Back in my home country for a few days

[BackHomeAgain]

I feel strange.

It’s been 18 months since I was last home, and that was for my father’s funeral. Everything is so familiar, my childhood and adulthood was here, my friends and family are still here. It’s like a big trip down memory lane but I’m not necessarily enjoying it. It’s a cross between comfortable and painful.

I didn’t have a bad childhood but my relationship with my mother deteriorated in my teens, and has never recovered. I had a big group of friends but no self-confidence. I felt hugely inadequate all through my 20s and 30s.

Living abroad, I feel free from everything - from social and family pressures. I just get on with being me. I wonder if was trying to run away?? And now I feel disloyal to my roots.

We could move back tomorrow (though we’re not planning to) and slot right back in. It would be very easy socially, financially, logistically. This is all very reassuring until I think of how emotionally uncomfortable I am here. The emotional bit would be super hard. Being surrounded by my history hurts.

I guess I’m different now. A lot of hard stuff has happened and coming back just reminds me of that I suppose. But is it healthy to just turn around and walk away and leave it behind?

I don’t know what the point of posting is, guess I wonder if anyone else has felt the same.

I moved back to my home country two years ago from the UK. I was happy to stay in the UK, but my dh (UK citizen) was keen to give it a go here. I had a good childhood but once we moved back, my relationship with my mom completely broke down. What also compounds it is that she now has stage 4 cancer. I've discovered that she has narcissistic personality disorder and was absolutely vile to my dh & dc. Ultimately my priorities lay with my dh & dc & I don't think she liked that.

We've since moved 3 hours away from my dm & we didn't know anyone. My dh was offered the first job he applied for & earns 3x his previous UK salary. He's very happy in his role & my dc love their schools but oddly I'm the one still homesick for the UK! However, after 2 years the homesickness is lessening & I've met the most lovely people. Things are definitely looking up even though I have no relationship with my family here.

I can relate to your emotions completely. There's no right or wrong answer..go with your gut. If you do decide to move back home & it doesn't work out, move back to the UK, it'll still be there even after Brexit!

Very similar story. When we returned, we lived in a different city a long way from where I grew up and I was really happy. Job situation changed and the next job was in the town I grew up in - the one with all the bad memories. It’s been really hard. I hate it. I’ve been depressed. My kids hate it too - for their own, valid reasons. We’re all over moving though. I would say that if you do end up moving back to your home country, go to a whole new city/town/area where you have no history. Even if you had a great one, you cant recapture it. People move in without you in it.

I was thinking about exactly this earlier this week, when the possibility of moving back to the UK reared its head again. I didn’t have an unhappy childhood or a difficult adulthood, but I don’t want to move back.

Aside from the upheaval, and possibly finding it boring (London isn’t boring by any stretch, but after decades of having lived there there's an element of familiarity breeding if not contempt, apathy), I just don’t consider it home any more. My friends and family are there, and I love my memories of it, and I love visiting, but it doesn’t spark anything inside me. I go back and feel warm and fuzzy for a while, but no butterflies or thrills of excitement. Nothing to do with Brexit. It’s just very samey.

I do wonder whether I’m running away from something and/or towards something elusive or transient, and the only reason I’m concerned I may be is if I become apathetic to where I am now. I’m not going to want to start afresh aged 70-odd! Do I need to learn to settle down once and for all? Hmmm.

Your situation is different. Sometimes difficult relationships are kept healthiest with some distance. I don’t think families should be about suffering, certainly not when one member has cancer and a sharp or destructive edge to her personality. There’s no shame in keeping some distance.

I don’t follow the bit about disloyalty to your roots. You clearly know where you come from, those are your roots. You can’t change that. You’re not responsible for where you come from, your childhood/adolescence/adulthood would have been the same wherever you’d lived, you didn’t choose your mum or the impact she had on your life. I don’t see how disloyalty comes into it. Are you saying you feel guilty for choosing to extract yourself from an environment that wasn’t optimal for you? Do you find that selfish?

Thanks all.

To be clear we are not moving back to the UK. Nor are we considering it. We are happy in our other country, I was just back for a visit. I just meant that if we ever decided to, it would be super easy to slot back in and get on with it - as if we’d never been away. And that whilst there visiting it was somehow emotionally uncomfortable despite the familiarity.

I guess I feel disloyal because there are people there who care about us, but we are happier not being close to them and that we have a nicer life living somewhere else. Like we’ve turned our backs a little bit on our old life, like it’s no longer good enough.

And on one hand it was great to catch up with friends, but in the other hand I could no longer relate. Their issues with schools, money, houses, youth crime, husbands who don’t pull their weight, 11+, boredom, grey kitchens, extensions or loft conversions just aren’t things that are problems for us in our new country.

But to your point @7salmonswimming, it does feel a bit selfish..

And the weather was bloody terrible. Grey and drizzly the whole time!

I guess it just doesn’t feel like home anymore.