Finally Coming Home

Nearly two and a half years ago while working in a boutique in downtown Portland, Maine I was messing about online during a slow day and found a google advert to "Au Pair Abroad!"  I was fresh out of an extremely unhealthy yearlong relationship with a man I hardly knew when I had moved in with him and still in the process of moving from our cramped studio apartment into an even smaller space with a group of friends also recovering from bad breakups.  I was an emotional wreck, feeling extremely displaced with my things in boxes relying far too heavily on my very patient friends and, nearing the end of my overworked five and a half year college career, unable to see much past graduation.

I was burying myself in theatre work (my chosen academic course) designing both for school productions and professional ones, trying to keep up hours at the shop and dallying with an ex-boyfriend with whom I'd had a long term on/off relationship.  I was thin, exhausted and probably hallucinating with the weight of my baggage when the sight of that ad drew me in like a siren.  Portland had become my adopted hometown in the four years I had lived and studied there and despite being a small city, was beginning to feel stifling in its interconnected web of theatre and art-folk with whom I socialized heavily.  The idea of running away to Europe (or any other foreign country for that matter) seemed like salvation.  It was a chance to start fresh, to shed the weight of my past relationships that I couldn't escape while living in Portland, and change the unhealthy patterns I had been perpetuating for years.  So that very afternoon, bored, emotional and confused I applied to take my unstable self to another country to care for other peoples' children.

A week later after a couple of phone calls and some lengthy emailing, I had booked my flight to move to Hamburg, Germany in just two months time and live with the Rexhausen family: Mari, 7; Jack, almost 5 and Jan and Katherine, successful creative types.  Their family sounded chaotic but warm and loving and supportive and despite having moved out of my mother's house when I was seventeen, the idea of living with a family again appealed to me.  I left Portland in a blaze of parties and tearful goodbyes with my wacky but wonderful friends and didn't really look back...Portland had been such an important place for me and could very well have become my home but something never completely connected and I found it much easier to leave than expected.  

Hamburg was closer...in Hamburg I had very little trouble settling into the Rexhausen family and eking out a life for myself.  I met a wonderful group of American and English ex-pats and slowly found a sense of routine..albeit one that revolved around work in the week and parties on the weekend but it worked.  I never settled really...I kept my work and home life quite separate from my social life to the point where I think Jan and Katherine were beginning to grow concerned: here I was, a twenty-three year old college graduate and I was still partying like I was an eighteen-year-old on holiday.  I justified it by saying that I had worked so hard in college and was so responsible in my work with the kiddos that I deserved the weekends to go crazy...

I was restless and in many ways still running around in circles trying to recover from my heartbreak in Portland and my break-up with Portland itself: I had thought Portland was home and realizing, like a lover after some time apart, that maybe we weren't quite as made for each other as I had thought.  We had moved so much growing up that I had been so proud of the life I had made for myself in that vibrant, young student town and hadn't realized that it was merely a stop along the way.  In Hamburg I was in basically the exact same role: irresponsible, high-strung and always on the look out for something.

In June of 2009 a visitor of my English friend David came to Hamburg with Dave's brother Phil for a long weekend of drinking and rugby watching.  Michael was awkward and shy and ginger-haired and wouldn't look me in the eye until at least 5 beers in...it probably wasn't so romantic as I remember it but somehow after he finally looked at me and we began talking which turned into a weekend of looking at each other and talking and hand holding and I was sixteen

again with a crush on a boy who was completely unsuitable for me based solely on the fact that he lived 777 miles away and anyway I didn't want a boyfriend, certainly not one that didn't live in what I thought was to be my new hometown.  But even after I listed the reasons why it would never work, he still came back five days later.  And this time it was just the two of us...and I'll spare you the mushy details but over the next eighteen months, an eighteen months that sometimes were a battle and always filled with time-limits and goodbyes and airports and skype and enormous phone bills, but somehow this awkward, insightful, beautiful Englishman came to be mine.

Mike has lived his whole life in the same town.  He has cousins and friends he's grown up with, adults who have known him since he was an infant and just two houses he's ever called home.  When it became clear about six months in that our relationship was becoming serious and that if we wanted it to continue we'd have to eventually make the move towards living in the same city, I was initially apprehensive.  I had lived with two boyfriends before, had moved in with them after only short amounts of time of dating and both had ended disastrously.  Mike already meant so much more to me and I refused to destroy the relationship in the same way.  So we waited...we waited another year, a year for me to mature a bit more, to get to know each other better and for me to be sure that I could in fact settle in a family.  The Rexhausens were invaluable support during this time and my biggest gauge into my own "readiness".  I suppose I figured it was time to start thinking about it about six months after the initial discussion when seven year old Jack started asking Mike when he was going to ask me to marry him.  Mike made me an incredible offer around that time to come to Sale, to live with him in a house his mum owned that we would fix up together and create our own home.

I was still scared up until the day I left Hamburg and left my Rexhausen safety net.  I wanted so badly to find my home and for Mike to be a part of that but...it was incredibly overwhelming.  I grew up in so many ways in the months since I had first convinced Mike to talk to me but in the comfort of my temporary Rexhausen life, living in their home I had almost convinced myself that that was where I was always supposed to be.  On November 15, 2010 I got off the plane at the Manchester airport for the last time and Mike drove me straight to 107 Urban Road, to a house that, for the past three months, he had singlehandedly been gutting - tearing out carpeting and wallpaper, painting everything white, installing a brand new bathroom - he brought me home.  It was just a blank canvas of a house at that point but as I touched the walls and opened the cupboards and sat on our new giant bed, I saw my life here.  I saw the curtains I'd sew and meals we'd cook and the love we'd make...it could have been any house in any city but this was my home with my love who asked me to marry him while lying in bed that night.

Four months on now and the house has purple and red and green walls (well, in different rooms), Michael is now my husband and we're working on putting in a small garden.  This is life I was supposed to lead, this is the man I get to spend my life with and every morning when I wake up there is no more anxiety, no more emotional rollercoaster, no more running in circles.  My husband brought me home.