Vienna trip is over: decompressing

-
I didn't write yesterday because I was utterly finished by the time we finally got to bed; and today is the first home day. I've unpacked, began to tackle (a little bit of the immense amount of) the dust from the building works, and am sitting down for a breather of five minutes before the blessings return from their grandparents.

At Vienna airport. I didn't have the energy to stop them wiping the floor at departure. 

God, I have missed home. Missed family, missed friends, missed my husband most of all - but home is even more than all those.

Home is a place where I feel welcome, where I feel my children are welcomed - even by strangers. A place where people randomly smile at us, have a chat, ask how we are. Where my neighbour says hello and welcome back.

I find I really do have to decompress and get comfortable again! The best I can describe the way I felt in Vienna is, oppressed. It's an oppressive environment; at all times with kids I'm on edge about disturbing others, expecting to be told to make them shut up and be invisible... it actually happened only rarely but the looks, the demonstrative sighs, the eyerolling was constant. And it impacted on my relationship with my kids - instead of enjoying the moment with them I'd be shutting them up, hushing them, telling them to stop being kids.

It's so good to be home, where I can breathe out.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Back to meat after 20 years vegan - 4 years on

-
Image
Back in 2020, I briefly mentioned in another blog post that we were no longer vegan. I said that shift deserved its own blog post, but here we are at the end of 2024 and I never wrote that. Not that I intended to leave it this long, but it really did take me this long to truly digest the change (pardon the pun) and get enough distance from my previous world view that I could write about it. Paradigm shifts like that don't come quickly, or easily. I've had a few major paradigm shifts in my life - from atheist to Christian , and later to Catholicism - and it's a disorienting thing every time. It starts with the proverbial 'pebble in the shoe' (something niggling that gets harder and harder to ignore) and takes time to even go from subconscious to conscious mind, to a time of discovery and 'why didn't I see this before??', and finally a bewildering sense how I could possibly have thought the old way because I'm now wearing all-new lenses on life. The ...
Read more

Thrown into to a new reality, then back to the old

-
Image
Towards the end of August this year, Mr. and I suddenly faced a very different future to the one we had envisioned: at 42 years old - and he's 55 - I found myself pregnant again. Camping after our summer trip - and I've just found out I'm pregnant As it's been seven years since D(7) was born, we really didn't expect that. We would have loved more kids soon after D, but I just never got pregnant. Seven years on, we were pretty convinced that this was our lot. Two beautiful children, we really can't complain! So we needed a bit of time to digest that. A new baby, with siblings 8 and nearly 10 years older! And Mr. would be 75 when that child was 20... the maths was mind boggling. But hey - if that was our new reality, we were going to run with it! The kids certainly were excited about it, they're old enough to understand and yes, we told them; this is a family matter. I knew there was a chance this pregnancy wouldn't work out, but we felt they had a right t...
Read more

Home Ed Club

-
Image
My kids have never been fond of 'clubs' - half term activity clubs, for example - where I leave them for the day. D(8) in particular much prefers having me nearby, like at co-op, as he is much more cautious and reserved than N(10) who immediately dives in and makes friends. So, knowing this, I was not too sure how they'd feel about the local 'home ed club' that meets once a week; but I thought they were old enough to try it. D wasn't hugely enthusiastic about the idea, but I convinced him to at least give it a try. And guess what - the first day, when I picked them up, D bounced out of there with the words, " I love this!! " So they're having a fantastic time each week now, doing Pawprint Badges and challenges, BBQing, building friendships, and they even had an outing to the local fire station! And what's amazing is that this setting is in walking distance for us, so they can even go there on their own which N has been relishing: that sense of ...
Read more