Mixed feelings

For the past few months, there's something I've been keeping from you.

No, calm down, I'm not pregnant.

It's just that a job in Ireland had come up - one of those rare jobs that is in my husband's sphere of work - that could mean we would move back home. Not to Dublin, but to another large city not too far away from it. (That could be anywhere. Ireland is a small island by most standards.)

So it's not that I've been ennumerating fowl (counting chickens, that is) ever since, but just that when contemplating the future, my mind would run over the possibilities and include the notion that we might just be elsewhere by next year, say. If the job was offered, accepting it would be a no-brainer - it was a permanent position in the country we both call home, and which we'd like our children to. B's position right now is always dependent on funding, and as we all know, funding, in this economy, in this country, is a very fickle mistress.

Anyway. Yesterday he was told to bog off. I mean, received a politely worded rejection. (Aside: When I first moved to this country I told my boss in Pennsylvania about the Irish acronym PFO for such letters. He thought it was great. It had become such an everyday part of my vocabulary since leaving college that I had to think hard to remember the official word "rejection". PFO stands for Please Fuck Off.)

I'm still mostly in denial, and convinced that once politely reminded of who we are, the employer in question will instantly realise their mistake and say "Oh no, no, you're the one we meant to invite for an interview that would be mostly a formality, before offering you the job post haste. Thank you for bringing that oversight to our attention. Silly us." But I'm also gently recalibrating my view of the future to be one that is probably right where we are - if we're lucky enough to get to stay here.

Random things that make me glad we're staying:
I don't have to pack up our entire house, or decide what's worth shipping and what we have to sell/dump/give away, after two years of just getting it nice.
We don't have to tell our five-year-old son that he's moving to another continent and leaving all his friends behind. (The two-year-old probably wouldn't be too happy to hear that either, but her brother would take it very hard.)
I love our nursery school - it would be hard to find another so great.
Dash is getting on really well at elementary school, and whatever may be said about the state of education in this country, the state of education at home is probably worse. And even if he does say the pledge of allegience every morning, to his father's consternation and my meh, whadayagonnado feeling, at least school is (nominally) secular. Also unlikely to be the case in Ireland.
The warmth of summer, and seeing my kids turn into fish after day after day spent at the pool.
The ease of online shopping.
The relative cheapness of electronic goods.
The beautiful weather of Spring and Fall here.
All the great friends I've made here in the neighbourhood, and how sad I'd be to become just an online friend who might see you again in twenty years when you finally make that long-awaited trip to Ireland.


Random things I was trying not to think too hard about in case they didn't happen:
Living near the sea again, even if it is freezing cold most of the time.
No mosquitoes.
No poison ivy.
Living near enough for friends and family to come and visit us often, not just once in a blue moon when their work sends them on a conference to DC.
Living near enough to go and see friends and family more than once a year when we're all so strung out on travel stress and jetlag and five-hours-time-difference that it's hardly enjoyable at all.
Having the smaller carbon footprint that comes with not living in the USA, even if life is a bit harder because of it.
Not having sweltering, humid summers that last for three months every year.
Not having to fit all our Christmas presents into three square inches of suitcase every year or leave them behind "for next time we come".

I could go on. See, mixed feelings. Above all, I would hate for us to go and then spend the rest of our lives complaining about how life was better in America - I have to hope we wouldn't be Those People.

We always said it was a win/win situation because we'd be glad to go or glad to stay. That's still how I feel, and I know how lucky we are to be in such a place with our lives. And maybe it just means there's something even better around the corner.