Six Month Reflections

Usually, we write our blog with the goal of amusing those reading and perhaps shedding a little light into what it’s been like for us living in the UK. In our attempt to keep our devoted readers (okay, so it’s only Dave, Greg and Patti who read it, but three readers are better than none) interested, we often decide to use humour and story-telling. However, sometimes we edit from the blog some actual honesty about what it is like for us to be here for fear that it might be depressing or boring. But today, while we are taking stock of life after six months in England, I will try to take a page from another blog we’ve stumbled upon, www.wifeinthenorth.blogspot.com and share some of the ups and downs of life since we moved across the pond.

There are good days in England. Days when the sun is shining and the train runs on time. These are the days when we feel lucky that we have been able to have this opportunity. We feel lucky that things have really worked out well for us. We have a nice place to live. We both have great jobs with really great co-workers. And, the pace of life is a lot slower. We are both taking steps to advance our careers. Brent is doing his Masters and it is being paid for by his work. Brilliant. Beth’s PhD is progressing well and her supervisor is terrific. The grocery store delivers. Fantastic. Plus, we are able to travel all over England on little mini day-trips instead of making it a big two week vacation. This is quite a luxury. Some days it feels like the land of opportunity. There are so many midwifery teaching jobs here we could have our pick of where we want to live. A stark contrast to Canada where there are six universities spread out throughout the country and they are all already fully staffed. And, the field of university intellectual property is miles ahead here - they have really got their act together. There are days when it is fun noticing the amusing differences between cultures. The sense of history and the feeling that many of our ancestors came from these very lands is pretty amazing. It is a privilege to live in the land of Shakespear, Churchill, Dickens, Austin, and Harry Potter. We are also really lucky to be experiencing this adventure together.

But then there are the grey, rainy and gusty days; and the weather is bad too. There are days when we wonder why we left our nice, comfortable life behind with family and friends. There are days when figuring out how to do basic day to day things in a foreign place is too hard. Often we coast through the week Monday to Friday, caught up in our daily activities and busyness, only to be hit with the feeling of homesickness on Sunday when we finally slow down. Our missing of all things familiar turns into lengthy conversations about the importance of snow to the Canadian identity and fond reminiscence of how nice our couch was. There are days when we just whine, ‘we want to go home,’ and when we curse how the British can’t get anything right.

It is a huge undertaking to pack up, put in storage and move one’s entire life. It is even more challenging to try to maintain some kind of a life in two places. We are still paying bills and running a house in Canada, while doing all those same things here as well. It is a lot of balls to keep up in the air.

One of the hardest things about living in a new culture is finding out all the things you take for granted. On a daily basis we all have systems for being in the world; ways of getting things done. You know where to go, you know how long it takes to get there, you know the route and the expected traffic patterns and you don’t even have to think about it. When you move somewhere new these systems disappear and you have to start over again. It finally feels now, six months later, that we have some systems for surviving and functioning here. If we miss our train, we know when the next one comes. We know that you have to call Sky early when the wind knocks the satellite out or else it will take them 3 weeks to come and fix it. It feels good to be competent, functioning people again. But I can’t help but feel that although the layer of ice that we are skating on is getting thicker by the day, there is still a fast current lurking just beneath the surface. At any moment we might hit a weak patch of ice and fall in.