I’m trying to write about what it’s like a year into repatriation
without giving advice on how to get here*. It wouldn't help to hear there will have
been unexpected growth and grounding when you’re only six months in and it’s
the dead of winter and you still don’t have any friends in your tiny village
(why did I think I would be happy in a tiny village anyway after decades living
in cities??) and you’re missing all your old friends like crazy.
Maybe this is more about commiseration with other people who've made it through a year and might recognize themselves a little bit, and maybe also for
those of you about to leap to help you, during the part while you’re wrenching
yourself away, pretend it will be ok later. It will be ok, but it will also be
much worse, in ways you didn’t expect. And then it will be spring again and the
neighbors will come out of their houses in your tiny village and they will be
friendly after all. And you’ll be able to think back to this time last year and
remember how wretchedly wrenched you felt and all scrambled up about home and
identity and what you wanted new people to know about you and on top of all
that there was no furniture in the house. What a blessed relief that part is over.
So for my cohort of yearling repats and those about to leap,
I’ll say this: it got better and I didn’t realize how until I let go of trying
to recreate things I’d lost. My Doha expat routines and community simply cannot
be replicated in rural Vermont. I made
it through the year thanks in part to Netflix, sugar, a few friends both here and far
away who did some propping up, a couple of snow adventures, and, now that
spring has come: lakes, a paddleboard, and acceptance of this new version of
home and my evolving place in it.
*I don’t like to write to give advice, because for the most
part I like learning by doing. I don’t like reading what smug people write,
from the other side of the problem, about how I should best navigate it. Does
it even help to read those lists of things that dying people regret? They
didn’t figure this out until they were old and certainly not from someone
telling them. It’s related to letting go of being able to talk your kids
through all the hard parts. They need to do some of their own messing up. We only provide the base. I’m only starting
to get a hint of how my older kids are choosing to navigate the world and all
I’ll say for now is that I’m mostly very relieved, especially about the oldest one
because it’s the first one that’s probably the most mis-parented. If he’s lucky he’ll get a good
graphic-novel-memoir out of it.
