Blog: Home Away From Home

Since moving from England to America almost 15 years ago it is difficult to pin point exactly when we realized that the move was permanent. Only coming for two years initially, those 24 months flew by so quickly that when my husband’s employers offered to sponsor us for permanent residency it seemed like the perfect solution. When the green card (which isn’t even slightly green incidentally) arrived in the mail about a year later, so did our independence to stay.

Thinking back, I’m not sure when or even if we decided that moving back home was definitely off the table. For the first few years every time someone asked if we were coming back our answer would be “absolutely!” Somewhere around year five and a couple of kids in, our responses weren’t quite as committed, but I remember feeling pretty confident that as long as we were back by the time our eldest child was 10 he could slide easily into the British school system in preparation for high school (which starts at age 11 in England) and be none the wiser. I would say it was somewhere around year eleven that we realized with some silent nervousness that our lives were in fact set here. Our American children have British heritage certainly, but their mindset was not and still is not English.

I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining as there is no doubt in my mind that raising them here is a privilege. Compared to back home we live in a mansion, the crime rate is almost non-existent, the children know everyone in our area and can run free around our subdivision without us worrying (thank you economy for stopping the building so we can pretty much see exactly where they are at all times). Add their positive school experiences and their amazing soccer opportunities into the mix and all of it contributes to allowing them to remain children for as long as possible while enabling us to live the lives of rock stars (as so many of our friends back home seem to think). But we can’t help but feel that there is always a small part missing. Regardless of how wonderful our life is here, dare I say that it isn’t quite complete?

The older I get the more aware I become of the burning question which we never talk about or even acknowledge for the most part because I think we are too scared to chance finding out the true answer. If I’d honestly realized almost 15 years ago that moving 4,000 miles away from family and friends for a short term adventure would result in a final decision to live here forever, I’m not so sure that we would have come. That’s not to say that we don’t love it here because we genuinely do but what we were unable to predict perhaps, was how lonely it can be too. Oceans apart and a six-hour time difference puts a real spanner in the works with regards to consistently cultivating healthy and strong relationships with everyone back home. On top of that our general day-to-day lives are so opposite to how most of our friends and family live that no one can really relate to us (refer to the rock star comment earlier!). Lots of our friends believe us to be millionaires, which of course is completely laughable, but the lifestyle they see on Facebook and on Shutterfly and even what we talk about on skype leads them to believe otherwise as the worlds between Plainfield and London are so completely different.

We have friends here who feel alone sometimes too as their family members live out of town or even out of state, but the difference between them and us is that they are all American. Regardless of distance they all have the same fundamental beliefs, they all celebrate the same holidays and they all share the same traditions. Miles may separate them for sure, but their cultures keep them together.

Being the first generation to move across the pond we, to a certain extent, are starting from the beginning. Although I can see that loneliness from time to time is inevitable, it’s something that I don’t want my kids to ever have to experience and so I take comfort in the fact that hopefully the traditions that we are creating now as a small family of five will stick with them and continue on as they grow up and start families of their own. It is important to me that the children feel strongly about where they belong, who they are and what they believe in. For me growing up with Welsh parents, being raised in England and now spending my adult life in America, it’s sometimes tricky to know where exactly I fit in and at times that can feel like a ball and chain weighing me down.

Friends are friends and many here we consider family but for the most part they come and go as with the circumstance of life. For the majority, family never leaves and emotionally ours are all right here, just in our situation they aren’t geographically close enough to stay and so we remain separated.

The children don’t know any different and as we believe without doubt that raising them here is absolutely best, they believe it too, just as they should. It’s only us as adults who know what we are missing and having kids doesn’t allow for our selfish desires to creep in. So we stand strong and try to live every day by cherishing our blessings. At the end of the day it won’t be long before our house is filled with American Heatons, son in laws, daughter in laws, grandchildren and more. Time is unstoppable apparently, after all last time I blinked I was only 25!