Homesickness .... it's truly a bitch.

I've been pretty homesick in the last couple of weeks, it hit one Friday and didn't shift for a few days and I've then had the odd day here or there where it's descended on me without warning. What I have learnt is that there's no point fighting it, no amount of internal pep talks or being all Pollyanna about it will help - when the homesickness hits, the only way to deal with it is to talk it through and let it wash over you (preferably at the same time as a glass of wine washes over you - alchohol may not be the answer but after a glass or two of wine, who gives a toss about the question!) I'm lucky that I live where I do, there's a huge Pom ex-pat community here so every 2nd person will have been through what I'm going through, which makes it easier to talk to people about. I'm also lucky enough to have friends here that I can text when it's all a bit bleuuggh and say 'you know what I should be cleaning/tidying today but can we bin that off and have coffee instead' (I'm very lucky that I have chosen friends who regard housework with enough loathing that they'll drop their plans for bleaching the loo to come and eat cake with me too!) I sent one text last Wednesday, to a friend from school (as in 'one of Jakob's school friend's Mum', not as in 'I went to school with her') asking how she'd dealt with the homesickness (they've been here 5 years, originally from 'oop North, UK) within a few minutes not only had she replied with an amazing amount of good advice/her own experiences but, I later found out, had then texted 3 other mutual friends to tell them I was homesick and they then all rallied round. It was kind of a defining  moment and one which truly showed me that I *do* have friends here, and that though my default setting is 'internalise and try and deal with things alone', admitting that I'm sad every so often isn't wrong and it certainly doesn't mean I'll be on the next flight back to the UK, it just means I'm still adjusting to life here. The upshot of it all is that I spent a happy Friday afternoon with some friends, drinking wine, watching the kids play together and generally feeling a lot more me like than I had at the beginning of the week.

I think the problem with homesickness is that it hits when you least expect it, I'd managed nearly 6 months without finding it too hard being so far from home.I think that emigrating is always harder for the people you leave behind to start with. When we landed here we were too busy getting a life (literally - house/phones/school/car etc) to give much thought to how much we missed home.  Everyone we left behind was having to get used to us not being where we should be. Over here we were in holiday mode, in a rental house by the sea, enjoying the local wine and generally discovering all the cool stuff about Hawkes Bay. Then we moved, the kids were settled in school/kindy and then it all became 'real life' and we had time to process the move we'd made. That seems to be the point at which everyone at home has got used to you not being there and other people, entirely naturally, slip in to the space you've left and life moves on for everyone. That's when it hit me, we're here, they're there and there's a frickin' massive expanse of planet between us.

So, this was my first blip in an otherwise amazing adventure.I'm not going to dress it up, without the friends I've made here I'd probably have taken to my bed in a darkened room and tried to sleep through the heart wrenching feeling of being so far from home BUT I didn't, I went out, I saw friends and I talked about it and it really helped. What have I learnt? That homesickness is a bitch, a big tear inducing bitch who hides round corners and happy slaps you when you least expect her. I've learnt that people come though for you if you give them a chance and admit you're struggling, I've also learnt that however hard it's been the last couple of weeks, a lot of good's come out of it. I realise that I'm part of a nice circle of people here, which isn't a place I thought I'd get to here in NZ, I probably kept people at arm's reach because, hey, I'm 38, I'm not good at making new friends (which reminds me of a card my Mum sent me once, which stated on the front 'does not mix well with others' with a picture of pouting stroppy child on the front!) Last thing I've learnt? That you can be homesick *and* happy, and that's the most important lesson of all.  

6 months in ..... what's with the sandals?

Wow, 6 months in and I'm only just getting time to sit and write an update, time really has flown by. It's now mid winter here and so far it's been much the same as a UK summer, maybe dare I say it, a little sunnier! We're in our own home now, have been reunited with all our belongings, we've got a pet cat and the kids are settled in school and kindy. Jakob's made the hockey team and has soccer practice once a week, Ol's eagerly awaiting starting school in August and Leni's happy to be wherever her brothers are. The journey here seems to have been so quick and yet, when I look back on life over the past year, it seems to have been a long process to get where we are now.

So, where are we now? Well, we're part of a lovely community here, something which has really helped with our settling in process - everyone knows someone who can help you out somehow, that's very much the kiwi way of life, they're welcoming, helpful and eager for you to fall in love with their beautiful country. And we have, we've only seen a small part of this place so far but every where you look there's something amazing to see. We live in the shadow of Te Mata and there's not a day goes by when the view of the mountains here don't make me take a sharp intake of breath with their awesomeness. The pacific ocean is on our doorstep and the wild beauty of it never fails to soothe my soul when I'm feeling particularly homesick. All that aside, it still feels very new and slightly off kilter being here, we left a life filled with incredible people back home, this move was never powered by a need to leave people behind, we were blessed to have amazing families and beautiful friendships so the leaving them bit was the hardest part of the whole process. That said, we still have those people in our lives, it's just not as easy to get a hug, or a soothing cup of tea and 'it'll be alright' pep talk anymore, though skype and some good friends have saved my sanity by moments!

We arrived in high summer and having stepped onto a plane at Heathrow wearing a fleece, Uggs and many jumpers (it was snowing!) to being spat out of our climate controlled 747 into the heat of Auckland International meant the kids and I were slightly shell shocked on arrival. Factor in a journey which started with me being pee'd on before our plane taxied away from Heathrow (thanks Leni), had a mid point which featured being puked on by Jakob, seeing a cockroach the size of my hand in Kuala Lumpur and finished with me tearfully remembering I had some baby food in my backpack when I went through the (very stringent) MAF controls at the airport and you can see why next time we do that journey, we're doing a stopover somewhere to break it up a bit! Still, the family were back together after 5 weeks of Mr T being here before us and that was all that mattered to me, real life could take a running jump at this point, I was just glad to see the kids with their Dad again. 

We decided a long while before that Hawkes Bay was where we wanted to be and luckily it all worked out with jobs/rental house etc. We're pretty rural here, something which my jet lagged brain registered vaguely on our road trip down here - there's a whole lot of mountain and single lane roads to get to HB! You're more likely to encounter a logging truck than a petrol station on the Thermal Explorer Highway, it's beautiful, rugged, isolated and has more impressive scenery than any I've seen anywhere before. And I think that's the thing that NZ gives me, every day, every where I go, there's all this scenery, almost assaulting your eyes, like you can't quite take it all in at once. At no point have I taken a photo that can do it justice, I look at the photos and think 'No, it was bigger and more beautiful than that' and until you see this place,  you can't imagine the scale or accessibility of it all. There are beaches here that if they were at home would be heaving with people, but we're often the only ones there because right round the corner, there's another beach and so on and so on. 

That's the upside of it all here - the space, the freedom and the life we can give the kids just wouldn't be possible at home. We've had to balance that with how hard it is to be so far from everyone we love and yet, despite bouts of homesickness, this is where we need to be and this is where the kids are thriving, changing and growing before our eyes. The boys have kiwi accents, and their attitudes are very kiwi now (as in, there's less of a sense of fear here - kids climb trees at school, run round like lunatics at lunchtime and are allowed to be slightly more feral than I'm used to from home) The school don't seem to expect the kids to sit still and not run round, when the bell rings for the end of school the classroom doors fly open and the kids pour out - running, jumping, rolling, play fighting and carrying some form of ball (mostly rugby, this place is obsessional - Kris made a joke to a friend of Jakob's that Richie McCaw isn't that great a player and was met with an indignant response) In the summer 50% of the kids at school don't wear shoes, the other half wear leather sandals the like of which I haven't encountered since my own school days. That's the other thing that's surprised me - the high school kids wearing uniform vaguely reminiscent of the 1950s, the boys wear shorts (all year round, even in biting wind and rain, they all wear shorts) and knee socks with clumpy shoes in the winter, or those ever present leather sandals in the summer. The girls get to wear school dresses, jumpers and the same clumpy black shoes/leather sandals as the boys. There's nothing like seeing a sullen 15 year old boy walking along trying to look cool in knee socks and ugly shoes to make you giggle.