Today...

...is a hard day. It's one of those where I'm tired but not able to sleep, and as I'm sitting here in the kitchen looking out over the baking green lawns of my new neighbourhood, I'm feeling as lost here as I did in Germany. I had this wild notion that once we were settled into our house here on Wisteria Lane that things would start clicking into place, and all the stuff I was prevented from doing in Germany I could do here...that life would be simpler.

But things aren't clicking. I feel more like a stripped gear.

Hubby goes to work in the morning, Bea goes to day care, Max goes off to school...and I'm here, in a mostly-empty house playing maid. They all have places to go and people who are expecting them, some sort of anchor in this new life, and I am right back where I was in Germany. I have my routines, but as of yet I have no car. If I want to go somewhere, I have to wait until hubby comes home with the car, and by then it's into the homework/dinner/bath and bedtime rush hour. Most of the day spend in silence in an empty house, and then it all hits at once, completely overwhelming me.

When we were in this position in Germany, getting by with one car, I'd hop on my bike and go riding around my new town, making notes of where things were, learning the lay of the land. I can't do that here. Our household goods have not yet arrived and neither has my car, so not only do I not feel settled in my new home town, I can't get settled in my new house. Nothing feels like mine, and after 12 years of rented accommodation and a sideways way of life, I really needed to start putting down roots and stop having everything feel so temporary.

It's not just adjusting to life in a new state. It's adjusting to life in a country that's supposed to be mine but feels so far away from it I may as well be on Mars. After 12 years I'm more European in my thinking than I am American. People tease me about talking like a Brit and probably assume I'm doing it to sound superior, but it's how I had to communicate for nearly 12 years, and that just doesn't end because of where I'm located. I feel horribly displaced, homesick for places I've been before, and completely without direction on what I'm supposed to do now. There are no re-patriation programs for folks like me because few people "stay over" as long as we have. I know it's time to move on and start the next phase, but right now, there's no where to move on to and no path to follow.

I just thought things would be easier now. And I didn't expect to get hit this hard.