I prefer where I live and I prefer easier access to London. I’ve enough to keep me busy and I prefer my London based dc being within reach. They get their countryside fix by coming back here.

This is me too. I feel so rootless. I get such a longing for my hometown (400 miles away!) but I know it probably would not be the same if I went back, a lot of my ties are gone.

I have, but I don't really have any reason to move back. I don't have many ties there now. My friends all moved out of the area as adults, because it's a city location and house prices went sky high during the boom. My Dad is still there but he's 84, so when the inevitable happens, I won't have any ties at all. But when I visit Dad and walk those familiar streets and pop into the old shops, I feel such a sense of belonging. Like a few pps, I'm on a local FB group and I love looking at the old photos of the area. But I think it's more a yearning/nostalgia for my childhood place. I like where I live now and I've put down some roots, but I don't have the same sense of belonging or that these are my people.

Not at all, and I grew up in a town that appears on desirable places to live lists often. It really isn’t that great. I found it terminally boring growing up there and moved to a city as soon as I could. You couldn’t pay me to move back

No but along those lines, sort of!

Leeds and Bradford? 😄

This is a really interesting thread!

My family moved to South Africa when I was very young so I spent most (not all) of my childhood there. I wouldn’t want to move back there.

I did spend a fair few periods in the UK during those years but don’t feel drawn to return to any of those places.

I’m in the UK now, but will be moving abroad within the next couple of years, so guess I don’t really feel I have “roots”.

There is a Welsh word - Hiraeth - that describes the feeling that some have described on this thread.

To quote from the BBC travel site: A blend of homesickness, nostalgia and longing, "hiraeth" is a pull on the heart that conveys a distinct feeling of missing something irretrievably lost.

Yes, but now I realise it's not the place that I year, it's the place at a certain time. I still go back but things have changed so much and the people have changed so much it's not the same.

I could have written this practically word for word, with the exception that I lived outside the town in a small hamlet, which has been built up and altered beyond recognition. My old house had its gardens and land sold off years ago for building.
All the wooded places, old orchards and waste grounds have gone. The old abandoned railway line which was used as a footpath and full of wildlife has been levelled and built on and even the local pub, with its huge lush garden full of mature trees, has been demolished to build a mini estate.

i have no family left there any more and my old friends have died or moved away, so I have no reason ever to go there again, and I don't think I will.

Yes, I do OP which has come to a surprise to me. I left the area where I grew up to go to university 35 years ago and now live at the other end of the country. In recent years I've felt a pull back to that area, NOT the town I grew up in which is pretty grim, just the landscape.

Unless something radical happened I can't imagine acting on the pull back up north. My children are all down here and DH and I have a good life here. Also, the weather is so much better where we live compared to where I grew up. I'm not sure I could cope with the cold and wet I grew up with after decades of lovely hot southern summers 😂

The moors and the dales are very beautiful though 😊

Is this Blackpool or Morecambe?

Yes. I met my DH in the town I moved to in my early 20's (neighbouring county, his parents live there). When our dc were preschoolers we moved closer to my hometown (and my parents).

I felt overjoyed on the day we moved. I had grown to dislike living so far away from my parents and I also disliked the town we lived in. I would not move again from this area, I am so at home here. I don't live in the village I grew up in but it's the same county and only half an hour from where I grew up. So I am closer to my family and old school friends. I often feel a lot of nostalgia for the village I grew up in, it has changed a great deal but I like not being very far away from it.

Newcastle and Sunderland?

I don't have any yearning to move back home - I think because half my childhood (primary school years) was in a different country and then my teen years were in 'home village' but I went to school in a different town so knew noone in home village, and feel no attachment to either school town or home village really. I do miss the sea as currently live nowhere near the sea and home village is a seaside resort. School town has been / is being regenerated and is much improved but still no urge to move back.

I do feel a very strong attachment to the city I went to university in - I lived there for 15 years afterwards and if I could go back anywhere it would be there.

I have felt like this most of my life - moved from my home city, also 'gritty', at age 10 and nowhere else has ever felt real to me in the same way. I would move back if the circs were ever right. Yes, it's still pretty gritty but so full of life, always things going on.

I have had similar feelings for years now, except my home area is 250 miles away so 40 mins seems like quite a luxury. I was actually up there this past weekend and it was amazing being able to pop in and visit family and friends every day rather than not see them for months.

BUT…you have to ask yourself, does the place you’re missing still exist? I know deep down that the ‘home’ I long to move back to would actually require a time machine as it’s not just the physical place you miss but the people and the memories and the feelings from years ago. You can’t get those things back, they’re gone but they still exist inside you now (which means you can actually take them anywhere so isn’t necessarily a bad thing). I miss where I grew up terribly. Even though at 18 I couldn’t wait to get away (and went as far away as I could!). But actually what I miss is my (late) mum and other family members, and my best friend, and a much simpler life with horses and fields and freedom from bills and the pressure of a stressful career. I know I can’t turn back the clock no matter how much I want to. So instead I visit and spend quality time with those people who matter to me, and I eat comfort food from my childhood, and walk through the fields I grew up in (sometimes sobbing with the memories) and try to be grateful that I have those wonderful memories while trying to make new ones.

My elderly mother still lives in the town I grew up in and is the last real tie I have to it. I still visit her on a more or less monthly basis so I do get to go back and have some trips down memory lane, but I think that is exactly what they are now - memory lane. It's almost 40 years now since I moved out after my student days. In that time people change and move on.

It is about 130 miles from where I live now with my DH and (currently) still two of our three adult DDs.

I've thought about what you say sometimes, but I really don't think that there would be much for us in my hometown now, although I did enjoy my childhood there.

I wouldn't go back to live there as it just wouldn't be the right decision for us. My hometown has been a long chapter of my life. I moved in there in 1970 with my parents when I was just short of my fourth birthday. I find this hard to say, but that chapter will come to a final end in the next few years. I have made my peace with that, difficult though that is.

Yes, but the rough and unfashionable part of South London I grew up in has now been gentrified out of all recognition and I could not afford to buy anything there now.

I have been home sick for a while but mostly for the people. I'm heading back, hopefully this month. Divorced my husband so I can go home now.

Glasgow and Edinburgh?

Wolverhampton and Birmingham?!

I don’t really want to say where it is but someone has guessed correctly!!

I know you can’t recreate the past and I know I can’t go back to the 80s and 90s and repeat my time there now but at the same time I do feel genuinely both very at home and sort of excited when I am there because as I said there is a lot going on there and it does feel as if things are finally starting to happen for it as a city.

I never left!