A Word About Being An Expat

People often ask me how I handle living abroad - as many of you know, I am the most anxious worrier on the planet. I think a lot of people are surprised that I managed to move to Ireland and now, here I am in Poland leaving many people scratching their heads. I'll admit moving away was hard at first (and this was after moving to another English-speaking country, I can't even imagine the culture-shock I would have experienced if I had moved straight here from Boston!), but the reality is, at the point in life when we moved away, the most important things in my world were my husband and my two kids.  And they are all here with me, so it doesn't really matter where we are living as long as we are all together. I think about being single, or even being married without kids, and having to be moved overseas on my own - now that thought scares the crap out of me. I've met some families whose husbands commute - Dublin to Krakow, Krakow to Switzerland, even Boston to Krakow. Now that to me would be harder than anything I have had to deal with since we've been away.  I know that wherever we end up,  I can always count on three people I can have a conversation in English with, who are always there to go to dinner with, or to go out exploring the sights with. All of the other little annoyances that I've had to get adjusted to are just trivial things that I know I will get used to over time, and so I don't get overly upset about them and they certainly shouldn't be causing anyone to have a nervous breakdown or anything (aHEM!). Don't get me wrong, I have my days where I bang my head against a wall and scream, 'If only we lived in the US this wouldn't be happening!!', but I just have a large glass of wine and life is good again. On the flip side, there are a lot of things that wouldn't be happening to us if we were still living in the US - the kids' passport pages are getting filled up with stamps from all of the countries we have visited. They are being exposed to so many different languages, and they (we all?) will hopefully be learning a new one soon. Recently I went out to dinner and we went around the table saying where we were from - Argentina, Austria, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Honduras, India, and one girl had just moved here from Katmandu. I was fascinated talking to her, asking her how she liked Poland and she was so excited to be living here after not having electricity or running water in Nepal...(OMG). She said her husband has to drag her out of the shower each morning because she just stands there enjoying the warm water pouring out from above.  The other night we were invited to our neighbors's for dinner, the wife is from Denmark and the husband is from Germany. After we ate we sat around the table chatting and the wife asked us to turn over the place cards and there was a little Danish song printed on the back, so the she led the song and we all stood around the table and tried to join in. Kind of silly but I loved hearing about the history of the song and what it meant to this family.  I just feel like I am learning so much about the rest of the world - I know it's not like we are roughing it touring through Africa or Indonesia or anything, but I wouldn't pass this experience up for anything. One of the things I miss when we visit the US is hearing all of these different languages and accents. And now I feel like I have friends all over the world that some day we may be able to visit again after we move back. Obviously it has been hard to be away from our family and friends, and it's hard looking at pictures on facebook of family vacations, or people going to Cape Cod, or pumpkin picking and apple picking - but I try not to dwell on that and instead I think, soon enough we will be back to enjoy all of those things...or maybe not (insert evil laugh here ....)