It might be because it's winter (I hate winter) or because we've got to move (grrrr to renting) in a few weeks or because we're in the ten-months-in doldrums or because my sister is going to have her first baby in the UK soon or because my oldest daughter starts high school next year (major tie-down!), but my husband and I have been feeling a little low and unsettled about being here.
Sometimes I wonder whether if we knew then what we know now would we have come? We did a paper exercise weighing up the costs and benefits of our emigration "adventure" recently and although we've gained heaps in terms of our the explicit quality of our day to day lifestyle, the slow severing of family ties and the loss of our cultural identity seems to become harder to reconcile with as each year passes, rather than easier as I'd anticipated. I think we're close to the tip point in emigrating- where it would be harder to re-establish a life in the UK than it was to make one here and where our family ties are weakened enough that our kids have slipped the anchor from their wider family. Sometimes it feels like an awful blow to acknowledge that we traded their (and our) family ties for a better climate, bigger garden etc. I wonder if they'll thank us for it?
Maudlin I know. Perhaps it's the weather.