BEL MOONEY: Should I leave my family to go back home?

Dear Bel,

I’ve been struggling with a problem for years and feel I can no longer bury it at the back of my mind if I’m to find any real happiness.

I hide it to please everyone else around me, but inside my heart is broken.

I was born in Ireland but moved to the UK at the age of 18 when I had finished my exams.

Jobs were scarce in Ireland and a friend persuaded me to go to London with her to seek out opportunities. It was an adventure, but from the outset I really missed home, family and friends.

I secured a good job and, as time went by, made quite a nice life for myself. I’ve lived in Scotland for the past 35 years — married to a Scot I love dearly. Our daughter and grandchildren all live locally.

I have a good job and social life (Covid permitting). So what’s the problem?

Nearing retirement age, I am so homesick it actually hurts. I always wanted to return to Ireland but life overtook that desire.

I visit as often as I can. I’m still close to my large family and my old friends. While there, I feel so happy and content and know it’s where I belong. Of course, a holiday is always going to be different to actually living there, but it breaks my heart when I have to come back. I tell my husband and my daughter I miss it, but they just think it’s a post-holiday phase.

I’m unhappy inside and at the same time guilty for feeling that way, because my husband has never complained at my frequent visits home and often comes too and enjoys himself.

However, I know he’d never contemplate moving there as he is close to his family here. Even in spite of my daughter and grandchildren, I still can’t help thinking I want to spend my latter years where I belong.

The pandemic has probably brought this to the forefront of my mind and I’m torn in two. I’m not in a position to have homes here and there. To move permanently would probably mean leaving my husband and that would also make me unhappy. I don’t have anyone to discuss it with and that’s why I’ve written, to get it all off my chest.

I don’t know if you’ve come across homesickness on this scale before, but I would really appreciate your thoughts.

ROSALYN

Never in all these years have I received a letter describing homesickness, and I find it very interesting — especially in this age, when people seem to expect to move about much more often than before; feeling rooted in one place is almost unfashionable.

But I do understand. In Welsh there is an old word, hiraeth, which means ‘a spiritual longing for one’s home’. This can even be imaginary, a nostalgia for a place to which we can never return.

In German the word is heimweh, and it seems to imply a deeper feeling of ‘homesickness’. Again, it is a pervasive yearning, a pining for something out of reach, which you know so well.

Some readers may be unable to understand why this is a real problem, but for one thing, homesickness is much more widespread than people think and, for example, may be suffered acutely by refugees.

Children living away from parents for the first time can feel great distress. In your case I fear it’s already affecting your family life and may have a cumulatively negative effect on your marriage.

Although you say you have always missed Ireland, I’m wondering if your age may have something to do with the need to write it all out; approaching retirement can trigger gloomy thoughts about the future and make existing woes worse. And, as you indicate, the heightened emotionalism and dread of Covid and lockdowns cannot have helped.

The reality is, you have two homes and need to accept that fact, because it is the truth.

One home is where your husband and family live and the other is the land of your birth.

You say you love your husband ‘dearly’. That statement makes an utter nonsense of any notion that you could ever leave him to live in Ireland alone. Yes, you have family over the Irish Sea, but they are not the unique family you have created with the man you love.

Were you, by some whirl of fate, to find yourself living back where you were born, you might well start feeling homesick for the long, happy, fulfilled life you have been blessed with in Scotland.

You might also become irritated by family members you find endearing when on holiday — and (equally) them by you. I’m so glad you got this off your chest but hope you can find a balance between all your loves.

If you are able to make, say, two or three trips to your birthplace per year, might it be possible for you to ask one of your dear ones to lend/cheaply rent you a little room of your own so you feel you have a pied a terre in Ireland?

Psychologically it might be good for you to have this as a little project. Since your husband enjoys himself there he might also like not being beholden to others as a visitor. A good remedy for homesickness is displacement, so that you are never without a firm plan and dates to look forward to.

My favourite poet, the great W. B. Yeats, wrote: ‘Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams.’

I’m not treading on yours, Rosalyn, but I am saying that, even if they seem ‘torn’, the two halves of a heart can be still be knit by what unites them: love.

My old school pal’s driving me mad! 

Dear Bel

Sixty years ago, Kit and I became friends at convent school. After four years, she left and I heard nothing for decades. We both married men from other countries. I lived abroad, had three children, then came back to England as a widow.

Over the years, I moved from lapsed Catholic to agnostic and now I’m an active Humanist. Kit found me on Friends Reunited and we’ve been exchanging emails for ten years. We’re both 72. She’s become a born-again Christian, but her husband doesn’t share her faith.

Her calls always fall into complaints about her husband and their financial woes. She also goes on about religion, although I have told her I’m not religious. Then suddenly, last week, she called to announce she was on her way to stay.

She’s been here for more than a week and I’m increasingly concerned. Her driving is erratic and sometimes alarming, she takes sleeping pills, drinks wine every evening (I don’t), prays aloud and sings along to religious songs on her phone.

Ten years ago, she survived cancer, but no thanks to the NHS, it was God and his angels who got her through. I despair.

The other day she took ‘spiritual guidance’ from some telephone advisor (religious scammer?) and paid him £200 (she asked me to write the cheque in return for cash). I thought this outrageous when she’s pleading poverty.

Yesterday she was looking at a map, so I asked: ‘Are you planning your next journey?’

She replied: ‘Oh, no, I’m happy here and want to stay longer if I’m still welcome.’

Of course I assured her. But what can I do with my old friend? How can I help her to think and act more reasonably?

FREDA

What a pity I had to edit your intriguing letter, because you paint an attractive picture of your creative and intellectual life, in which you also enjoy regular visits from a younger male friend of three years’ standing.

You sound fulfilled, and it’s clear you’re being as kind and tolerant as possible, but that Kit’s uninvited presence is driving you mad.

In other words, she is actively circumscribing the freedom you cherish. And to be honest, I am not persuaded that you have any obligation to put up with it.

You call her ‘my old friend’, and yet the schoolgirl friendship died and you went separate ways.

Had she not traced you I wonder if you’d have thought of her again? Now she’s inveigled her way back into your settled life because (it seems) she is discontented with her own and, like all people with a religious or political obsession, has no sensitivity to your feelings. Yet you ask me how you can help her, even though you must know that asking her to shift her beliefs is like asking rain not to fall.

Yes, concern matters, but why are you making her your responsibility? It’s admirable, but what makes you think you can change her life?

Her religion must make her very happy, after all, and to her, singing along to hymns and talking to a religious advisor will represent perfectly ‘reasonable’ behaviour.

If she believes God saved her from cancer, so be it. Even if you think she shouldn’t drink and take sleeping pills, you are not her keeper.

There comes a point in relationships when displaying a kindness that is not actually felt can be called ‘bad faith’.

You tell me your daughter disapproved of this visit because Kit is careless about Covid. If I were you, I would regretfully tell Kit that her visit must end because your daughter is returning to stay in her old room and help you with your craft business.

Then the email relationship can continue, but you will be free to live the life you love and which, at 72, you surely deserve.

And finally… I need to set the record straight…

Oh my, did I get into trouble last week! Not from you, dear readers, but from him indoors — the practical husband who slaves away over our homestead, making everything work, feeding dogs, dealing with bins and recycling and even saving spiders from death.

What did I do wrong? After telling you I felt down but had tried to perk myself up, I wrote: ‘I walked around the house, looked at everything anew, and realised I didn’t mind the stained ceiling, leaky shower, dust and spider webs, because it’s home.’

‘Leaky shower?’ he protested. ‘People will think I’m useless and lazy. Anyway, I mended it!’

‘But when I was writing we couldn’t use it,’ I said.

‘But I still fixed it . . .’ (subsides, muttering).

Who’d have thought an honest description would irk such a mild-tempered guy? We do now have a shower — and the water runs cool if a tap’s turned on elsewhere — but the stained ceiling needs touching up.

He has a weekly jobs list to make a dedicated DIY-er quail. Each of us has a role to play to keep this farmhouse standing.

Of course, that column was about cheering yourself by acting and counting blessings. Marion G understood: ‘Your article was an inspiration — knowing I am not alone in feeling a bit down . . . in a world which has shrunk somewhat and where the worry of Covid has been replaced in some countries by political upheaval and uncertainty.’

Thanks, Marion, and I’m glad I gave you a ‘way forward’.

Then Fiona recognised the domestic problems: ‘I am 78, lost my husband two years ago and am still in the old house we bought 50 years ago.

‘Your paragraph about “home” struck such a chord. Yes, the roof leaks, the kitchen door has to be wrenched open and I noticed a new spider’s web in the bathroom. But home is where the heart is, and I love it.’

So do we, Fiona. And I’ve promised my husband I’ll now tidy that messy room. Like a good . . . er . . . housewife.