This is long.. but I really need perspective so thank you in advance for reading.
My husband and I arrived back in the UK with our DS in June last year. We had been living in the southern hemisphere (my home) for 10 years. He was born here and has siblings and one parent here.
We have been together nearly 16 years and married for 5. It’s been a good relationship and we have done all sorts together, travelling and moving from country to country. I thought we were settled in my home country after 5 years there. It had been a bit of a bumpy time, with some good years and some tough. We got married, I lost my father, left a toxic job, started studying, and fell pregnant with our baby all during that period. My husband is a great provider and a wonderful husband and dad. He has been the main breadwinner since early 2019. We went from renting a house in a nice suburb of a main city to staying with my mother in a quiet beach town a couple of hours away during the pandemic. After a brief period where we were both not working when my son was a small baby, he found a great job, we were getting ahead, putting away money, and planning to buy a home. I still wasn’t working but was studying and I thought things were going okay.
A few years ago, my FIL was diagnosed with cancer. He had been doing ok and was hanging in there, but unfortunately in mid-2021 we were told he didn’t have very long left. We made a snap decision to try and get there to introduce our son to his grandpa and to spend some time with the family before he passed. We packed bags and left our life behind to fly to the UK. Unfortunately, my husband’s dad died before we could make it there which was obviously awful. We decided to go anyway.
When we were deciding to go it was always framed as we would give longer-term life in the UK a go. I told my husband I would give it 12 months and see how we were feeling, if we were happy, we could stay and work towards buying a home here. Luckily my husband was able to transfer to the UK office of his company and continue doing the same job, remotely too. I would look for work when we were settled in.
Our first few months was rough. We stayed with some friends for a few weeks, which was great but our house search didn’t yield anything quickly, so we ended up having to go and stay with my MIL for a while. I think the invasion of us arriving with a toddler didn’t mix well with her still-raw grief, understandably. I did my best to keep things smooth, keep my son wrangled and occupied, and cook, clean, help out as much as possible. Still, I knew we were in the way and finding a house couldn’t come quick enough. It was tough on us all. My husband really had visions of coming home and spending some quality family time together, but he ended up feeling super rejected by his family who were still dealing with the loss of FIL. Fences are mended now, but still, he was hurt and struggling in his own grief too.
Fast forward 9 months to now. My husbands work is going well. We have a nice rental property, but we live 3+ hours from anyone we know because we couldn’t find an affordable property near his family and friends we have in that city. We managed, with the help of a loan from my mum, to furnish an entire house. We blew threw everything we had in the bank setting the house up. Our son is enrolled in nursery, and he loves it. I have been job hunting since Sept/Oct last year, to no avail so far. I think part of that was because my depression (I guess a continuation of the PND I had after my son) flared up badly. I’ve been so lonely, miserable, and feeling like a failure. We are fighting about the fact I haven’t got a job. I’m feeling a bit better now in myself, back on my antidepressants and have ramped things up with the job hunting. I’ve had a few interviews, but none have come off as yet. My already shaky confidence feels extremely low right now.
Basically, I want to go back home. I went from having an extremely loving and supportive family around me to having nobody. I don’t feel like I can even talk to my husband about how I feel because he just ends up accusing me of putting on the tears to get my own way. He just says that we had 11 years living near or in the same country as my family, and now after five minutes here, I just want to throw in the towel.
I do understand that he wants to give life a go here, but I’m also thinking of our son and the childhood I imagined for him. He has so many aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends in my home country, and here he gets to see his grandmother, one aunt and an uncle (child-free) every couple of months. My family are extremely close, while his is a lot more aloof and have sort of thrown it in his face a bit that he went away for so long, and said he can’t expect it to all be best mates and sunshine and roses just because the prodigal son has come home. I just find it tough because if my mum was a train ride away, she’d be here every weekend to see her grandbaby, yet if we want to see my husband’s family we have to make the effort 99% of the time. This is not to say that I don’t love my in-laws, they are wonderful and they have helped us in lots of ways, for which I’m so grateful. It just isn’t the same as with my family.
I’m also aware that part of my not settling in here has been to do with my state of mind and my lack of confidence. I haven’t worked since 2019 and I feel like the working world has moved on so far and I’m just left behind. My experience is just in office administration type work, but as I’m in my late 30s and have lots of (varied, maybe a little mixed up) experience, even the basic roles go to other people.
My husband also argues that we are better off in the UK because the housing market is going to be far more accessible to us than in my home country, where prices are insane. I get this, I do agree that our chances of getting into a house here are far greater than at home. I try to think logically and smartly about our financial future, but I just keep going back to the fact that my heart wants to be back with my family, and that I see our family’s future there and not here. He says we can’t go back without having some kind of life plan of how we’re going to get ahead when we get there. This angers me, because we DID have a plan, it wasn’t perfect, but we were doing well and making progress. I just feel like I’m here now, and I’m not feeling it, but this is suddenly the hill he wants to die on. Like I need to put together a full business plan and do a slideshow on how things will be back home and how we’ll survive. But when he wanted to come here on a whim, I said OK without hardly hesitating.
I’m even starting to think about whether I could possibly just go home to my mum with my son, but I could never take him away from his dad.
AIBU to want to go home?