One year later

Last year about this time we arrived in Jackson, MS at the airport, greeted by immediate family members, who had been waiting all afternoon for us. The emotional tension resolved as we crossed the threshold of the TSA. After almost three years, our bodies arrived at our home state: Mississippi. And for the last year, almost everyone asks us: ‘Are you glad to be home?’

And our answer is brutally honest: ‘Sometimes.’ Hear me when I say, we are glad to be among family and familiar friends again, but we miss our most previous home.

Well, to be honest, we have many ‘homes,’ near and far, and so ‘home’ for us is wherever we are located. For the past three years, home for us was the U.K., specifically, Bristol, England. We often recall memories of City Centre, riding the city bus, or the blended smells of big city and rural country. Quite often we dream of returning to live there but with no plan to actually make a living, really. For the past year, we’ve grieved, mourned, and desperately held on to Jon Andrew’s lingering British accent.

Other than remembering the good old days of living in England, the thing that we struggle with the most is feeling out of place in a familiar land. I don’t know if words can adequately explain the phenomenon, but I’ll try. Yes, we are familiar with our American culture and way of life, but living overseas (even in a country that speaks English) opened our eyes to the global cultures represented in a dense population, which offered us an alternative way of living and thinking. Our family embraced this context and thereby benefited from this courageous act of experiencing the world beyond our home state and country.

Food was different. The air was different. The politics, and reciprocal relationships between people and politics, wasdifferent. Church was different. Everything was different. We walked more. We talked more. We lingered longer with friends at table. We slowed down, took a breath, laughed more, lived more, and wondered how most of our adult working life had been distilled down to functioning a scripted life of going to work for 40+ hours a week, using only half of PTO, and living at a speed of Mach 5. So, yeah, everything was different in another context, and we are better for experiencing it as a family.

And now, one year later, we are slowly coming to terms with acknowledging our life in a familiar ‘home,’ yet while still feeling out-of-place among family and friends. So, sometimes we are glad to be home, but a lot of times we’re still grieving our previous life in another country. Thus, I suppose that will take some time for us to grieve the loss. But in the meantime, we are glad to be home...sometimes. 😊

Cheers.