Feeling well in your self.

How are things different here, let me count the ways! There are so many nuanced cultural differences both beautiful and frustrating that add up to feeling like a foreigner in a foreign land. For me, my role as a nurse is a completely different job. It is both frustrating and also beautiful. Charting as a nurse here is completely different. The medical terminology I am used to looks like a foreign language here, so I find myself muddling along translating my notes for people or re writing them all together. There is a phrase I see other practitioners use often here, “The patient is feeling well in herself.” It is an interesting phrase, meant to convey that despite surgery or whatever else is going on, the patient feels well, or like themselves. They are not hurting more than expected or feeling distressed. They feel well in their body. I have realized lately that despite stressors that go with us anywhere like finances and mental health and the well being of our kids, for the first time in a long time, maybe even years, I feel well in myself. This adventure sometimes can feel heavy and hard as we muddle through the ins and outs of moving 4 kids to another country with only a faint long term plan in place. We are still setting up our house and getting settled in, but I feel more at home here than I have felt anywhere else. I feel certain we are in the place we are supposed to be.

This pandemic has caused a lot of us to question if we are well in our current circumstances. For some of our friends that has meant changes in relationships for others changes in career or changes if schooling plans for their kids. Things we never thought we would be considering, like homeschooling, opening private practices, divorce or getting back together, have all become open options. I think isolation, hardship, loss of income, loss or safety has called us all to redefine what it means to be well. 3 years ago I wouldn’t have believed I would be giving up my dream job to live in our dream location. If you told me I would be making 1/3 of my income, selling our house that we worked so hard to own, and giving up my mini van for a bicycle I would have laughed. However, all of the above has come to pass and we are 4 months in to this adventure still trying to figure it all out. This includes trying to figure out new career paths for both me and Sean, new schools and new social systems for our kids, and a myriad of small details I never knew would come up. Despite it all, it is well with us. It is a strange thing to separate the idea of good, or happy, or perfect with being well. In essence most would say having an operation or being ill would mean you are not well, but I don’t think it is the case. I think wellness comes in many forms, and it is possible to be in hardship and also to be well.

This week my kids are all starting school in a new country and a new culture. They have had both anxiety and a bit of excitement going. Between Archie and Elsie who started last week, the results were drastically different. Elsie’s fears were all allayed as she easily found her way to friends and a teacher who is sweet and kind to her. While Archie refused to walk in the building on the second day, and is struggling with a bit more responsibility as well as reluctance to make new friends because he is so deeply missing his friends at home. He has a fear of making friends here and then missing them if we move back. Right now he is not in a place to talk about the long term commitment we made to being here, so I am trying to let him find his own way a bit. Hank and Frances both start this week, I have all the same nerves I have every year in the States over Hank starting. All of our kids suffered with a bit of feeling disillusioned over what the start of our life would be here, so we have had to continuously encourage them to work to the 6 month point where we would be living a normal schedule with school, social events, and less isolation at home with only your parents and siblings for company. I know this post is a bit disjointed, because throughout trying to sit down and write there has been a myriad of disruptions with requests for nutella sandwiches, help picking apples from the tree in our back yard, and needing to throw the clothes on the line so I can capitalize on the sunshine today. I guess the gist of this is, we still have financial concerns to navigate, we still have social and emotional things to work through with our kids and ourselves, we still have normal life to contend with, but we are well.