Changing places

Can a restless spirit settle?

Beach huts at Small Hope Beach, Shanklin

Moving home has been an integral part of my life.

Recently I found this piece I wrote shortly after we returned to England after a year living in France, now 5.5 years ago. In it I talk about most of the moves I made in my life, and it was startling to see them all accounted for like that. It doesn’t even include our latest year of moves to and within the Isle of Wight. I thought I would share it with you, as it speaks a little bit to why the idea of home is so intriguing and maybe a bit elusive to me.

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We moved almost every year up until I was about 10 years old, and then we stayed put. I felt a little out of sorts after the second year in the same place, as I was used to having a new home by then. I was restless and felt the need to redecorate and rearrange everything in the absence of actually moving. I was also 12 so maybe that says something else right there.

Eventually I went off to university and for a variety of reasons, changed schools and my locations for the first four of those years. I took the third year off living and working in London, and for the 4th and 5th years I stayed in the same place to finish my degree, but changed where I lived four times. 

When I finally moved into an apartment with my boyfriend a year after we graduated, we stayed for 6 years, and that was only the second time I had lived in one place for that long. We got married, bought a house where we stayed for another 6 years. After we had two kids, we moved to a bigger house in the suburbs, and shortly afterwards I began my second phase of nomadic life. 

We split up a couple of years after moving to the suburbs, and due to a series of fortunate and unfortunate events, I was on the move every year or so, until after 5 years when our divorce was final, I was able to buy my own place.

After 8 years in my very own home, where so much life and love and sadness and joy and craziness happened, and enjoying the growing up of two wonderful teenagers, I decided to not just change house, but change country. 

As my teenagers had themselves gone off to University, I moved to England to be with my partner who was returning to academia. He is English and himself a bit of a wanderer. We lived in a spacious flat to begin with, and after three years we bought a house. After 6 years in the UK, we moved to France for a year while Pete worked on a research project. We have just arrived back to live in the UK after spending a month in California, and I feel completely turned upside down. 

I’m not quite sure what all the moving has done to me, but even now I feel a need to keep moving, not necessarily someplace new, although I do love week-long visits to explore an unfamiliar place now and again. 

I would be happy moving 3 or 4 times a year for longer stints in several places. I like the characteristics about many of ‘my places’, and I ache for certain landscapes with their characteristic light, smells, foods, weather and air ‘qualities’ (such as dryness or humidity, the type of breezes, the temperatures, and the cloudscape), as well as spending time with the people I am familiar with and miss deep in my heart and soul. 

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As I said at the beginning, changing places has been an integral part of my life, and it is a tribute to my parents that I didn’t ever feel a sense of trauma or disruption from moving those first ten years. My school and routines and friends stayed the same and only once did I change school and that was at a natural change time for many students anyway. Instead, moving was always a bit exciting to get to learn the new space, to arrange our same furniture (and all those decorations!) in a new way, and to adopt a new bedroom for my own. I definitely have fond and distinct memories of most of our homes. 

House at Beaulieu; absolutely NOT like anything I ever lived in. Probably everywhere I have ever lived would fit in this stately home.

As much as I wanted a stable and ‘normal’ childhood for my own children (i.e., not moving around, playing safely in the same neighbourhood and walking to school), it ended up not quite that way. Their father and I separated when the oldest was just about school age, and later divorced. We always maintained joint ‘custody’ (that is an awful word, isn’t it?). Their dad stayed in the home we had bought together in that safe neighbourhood walking distance from the school, so even as my address changed over the years, the kids had at least one consistent home. 

During that time, with the exception of one year when we lived in an adjacent city with my cousin that had so many other delightful benefits, we moved within the small community where we originally lived so that the schools, after-school activities, and most importantly friends for us all of us stayed constant.

There were myriad strategies I used to try to minimise the disruption to my own kids during this series of planned and unplanned moves. Oh my, however, it was a LOT of work as I tried to absorb as much of the stress of finding a new place, and the actual physical logistics of moving as I could so my kids didn’t have to. Exposure to pure chaos and the stress from repeated moving days was not a necessary part of their growing up and I wanted to minimise their exposure to that. It certainly makes me appreciate whatever my parents did to mask all that drama from me. I had no idea.

Through all those moves, I did try to make them into fun adventures. They always knew when and why we were moving, and I made sure the physical transitions were on days they were with their dad, so I had a couple of days to get their rooms put together and organised before they joined me again. 

(There is one amazing wooden bunk bed that I took apart and rebuilt so many times, I lost count. Once they were older and they had their own rooms, the bunk beds lived on as their single beds. A few years ago I visited a longtime friend who inherited the bunk beds, and I was so delighted to see the beds set up cosy and sweet for her two young boys who were enjoying them still.) 

Once my kids arrived in the new place, I would show them around and we would talk about all the benefits and special features of this new place, and show them where all their familiar toys and clothes could be found. After a good wander around the home, we would go walking to explore the neighbourhood so they could get their bearings. We would discuss a few things we missed from the last place, and remember them fondly, and then think about what we could do in the new place that might become special one day too. It took some nimble thinking at times!

I guess that is what I do with myself each time I move, even now. I do mourn for certain things about the places I’ve left, as I believe parts of them have become embedded in my soul. I miss the way the light plays inside the last house and across the gardens. The way the air feels on the patio in summer, or the particular smell of the entryway coming inside after a long walk in winter chill. 

Now, in our new place, those long walks have been when I think about how we are making this ‘new place’ our home, why we were attracted to it in the first place, and what things we want to do to keep making it into our special home. That warm feeling when we walk inside is now also that understanding that we are indeed, home. 

What about you? 

Did you move much, and did you find it hard? Did you enjoy the process? 

Did you ever move with kids? How did you ease their transition?

What made you finally feel you were at home?

What triggers that feeling of home to you now? 

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

And as always, so many thanks for reading! I appreciate your precious time.

xx Sabrina