Seoul Much To Say

Way back when (April to be exact) I was blogging along with the A-Z Challenge and I've decided to go back now and wrap it up with the final eight letters of the alphabet. You'll find the first post in the series here, but in a nutshell my theme was things that delight. 

Delight is my word for the year and it seems whenever I have a word for the year it is apropos to that particular year's life circumstances. Or maybe it's the opposite in that it's not obvious in life's circumstances, but declaring it my word inspires me to seek it out. 

An-y-way...

S is for South Korea

This little punkin and his parents and his soon-to-be born sibling will be setting up their new home on the other side of the world later this summer, and I thought it worth a mention here.  

Nana isn't going with him, but she will definitely come and visit. 

When I tell people my daughter is moving to South Korea I generally get one of two reactions.  A look of horror and disbelief flashes across their face as they whisper 'South Korea??' 

Or they say Oh Wow! What an amazing opportunity for them! What an adventure they will have! 

I'm in the latter camp in case you're wondering. Which is not to say there aren't some hard things to get my head around like the upside down time zone and the fourteen-ish hour flight and the puppy dog coming to live with us for the duration. But mostly I think Wow! What an amazing opportunity  for them! What an adventure they will have!

When I schlepped baby boy's mama across the pond to live at the tender age of fifteen she initially dug in her heels and cried herself to sleep at night. Our move happened so fast and she had been mostly happy in her big American high school. 

Very quickly though she found herself feeling at home in a country not her own. Really at home because one of the first things you learn when you move house or state or country is home is where your people are and there we were. 

She made friends with classmates who were different in many ways but were the same in all the ways that count. 

She became a comfortable traveler...adaptable, flexible, curious. 

She said she wished we'd had more chances to live in more faraway places and now here she is some fifteen years later moving to Asia. 

I want to to go back for a minute and reassure my 43-year old self that you are doing the right thing moving your teenagers from suburban Maryland to a small English village. That you shouldn't worry so much about how these daughters of yours will adjust because they will do so much more than adjust. They will bloom and grow and thrive amidst all the new and different. 

They will thank you for upending their lives and for showing them the world is big but people are people. I want to tell the me back then that fifteen year old daughter will one day make a move to South Korea and scarcely bat an eye. That the years we spent in England helped make her ready for the now. 

Not just ready but eager. Excited. Confident that when God opens a door we need to boldly walk on through. 

My son-in-law is a surgeon in the Army so we've known all year a move would occur, we just didn't know where. For the past year I've been praying specifically for their new home, new neighbors, new assignment. It's possible I may have even prayed once or twice for God to bring them East because they've spent the last five years living way out west.  

Y'all sometimes God gives us exactly what we ask for-ha! 

They are moving East. To the land of ancient history and delicious barbecue. Changdeokgung Palace and the DMZ. Twelve Unesco World Heritage Sites and the breakdancing capital of the world. 

And because there's no escaping ordinary life that will happen too. Play dates and laundry and a new baby to love. Groceries bought and meals prepared. Coffee with friends and church on Sundays. That dance of the familiar helps you feel at home when your feet wobble and your heart jiggles and tears threaten. 

Which they probably will, but my now grown up girl knows they won't last. She'll put down roots and settle in. She will call this new place home because that's where her people are. 

And she will find delight in this new place because that's how her mama raised her. 

Guess what? We're Normal

Have any of you published your blog into a hard cover book? I did this just before Christmas and I love it. And I'm especially glad I've inundated you with pictures in every post because who doesn't love a book with pictures? I used this site and I'm happy with the finished product. And this really has nothing to do with anything except my mom has been reading my 'book' which reminded me that I wanted to mention it here.

Just giving you the heads up....My husband is traveling so I may have more random words than usual this week.

Saturday was a beautiful day...sunny and almost mild. For January anyway. My husband flew to Japan on business Saturday morning so the pup and I drove to my moms house to spend the night. We went to church on Sunday morning then drove back to my house to spend a few days together. That's something I love about my new home...I'm only a short two hour drive from my mom.

Speaking of things I love/don't love about my new home...Friday was good. Several people asked me what repatriation is all about. I wrote about it in this post but in a nutshell...when you move to a foreign country you experience culture shock. Over time you adapt to your new country's customs, speech and way of life. You live in the foreign country for several years. It becomes home. And then one day you return to live in your real home country. You experience something known as reverse culture shock. And every now and then you need to talk about it with someone who understands the feelings and the phenomenon. And Friday was our day to do just that.

We talked all day. I only cried once. Besides all the talking we did a few exercises that went something like this-

List three things you miss about life there-

1. the village life

2. British humor and language

3. my friends

only 3?

List three things you are happy not to have to deal with here:

1. ridiculously narrow parking lots and spaces

2. a dorm sized refrigerator/freezer that is not frost free

3. 17 varieties of lightbulbs in a single house

List three things you are happy to have here:

1. closets

2. big wide roads and car parks

3. an ice maker

etc. etc. etc. It felt good to talk and laugh and set some goals. Oh, and to be told we are normal...always nice to hear that. Have a great Monday!

The Art of Coming Home

Did you know it was an art? Do you even know what I’m talking about? Isn’t this home? Should returning to the country of your birth ever need to be anything more than a tiny blip on the radar that is life? Did you have any idea that people of all ages and nations and walks of life have been studied and whole books have been written in order to better understand the phenomenon known as reverse culture shock? I’ve been reading one such book, which is aptly entitled, The Art of Coming Home by Craig Storti (don't know him, not doing any kind of review, yadda yadda yadda...just reading a book).

This concept of reverse culture shock is something I've wanted to write about on my blog for a while now, mostly because it’s a topic that consumes much of my thinking. I’m more or less in the throes of it…I’m up, I’m down, I love it here, I miss it there, I wish I could see/do/be xyz here, I don’t miss that about there, I cry and wring my hands in frustration, won’t someone understand… I go hours or days without life there even entering my thoughts at all… but wait, that's no good…I want it to stay fresh in my head…no, it needs to fade…who am I now… how do I take what I learned about myself and people and differences and life and make it fit here…where do I belong and how do I balance memory and reality?

There is a problem though in writing about all of this in a forum such as blogland, or for that matter anywhere outside of the expatriate community, and that is this: at the very core of 'coming home' is the undeniable fact that people don't really care. I’m truly not being critical here, just keeping things real. It’s a bit of, "So what's the big deal? You were here, you moved overseas for a while, blah blah blah, and now you're back.... where you belong. Home.”

Do you know how many times I've heard those words...here... home... where you belong? The thing is we're not really feeling it. Not yet anyway. We will I’ve been told but at the moment not so much. I'm sure a few of you are rolling your eyes as you read this thinking, ‘My goodness, will she just get on with life already???” That's an honest reaction and I understand it. Recently the welcome wagon lady stopped by my house. She stayed for almost 2 hours and I’m pretty sure I mentioned we'd just moved back to the states after 6 years overseas but what she really wanted to talk about was...herself. Her reaction to me was pretty much the reaction I get from almost everybody when I mention that we're new... ‘Wow, London, that's nice...so anyway back to me’. A slight exaggeration but I think you know what I mean. We're all very much about our own stuff...our own little corner of the world, what's going on inside our own house and particularly what is going on inside our own head. Perhaps this reaction is a blessing in that it is what helps me move on, to look forward, to be in this moment and not moments past.

It’s a high wire act I find myself walking most days. I want to feel settled and at home here, in this place, this town, my country, but in doing so I don’t want to let go of a single thing that has been added to my life in the past six years. A friend who also lived in the UK for six years but has been back in the states for seven years now recently said to me, “Sometimes I forget I ever lived there. Like those years never happened.” Is that feeling inevitable? Oh I really hope not. How exactly do I embrace the new without letting go of the old?

I started my blog back in January. We’d been told since the previous June that we would be repatriating in the next few months and it was just after Christmas that the time frame seemed to come together. I knew then that I would be overwhelmed by my own thoughts and feelings and I started blogging to capture that in some way, to put some of those thoughts and feelings in writing so they wouldn’t keep me awake at night. I wrote about what I expected to feel as we made our way back across the pond. Now I’m feeling it and I want to write about that too. Perhaps this post reads like one great big giant whine but I assure you that is not the case at all. My heart is in fact feeling very full…full of gratitude and sweet memory and hope for the future. A future where memory and reality are blended in equal parts…where I smile at the old and welcome the new….where home is where I am and the rest is in my heart.