Will this place ever feel like home?
I’ve never moved like this before. I’ve never found myself thousands of miles away from everything and everyone I have ever called home. It’s never been just my husband and me and the children. There was always someone to call, always someone to help and always someone to visit.
The place was familiar with faces and buildings and roads to destinations burned into memory so many years ago.
It was time to leave.
It was time to dare ourselves.
It was time to make changes.
I don’t regret any of it. In fact, I’m so proud of us for doing it.
For almost nine months I have lived away. I have lived on the flattest land I have ever seen under the most beautiful sky that continues to amaze me every day with a sun that never seems to stop shining.
I am happy. So very happy.
But this place still does not feel like home.
Not yet at least.
I keep waiting for the feeling of home to fill my heart but it doesn’t. Perhaps it’s too soon. Perhaps this place is just temporary.
And still… my heart is fuller than it has ever been.
It doesn’t long for what we left behind.
The people – yes.
The place – not at all.
But this weekend, for the first time since moving “away” I am going “home”.
Home for a celebration.
Home with family and friends and me for the first time in nine months.
I wonder how I will feel.
I wonder if it will feel like “home”.
But most of all I wonder if when I get back on the plane to go “away” again will it feel like I’m leaving home or heading towards it?
I totally understand what you’re feeling. When I moved from BC to Ontario (for marriage) I felt homesick for the first 5 years (at least). I’d cry (bawl) each and every time I flew out to visit with family and had to leave. I’d always refer to “home” as BC and this was just where I lived.
I really can’t pin-point the exact moment that Ontario felt more like home than BC… but it did eventually happen.
It may take a while but it will come. xoxoxoxo
When we got posted away from my home it took me 3 years to call our new city home. The weird thing is we got posted back to where I grew up last year yet I miss home which I now refer to as where we lived the past 6 years.
Yes it will Maija! In 2005, we moved from Nova Scotia to Edmonton and in a day we got on a plane in Halifax and got off a plane in Edmonton and knew absolutely no one. When I went to register the kids in school, we had no ‘emergency contacts’ because we had no family or friends in our new city. But, bit by bit, it got better. I adopted the attitude of “you have to be happy where you are”. So I made the best of everything. We moved for my husband’s job and I become a stay-at-home mom where previously I had been working. So it was SO much change all at once. I feel very at home now, although Nova Scotia is still ‘home’ and I miss it. But I am happy in Edmonton too and if we moved, I would miss it! Angie xo
i love this. i can feel every word. we recently moved thousands of miles away again and i too wonder when it will feel like home. Last time we moved (7 years) it felt like home right away.
The feeling of being at home. Nothing would beat that feeling of being on the place you’ve been familiar with an where you actually grow. It brings back good old memories.