The Question Answered

This is the thing that has been approaching. We are moving. Leaving America and returning to the UK. It is happening now, albeit at a glacial pace. The removal people are here, packing and wrapping, and heroically trying to decipher all the explanatory post-its we have left up about the house.

We aren't, ourselves, flying home today. That's not happening until after Christmas. So the whole process is strangely drawn out; longeurs of planning or tidying interrupted by bursts of activity, like today, when Things Suddenly Change.

We've greatly enjoyed our time here in America, and I'll come back to that at some point in the future, but right now I feel mostly just relieved. Ever since we arrived in Houston, since before we even decided we were coming here, the question has been hovering: how long were we going to stay? All the time we've been here, that's been second, sometimes the third thing anyone has asked us. "Where are y'all from? Do you like it here? How long are y'all staying?"

We didn't have an answer, which is fine as long as we weren't asked. In between times, the question sank to the bottom of our minds, obscured by the muddy waters of day-to-day life. There's no reason to agonise about where you're going to be living in ten years time when you've got to decide what's for dinner tonight.

And the main thing was that we were happy. Laura was happy with her job, we were all happy with the schools. Houston was an easy place to live. We were fine. If we stayed, we would carry on being fine. If an opportunity to move back turned up, we would probably take it, but there was no way to engineer such an opening and so in the meantime we could just carry on. The day-to-day stuff kept happening.

But every time someone asked the question, it reminded me that we didn't, couldn't know what was going to happen to us. And it began to feel like there two very different futures waiting for us simultaneously: one American, one British. Neither unpleasant, but would we get to choose, or would the decision be made for us? The longer we stayed, the more likely it was that the day-to-day stuff would harden about us like concrete: as soon as one of the boys was in a serious relationship, or got a job, it would be almost impossible to consider moving back home.

And then, rather suddenly, an opening did come up. In August we were adapting to middle school, planning Christmas, and mulling over if we should move neighbourhoods. In September we were faced with choosing between two continents. That we got to choose between those two futures, that we got to weigh up the advantages of each, that was a big relief. It felt good to go through the process and to evaluate our options. It went back and forth, but it was soon clear that we should go home, that the UK was home, even if the boys had spent more than half their lives across the water. It's not that the US is a horrible place: for all its faults, it has been exciting and fun to live here. But it has always felt like a foreign country, and I have always felt like a visitor.

Going home means that this has been a wonderful adventure, and these six years become an extraordinary episode in our lives. If we were to stay, no matter how much fun we might have, at some point America would become boringly normal.