The Photo Gallery | ‘Selfie’

Sunshine smiles in California. This is me looking happy on a good day. A day before we started to try and integrate two, of our three, children into a new school, in a new country. A day after getting a lovely new vehicle to cruise around town in – a sunshine red VW Convertible. A day after I’d been out for a run along a scenic cliff-top over looking the Pacific Ocean.

We’ve since moved into a house that we’ve leased for one year. It’s a beautiful house, fully furnished, with a swimming pool – a ‘paradise’ in a warm, sunny climate. At home the children’s voices are happy. They keep themselves entertained, with little outings and plentiful good food to help themselves to when they feel hungry. But, it’s not our home, our house back in New Zealand. It’s a gated house, like most of the other properties surrounding us in this affluent neighbourhood. We can hear other children playing – but can’t see them. It’s not the same as our friendly, close knit neighbourhood, where we had lived as a family for seven years, in Wellington. We are missing our home, our routines, our friends, our local ‘haunts’. We are trying to live each day positively – but there is a sense of ‘holding back’ from all of us, a knowing that this is only a temporary stay in our lives.

It would be easier to be on the road travelling, moving from one place to the next, in some ways. Perhaps that is the solution. We use this house merely as our base. We embrace the online public school opportunity that is available here in the US and travel as much as we can, accompanying the man of the house on various business trips. This is a time of finding our way, our pace, deciding on how best to focus our time whilst we are here.

I need to feel that smile, that was from the heart last week. I need that smile to sparkle in my eyes and override the well of tears that seem to rise all too easily when the integration into a local school feels at ill with our family. Thank goodness for options is all I can say – now to choose the best fit for us!

Sarah

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