Moving back home-ish

I have been on a long blogging hiatus as we made our move back to the US, found a home, settled in, worked out our new normal. It’s been a weird, wonderful, confusing and illuminating move for our family.

There’s the third-culture kid syndrome of feeling a bit weird (and not fitting in) for having grown up in different countries; there’s the wide-eyed amazement at all the food, junk, and culinary wonders that we suddenly remembered we had missed; and on top of all that there’s the dystopian feeling of trying to settle into a new place in a world ravaged by Covid.

Our homeschooling era is coming to–not quite a close, exactly; more of a crossroads. Max completed his first year of college and is starting to solidify his life goals. Maya has graduated high school and is hoping to take a gap year to work and intern. Sam, who hasn’t met a whole lot of other teens because of the isolation of Covid-19, has decided to try high school at our local public school. Sara just wants to meet more kids, so we’re planning to put her into at least three or four homeschool enrichment classes for now, and possibly enroll her in the local elementary school at some point.

Our uber-healthy diet has also taken a major turn. We chose to immerse ourselves in all the foods we had been missing in our ten years overseas. Mostly pizza. And tacos. But also all the different styles of burgers. And the many, amazing regional barbecue varieties.

But now, ten months of upheaval and wrapping up our school year has brought us back to our basics. We’ve begun cooking a lot more and we’re working on next steps: registering Sam for school, searching for internships for Maya, looking for work for me. We’ve experienced a “real” winter–complete with snow and sledding and navigating icy sidewalks. Also a real spring, the colors warming our souls and bringing clarity to our plans. We’ve also done all those homeowner things we had never done before: buying real, permanent furniture, planting vegetables and flowers around the house, getting the ducts cleaned.

I think everyone is feeling happy. The dog certainly loves the greenery and the weather. And the squirrels! Many of them don’t hibernate here, so she got to chase them throughout the winter. After a decade in the desert, I love where we live now–my heart fills when I walk around our neighborhood and take in the tall trees, the colorful flowers and green plant life. I love hearing the birds all day and the crickets at night. We have a basketball hoop in our driveway, which for some reason symbolizes permanency and roots to Nabil. And the kids all have new adventures ahead.

Oh! And today is Mother’s Day, which in itself symbolizes our return home. In the UAE, mothers are celebrated on March 21, so celebrating “American” Mother’s Day solidifies the fact that we’re back home, as new and different as it seems.