Should I leave my family to go back home?

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.