“I’ve got news,” my 22-year-old son said as he sat across the dinner table from my husband and me on a warm summer night. “I accepted a new job in Indiana, and I’ll be moving there in a month.” I froze. I was surprised, not that he was moving out, but that he was leaving
In October 2025, I packed up my 15-pound hairless Xoloitzcuintli, Troy, and the rest of my belongings and moved from the north of England back to my hometown in California. I was exhausted, relieved, excited, heartbroken, and so hopeful. I’d been living outside the US for 14 years — a year in Taiwan teaching English,
Nearly three years ago, my husband and I moved from New York City to a hillside Sicilian village. We’d bought a house here remotely, without seeing it in person until several months after the closing. During the unconventional process, my now-75-year-old parents, based in Colorado, were our biggest supporters. We had long phone calls, during
There’s a specific dread that comes from not knowing if the words in your head are the right ones in that language. I lived inside that fear, not of a school test, but of speaking in class and having the wrong language come out, or the right one come out wrong. I was born in
After a tiring seven-hour flight from Boston to Frankfurt, a three-hour drive from the airport, and six flights of stairs to our apartment, we arrived in Düsseldorf and quickly learned air conditioning isn’t really a thing in Germany. The large tilt-and-turn windows in our place didn’t have screens, only metal rolling shutters. This meant we
Moving to a new country comes with plenty of adjustments, from language to social rules, but I didn’t expect to feel out of place in my own body. Before moving to Japan from New Zealand, I was mostly content with how I looked, having already survived the body-image hurdles of early motherhood. Despite being a
