Hi! Thanks for coming up with this really nice idea, Carolyn. It’s great to reconnect and to hear other people’s stories.
I started on UKY in Autumn 2005, just after my husband accepted a job here. I found it a great place to air questions and concerns about the move, and without it our cat might not have made it across! I used to post as Airmom.
I met my English husband in 1983 at a Christmas party. He'd come to California to get his PhD and skedaddle back to England, but things didn't quite work out that way. We got married in 1987 and moved to Ann Arbor, Mich. where he took a post at the UM. We had two kids in fairly quick succession, and settled in for the long haul. Then in '95 we went to Bath on a sabbatical and fell in love with it. When we returned to Ann Arbor we felt just a bit antsy, but university jobs don't always pop up when you want them to. The years went by, as they say. In 2001 my husband had another sabbatical due so we went back to Bath for the year with our kids, who were now 10 and 12. Before we left for England I had a feeling something drastic would happen. About 6 months into our year I discovered I was two months pregnant. We extended our stay to 14 months and we came back to the States with a newborn baby. We surprised a lot of neighbours! Again, we loved our time in Bath and would have happily stayed on, but there were not jobs in the maths department. It seemed to us like a cut-off point. Our older kids were 11 and 13 and would be starting high school soon. We sort of figured our chance was up and we accepted it. And two years later Bath Uni had this job… After 19 years in Michigan, we moved to England in 2006 with our 17, 14 and 3 year old children and, against all odds, things worked out surprisingly well. We’re all quite content here. I can’t imagine living anywhere else at the moment, but 10 years down the line, who knows? Of course it gets more complicated as our kids start making all those adult commitments. A lot of us on this forum will face that dilemma at some point.
I feel nostalgic some times over things we left behind in Ann Arbor, but I prefer life in the UK. I love being able to walk through the beautiful countryside, drink good beer, eat delicious cheese, encounter livestock on a regular basis… But that’s a different thread entirely! But one last thought: this morning after we dropped our kids off at school a few friends and I decided to skip our usual coffee joint and walked down to the Pump Room for a treat. As we sat in that elegant room and listened to the string quartet and took our sweet time over our coffees (it’s a lull between tourist season and shopper season), I felt very privileged indeed.
I find my life here is full of moments like that.
