Return to America, Part 2

I hope my last post shed a little light on what it's like to move back to your home country after living abroad for awhile and all the complicating emotions and thoughts that accompany the physical move. It's tough but there are also some really amazing things about being back, some I didn't even know I missed until I experienced it again.

First and foremost is being close to family. I love that the kids are getting to know their grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins. It's good for them to have these relationships and something that cannot be replaced. The birthday celebrations, the holidays, the bbq's, these are all things that will last in their memories.

Another thing about moving back is that things are just easier. When I go to the store, while I may be overwhelmed with the number of choices, I am not having to translate in my head. It's rare now, but for the first few months back, I would be taken aback every time I picked up something to read the label and saw that it was in English. Getting places? Don't have to bike, hop on a bus, and then walk, just to get to a friend's house. If it's raining, I have to run 10 feet to my car and jump in instead of piling two kids, 2 saddlebags full of groceries, and myself onto a bike and riding a mile or two against gale force winds, that somehow have been against me both coming and going.  Do I need to call and talk to someone in customer service? No problem! They are usually super friendly, don't charge me 20 cents a minute, and speak English. I remember over there just pushing random buttons for like 10 minutes, being transferred through different menu options, hoping to get to a real person, who would probably transfer me again anyways when I asked if I could speak English. (I know all my expat friends know exactly what I'm talking about, just keep pushing those buttons! )

Convenience. America is a land of convenience and this is a double edged sword. There's a lot of negative things about all this convenience but I'm only going to focus on the good things for now. 3 kids in car seats? Drive thru options are my best friend. Grocery carts at the store that are designed to tote at least 2 kids? Thank you America! People bagging groceries for you so that you aren't trying to stuff everything in your bag as fast as you can because they are already starting to slide the next person's groceries onto yours, while you are still struggling to attach your bags onto your stroller.
Basically going anywhere is just more convenient. You don't have to plan for all four seasons (ok maybe in Missouri but at least we're in cars here!) for yourself and your kids every time you go out because it's inevitable if you don't, you will be caught on your bike with 2 kids in a rainstorm, crazy wind and hail and a temperature that dropped 20 degrees (this legitimately happened to me).

I have been surprised by the level of confidence I have felt return since moving back. I think when you live abroad, it's so difficult adapting to a new culture, a new language, a new lifestyle, that you begin to lose confidence.  Some people are naturals at learning a new language. I am not. Attempting to speak the language in a foreign country was really hard, even after 4.5 years, university language classes, and experience. Too many times did people look at me with quizzical eyes as they tried to figure out what I was saying, even though when they repeated the correct pronunciation back to me, what I had said sounded exactly like what they said...at least to me. Here I know how to talk...mostly. I am not hesitant to approach someone to ask a question or a price. I know the cultural expectations here and how to function within them when need be. I'm not consistently having to dispel myths about my culture (No, all Americans don't carry guns in their cars, love President Obama, hate poor people and immigrants, etc, etc).

There's so many other random things I love about being back. It's nice with 3 young kids to have a little ease and convenience in your life.  We want our kids to know America as home.  We would love to live abroad again sometime, as we had such rich experiences and made lifelong friends but for right now, as tough as it has been, we are pretty content settling down for awhile.

Return to America, Part 1

I've written this post over and over, erased it, walked away, came back and tried again, only to walk away again for months. I've been trying to store things away in my head for when the time came that I was ready to blog again. This process of repatriating , returning back to America, was more difficult and emotional than I ever could have anticipated. But now I'm going to try and share some of my thoughts and experiences of returning back to America after living abroad for 4 1/2 years.

In late January, Dan defended his PhD, we sold most of our belongings and put the other 15 boxes on a ship, packed up the two kids (and the one still baking in the oven), said goodbye to all of our friends and caught a plane back to America. The first few weeks were spent adjusting to the time change, introducing the kids to family and friends, and figuring out where we could buy decent bread and coffee(9 months later and still searching). Only the two grandma's had ever met Jonas and he was 1.5! The first few weeks were hectic but exciting as people were glad we were back and we were glad to see everyone and just rest a bit after a crazy last few months in The Netherlands. It  was after the first month that we started to struggle with things.

The kids were in car seats consistently for the first time. Every time we left to go somewhere, Ellie would get upset and say she wanted to walk, NOT ride in the car. We were thrown for a loop every everytime we went to the grocery store. SO.MANY.OPTIONS. Plus I knew what to look for in my old grocery stores back in Holland, but here it was like I was in a foreign country. I am just now getting to where I can mentally handle Costco. I mean, my mindset had been changed from shopping for a week or more to shopping for every few days because my fridge could only hold so much (remember that time in our first apt we had a dorm sized square refrigerator??). I once drove around for way longer than I should have, trying to find a mailbox, all the while trying to remember if they even still had free standing post boxes in America and if they delivered mail on Mondays (they didn't in The Netherlands).  Um, also, because Holland did away with checks before we arrived, I have forgotten how to write checks, so there's that.

(This is a picture of our first kitchen. Our refrigerator was in one of the cabinets on the bottom. You can see our shopping dilemma.)




I have a ton of stories about crazy cultural things that threw me for a loop. But the hardest thing was the emotional turmoil of thinking that I should know these things, America is my country. I should be able to transition seamlessly back into a city where I spent way more time than 4.5 years. Why was I having trouble remembering where mailboxes were in the city? Why was my English grammar something akin to my toddler's? Why was I regretting not taking more holiday's to other European countries? (ok that's an easy one to figure out:) ) Why was I still using the word "holiday"??

It was hard to talk with people about living there because everyone seemed to expect us to just be super happy that we were back. And we were happy to be back but also we really missed our life back there too. People would say, "Oh you must be so thrilled to be back for good!" and we would sort of smile, half nod and say, " Well, we are but also it's hard sometimes". What we didn't always say was, " We have missed our family and America will always be the greatest country to us BUT we started our life together there when we moved over 10 days after getting married. Our first home was there, two of our children were born there, we left friends who became like family to us and we overcame crazy obstacles together. that you can only understand when you pack up your stuff and move to a foreign country."

 When we would look at pictures or talk about some of our experiences, it just sounded really pretentious, so we didn't. Talking about going to Italy or driving to Paris for a weekend sounds really snooty if you don't understand that from The Netherlands, doing either of those things is a ton cheaper than a week long trip to Florida from Missouri. The first time we had a visitor from The Netherlands come visit us, we soaked up that time talking about life back there and our repatriation process. He had done the whole process once before so it was nice to have some validation that our feelings weren't crazy.

Another really difficult thing that I didn't fully expect was the relational aspect. When we came back, life had gone on. Our friends had lives and we really weren't a part of it anymore. Dan was knee deep in job searching so it didn't bother him as much as it did me, who needed things to do while 7 months pregnant with 2 toddlers. Everything had changed, we had changed and we had no idea where we fit anymore. The Netherlands was no longer home but America didn't feel like home either. It didn't help that we had no place of our own yet. We will always be incredibly grateful to our families for allowing us to stay with them during this time, but it definitely makes it harder to "settle" back in when all of our possession are still in boxes in the basement.

It's been a tough transition for more reasons that just moving countries but there have also been some amazing things about moving back, which I'll write about in Part 2.