An expat repatriates: I want to move back to London
This story less true than when I originally wrote it. The urge did pass, mostly.
The urge will pass, but right now, I just want to go back to London.
When Virginia and I met as two lonely American expat moms, one of our favorite conversations involved trying to suss out what we liked about London vs home. We quickly decided that everyday London life rocked. The instant something went wrong, however, from a picked wallet, to a medical urgency, to an ice storm, then home trumped. We found huge differences in calling in a stolen credit card to American Express vs Barclays.
Mostly though, we loved the community, the combination of population density and green spaces that enabled us to socialize while going about everything else we had to do.
I find the day to day difficult in Houston. It’s lonelier. I can get the community. I have gotten it. It just requires more continual effort and driving. Lots of driving. I miss walking. I probably got in a good 3–4 miles a day while going about my normal business. Here I have to schedule excercise.
In London, once you had a village, then it was there, available, at the ready. Lately, my efforts here have tired me out. I feel like I’m having to wrangle a village together. (One friend can lecture me that this is completely my fault. Her texts got buried.)
Granted, my mom’s rapidly approaching move in here might have me a little on edge. She comes to live with us temporarily at the end of the week. I’ve no problem with mom being here. It’s her stuff. She keeps a bit more stuff than I do. She has been bringing it here.
Last week she brought over my wedding cake. No, not the topper, the whole top tier. Reader, I have been married for a while. Thirteen years, actually. The cake wasn’t identifiable except for the “Leslie’s Wedding Cake” label on the Tupperware lid. My mom is so happy to have the big yellow 80’s vintage Tupperware bowl back. She’d been looking for it — for about 12 years it seems.
A few hours later…
Why do moms blog? Because it works. Within 10 minutes of posting, I got a friendly phone call from another repatriate. We are on the same longing for London schedule it seems. Twenty minutes after that, I got a call from Maverick (one of my main mom mentors) who wanted to check up on me. Our consensus: helicopter mothering takes much of the blame for this isolation. Working or not, American moms are too busy to connect with each other. Mav is batting 1000 on repatriated friends who find American motherhood baffling. Canada and her friend Norway came over for coffee and agreed.
As it happens, I’m drafting an article about the helicopter mom discussions we don’t see. We talk about how it stunts kids’ maturity and how it exhausts mothers, but it has so much more dirty laundry. I have female isolation listed as one of the middle topics. I think I’ll bump it to first, or last, as benefits its status as the immediate consequence of hovering. (And I did.)
