The long road home

We are coming home.

On the virtual eve of your two year anniversary here in Canada, we have decided that we are going to go back to Australia. We hope to be standing upon Australian soil by December 2007.

We don't know what we are going back to. Things change with the passing of time; places, people, ourselves, and then there are the unexpected things; things that perhaps only we, the removed, will notice.

Things will not be the same once we get back, nor do I expect them to be, which makes me a little afraid, a little uneasy and tentative in expressing my joy to return. I am afraid you will not like the new us, if you perceive there to be a "new us"; I am concerned that you have adjusted splendidly to our absence and there is no longer a place for us in your lives. Our kids don't know you, and you don't really know them; give them time, they will love you, just as we do.

We don't really know exactly where we are going to call home, within our wide brown land; we are hoping Adelaide, so we can be nearer to those we have missed, but the reality is that we have to go where the work is.

So why now....when we initially suggested forever.

Well, the answer to that could very well take pages to explain, and each page might present statements that contradict with the last: I love it here, but I dislike what I have become. I have enjoyed the years of quiet reflection and have appreciated being removed from certain stressful situations, but I dislike the isolation, dislocation from the social and the loneliness. The financial situation here has been crippling, stifling, limiting and suffocating, and yet we hope to return with a good profit. Ashley will tell you his love for sport is one reason he yearns so strongly for Australia, and yet we have not watched a single game of hockey, a sport that rivals Aussie Rules, concerning the inspired passion, and frenzied supporters stakes. We might tell you how soul depleting we found the cold dark months of winter over here, and yet the sight of falling snow was such joy to the heart, that our inner child simply burst with wonderment and playful abandon that we secretly wished it would keep falling like soft feathers, forever. We will tell you that the timing fits with children's schooling so they fit in and make friends, all the while tearing them away from the Canadian friends they have already made. I might tell you that I have missed Australia and am glad or, perhaps relieved to be home, but do not scold me, if I present with a broken heart when reflecting upon my time in Canada, for unlike Australia, which I know to be waiting for us with reassuring welcoming arms, I know my life here in Canada can never be again...it is over and it is done, and it feels a little like the end of a marriage, in some respects....one simply can not go back.

I first fell in love with Canada in 1999, when we spent time there on vacation. I longed to return, and dreamed of one day doing just that, saying that "I could live there"....mind is a powerful thing. But like all fairy tales, they are just that, fairy tales; skimming over the realities of real life and the practicalities of everyday living...no one lives happily ever after; it would be superficial to suggest they do; dismissing a person's growth through the challenges, adversity and the self-reflection they have had to endure.

When we return, I hope to make some good choices. I hope to return, having acquired some wisdom, though I can't tell you what kind of wisdom that is, for at this point, as I am still living in the moment. I hope to return and not make the same mistakes I have made in the past, but really, I don't know where life is taking me next.... taking us next, but I am open to whatever it is.

I just want to live.