I recently did a series called Bringing up bébé: 5 years later (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3), in which I re-read Pamela Druckerman’s famous book about raising kids in France as an American-British couple, and compared it to my own experience. It was a lot of fun and I enjoyed chatting with people in the comments. I promised that I would follow it up with a post for paid subscribers with more personal reflections and anecdotes, but I couldn’t quite settle on what I wanted to say. I thought I would write about the emotional experience of raising kids in a culture that is different to the one I was raised in, but as I wrote, it turned into more of a general musing on what home means when you have roots in many places.
I’ll start with a little context. I’m British - English - and was born in Brighton, which is a coastal town in the south of England, but we moved to Scotland when I was five and I lived there until I went to university aged 17. For this reason, I quite intentionally refer to myself as “British”, because I don’t feel fully English or fully Scottish.1 I did my undergraduate in London, and absolutely adored living there. In the decade following my degree I lived in various countries (France, the Netherlands, the UK, and Ireland), and vacillated between a desire to travel and experience different cultures, and the urge to put down roots and call somewhere “home”.
Lately I’ve been asking myself the question what does “home” mean? Although there are many people for whom the answer to this question is simple, to me it’s like asking “what makes a successful marriage?” or “what does it mean to be a good mother?”. There is not much that is objective, and the answer isn’t what I might have guessed it would be earlier in my life. What is true for me may not be (probably won’t be) true for you, and there are many possible good and true responses to the question, even if one truth seems to contradict another.
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