One year ago today (at 2:30 in the morning, after a 24 hour travelling ordeal, see One Year Gone) we arrived back in Florida and began our new life. I arrived and settled in with a lot of hope and hesitation about our new life. We had developed a great network of friends in Dublin and I had high hopes for creating a similar network here. But I was hesitant, knowing how hard it was to meet people in Florida when we lived here previously. I looked into mommy groups, joined a group on meetup.com but just never found anything that worked for us.
I was fortunate to meet a few of hubby’s co-worker’s families early on and began spending as much time with them as possible but they live over a half hour away and it was a struggle to get together when Honeybun had to be collected from school at noon. I also started hanging out with another mommy from Honeybun’s school who has a son Sugarplum’s age.
Until recently, these few mommies were all I had and I barely got to hang out with them. I was struggling to feel “at home” here and missing my Dublin mommy friends dearly. I missed the every week gathering we used to have and how laid back, genuine and un-competition-y everyone was. I still long to be back amongst that amazing group of mommies and children and get sad when Honeybun says “mommy, remember so-and-so? I miss him/her.”
For the past year hubby has talked about moving again. We reminisce about our time in Dublin and travelling Europe and he’ll chime in with “I think we should go back to Dublin” or “what about London?” I’ve insisted from the moment we got back that we have to be here awhile. We own a house and can’t afford to lose money yet again (the last two houses I/we owned we lost big money on). Then it hit me the other day: I’m actually kinda happy here.
Sure, I still hate driving and the people are not very nice and it’s a hard place to raise children BUT I like the weather (really, the heat doesn’t bother me), I love that I have family around almost constantly, Target is only a 10 minute walk away, I can actually work here and most importantly, I have friends now. Friends that I adore and that even though we’re still in the “getting to know you” phase a little bit, that I want to keep in my life. My children have friends they adore and while I do think we will move again sometime and it’s always hard for kids to say good-bye, I want my children to know how to build lasting relationships. I don’t want them to fall into a pattern of never getting close to anyone because we’re just going to move. And I don’t want to get in that habit either.
Florida may not be our forever home, but right now it does finally feel like HOME. A few months ago I never would have guessed I’d be saying that I’m happy but it’s true. The past few weeks have really changed for us. My going back to teaching, Honeybun being out of school and us being able to spend more time with people we like has made a huge difference in our family happiness and I’m now excited for our Florida future.
