To suddenly want to return to England

[Brightgirldeadtown]

Mid 40’s now, I’ve lived abroad since my 20’s and travelled lots. Now properly settled with Dh and Dd etc.
I've recently been hit with an overwhelming urge to return to my hometown to live..my family don’t even live there now, Dh’s do, but that’s not necessarily a good thing 🙈some old friends but doubt we’d be close nowadays.
Is this a mid life crisis thing? I keep getting upset randomly in the middle of the day thinking about my *Old life. I also have a strange sadness about Dd not experiencing the same upbringing… should I return? Has anyone else done this?

The past is another country; they do things differently there.

I think mid life is a strange stage as we have to grind out our working life for a good few more years and we can hanker after what we recall as simpler times and connect that to our home town maybe. I do it having lived overseas for sometime and I do think the UK still has lots of good things going for it but I also think it is a bit of rose tinted glasses because the grind is everywhere so you can't escape that and I think there is a bit of escapist thinking involved but also a bit of longing for the familiarity of your roots as you age.

There are lots of facebook groups for ex pats considering returning so may be worth joining those to explore it.
We accept our kids are settled and we earn double plus here our pensions are better etc and so for the rest of our working life it makes sense to stay put but the longing for your home country as you age is very common I think, amongst ex pats, it is a return to the familiar.

It does sound a bit mid-life crisis. Mainly because of the wistful looking back to your childhood rather than looking forward to something built on what you currently have.

I don’t think you should ignore the fact you’re yearning for something different though. It’s an important signal that you haven’t got things right at the moment. Just don’t go chasing butterflies.

I have very similar feelings, OP. For me, it’s partly because there’s a lot of upheaval going on in my life right now, and sometimes I think that if I was back in the UK, it would be much easier, partly because I am fully au fait with customs and expectations, partly because (however fluent you get) almost everything is easier if you’re speaking in your mother tongue and partly because I live in a country where most people are very self-reliant when it comes to housing, so getting someone out to fix things is very difficult and in the UK, it was usually easy to find someone.

I have spent a lot of time weighing up whether I should go back, but all the negative stuff people have listed here means that really, it’s a no brainer to stay here, but it is mentally tough.

And finally, one thing that I’m realising now my children are almost grown up, is that if they settle here (as some of them look very ,cub like doing) then any return to the UK would mean leaving them behind. So I think the thing about wishing your child had the same upbringing as you is related to that. If I move back to be near my elderly parents (as I something about doing) then I will live out the rest of my life in a different country from (at least some of) my children. Sometimes I wish I’d considered that before it was too late, because that particular situation is now set and can’t be undone.

As a teacher who has left the uk and is currently teaching internationally- the only thing your daughter is missing out on is overcrowded classrooms in underfunded schools. Behaviour is getting worse and the time teachers have to spend with individual students is also decreasing.

it’s not worth going back from that perspective. I also live in a country where the language spoken is different and it can be hard but you’re giving her so many new experiences and enhancing her life! There’s definitely so many positives to how your daughter is experiencing life and education.

How old is your DD and how long has she been at school?

We moved abroad when DD1 was 6 and sent her to the local primary school.

Someone told us that she would be fluent in the local language at 6 months in. I can remember that even up to 5 months in we were panicking that we had made a mistake as she didn't seem to be picking up the language.

Then at 6 months in it clicked. I think it was at that point she had acquired enough vocabulary to be able to work around gaps in her vocabulary which were then quickly filled.

Our other 2 DCs followed DD1 in their turn. They too followed a similar progression with a few months of struggling and then it suddenly clicking with them. Ultimately all 3 DCs became bilingual.

The bilingualism did cause its own problem in school. If the teachers wanted to speak amongst themselves and not be understood by pupils they would talk in English. There was some consternation when they realised that DD2 at age 4 was innocently providing simultaneous translation to the rest of the class!

I wouldn’t rely on mn too much. More people unhappy with U.K. post than don’t and irl it’s the opposite for me. I don’t see the same until I read it on here.

Me neither @MarshaBradyo! I don't know anyone who is unhappy in the UK or yearning to move abroad, but reading MN you'd think every second Brit is miserable, skint and dreaming of elsewhere. Most British kids I know are happy at school too and not feeling like they're being deprived or overcrowded and I live in the overcrowded SE of England.

PorridgewithQuark makes a lot of sense. How can you be integrated if your child, born in-country isn't able to fully communicate with her peers? That's not integration. But I have to applaud you for at least learning some of the language because very few Brits living abroad seem to bother, at least around me.

I've had my kids in international and local school. In the international ones you just carry on as you were, everything in English. If your child(ren) are in local school and neither parent is at least C1 in the language, then at least one parent, ideally both, have to also make a conserved effort to focus on the culture and language. Learn the nursery rhymes, the Christmas carols, the names of cartoon characters in that language. It's a lot of work. But without it, your child is in an incredibly unfair situation.

I've seen when two foreign parents don't do this and by the age of about 8/9 the kid ends up going to international school in an effort to catch them up before high school. Some kids can manage with school in another language, but many actually can't. School in a language you're not comfortable in is exhausting. And it's not the same as having a parent who speaks the language well. Having two parents speaking almost exclusively in Lang A and socialising almost exclusively in Lang A and then you having to learn in Lang B, which classmates are natives in, is very, very hard.

I was surprised at being sad that my children didn't know simple things like nursery rhymes, or the hokey kokey- things I didn't know I knew or even thought or think are important! I was sad that their Christmas at school was, well, not really what I'd consider Christmas at school! But after a few years of following along and pushing a bit too I've now come to enjoy local traditions as my DC's traditions. After all this is their life in this country. They didn't choose to be born in this culture so it's pretty unfair for me to not bring it into home and make it ours. And while I went through the motions for a few years, it's now started to be meaningful to me in the "home" way that seeing my toddler singing "I'm a little teapot" would have probably too (again never considered it an important song!!).

I am not living somewhere I particularly want to, so I also have a yearning for "home". When I go back to the UK though I feel out of place. It's easier because I understand every, single word. But it's not the same as the place I left. I get the yearning for "home" though and for the straightforwardness of just understanding everything without even trying and the comfort that that brings! It's just so easy!! But the "home" I'm thinking of simply isn't there anymore. That's in the past. The only reason it's home for those who live there is because they experienced the changes gradually and they have shared cultural experiences. Were you to move back after 20+ years you may enjoy it, but it wouldn't be the same because you have a 20 year experience gap.

There's no easy answer to any of it. But the key to feeling at home in a place is to do what you can to fit in, not float in an expat/international bubble. And that's actually far easier to do with a child.

In all honesty you are not missing anything here in the UK. If I could escape from the almighty mess we’re in here and live in another country I would do so gladly.

Me too. Happy children and parents and we’re in London

I live far away from where I grew up and I know there are things about my rural English childhood that I loved and that my children will not experience. There are also things that weren't so good, and things that are better about where I live now.

You are probably feeling nostalgic and have rose tinted lenses of your own childhood. The truth is, your daughter's childhood will be her own and not yours, no matter where you live. It will not be 'the same' because we are living in different times, and things change and move on.

Why not have a trip back to your home town with her, and you could show her places you used to spend time, where your family lived etc.?

That could fulfil some of your need - I think you probably want your daughter to understand your past and your identity, rather than actually wanting her to have the same life as you.

I haven’t left and here I am in middle age thinking it’s too late to move anywhere else as my life is here

so it works both sides. I think it’s human nature to hanker after the past. Think about what is good where you are

I get the feeling. I’m nearly 40 and have lived more than half of my life abroad. DH and I are
from different countries, and we live in a third country now; we are raising our children in a culture that is not home for either of us.

I love the UK, but on a recent visit back, it became clear that it has changed so much since we left. If we moved back, it would not be a return to the place we left. It seemed a lot more run down, and everyone we met seemed to have such a depressing outlook on life. Very few goals, very little forward momentum, very few things to look forward to. It all felt rather joyless and hopeless. Clearly that’s not the entire country, but it was enough to make us glad we aren’t living there.

@DivorcingEU I think the language thing very much depends on the child and the local environment.

Our DCs went to the local school in the local language but we spoke English in the home. Their friendship group was from the local school. I don't think they felt isolated. We absorbed some local traditions but at the same time retained our own.

There is lots of conflicting advice given to parents about this. One of our friends was told that he should only speak with his DCs in the local language. As a result his DCs could not speak his language and struggled to communicate with their GPs. Seeing our DCs flick between languages without effort he regretted taking that advice.

I absolutely don't mean the OP should speak the local language to her child.

I actually think it's a terrible idea to speak a language you're not native speaker standard in to immerse your children.

I mean that the vast majority of the child's interactions outside the house should be in the community language if there's not a native speaker at home.

Almost all the child's friends and activities should not be English speaking IMO - at least until she's fluent, if she's going to thrive in local, non English speaking school.

We speak English at home if there are no visitors, and it is my children's mother tongue, the language they speak to one another in and they refuse to watched dubbed TV - always original language, the two who enjoy reading for leisure both prefer to read in English, but right from the start the world outside the front door has been in German for my children - the children in the playground, the baby and toddler's groups, the music group, the toddler gymnastics, the football club they each joined at age 4 and all still train with twice a week plus matches now (my eldest plays on the adult women's team now). Preschool was then obviously also in German but by the time they started they were fluent anyway, because I'd taken them to every possible local group and essentially lived in the neighborhood playground with them.

My eldest was the first "foreign" child at her kindergarten and her teacher told me at her 6 weeks in parents meeting that she'd been nervous about this but that DD actually had a better German vocabulary than most of the monolingual German children the same age, and was easier to understand than the children from dialect speaking families.

It's very possible to bring children up bilingually without speaking the community language to your child yourself as a non native.

I do appreciate that this is far harder for the OP as she says everyone speaks English where she lives - this is not the case in the farming community I accidentally landed in so although my first years here were extremely hard, I also had no real choice as neither my children nor I are naturally reclusive 🤣

It's really important to give a non native speaking child a fighting chance by immersing him or her in the local language pretty much every time they are outside the house IMO, not rely on them to pick it up just at school when everything else is in English in their lives. Parents who don't make the effort to expose them continually to the community language outside school extensively every single day are really doing them a disservice and making their school life much harder.

I think it would be useful to know OP's DC's age. Quite young I think.

A lot of children find the early stage at school overwhelming. Language will be another part of this.