I’m writing this to you from a cardboard box fort.
To my left, there’s a dog travel crate bigger than some of the London flats I’ve rented. On the floor is a scatter of babygrows, toys and sterilising equipment, all being carefully packed up and distributed to Prague’s newly expectant mothers.
For our family, it’s time for another goodbye and another move. Until five weeks ago, we thought we’d stay in Prague forever. Though my son isn’t yet two, I’d already started researching the school system. Peter, my husband, was learning to drive on the notoriously aggressive Czech roads, and we had started collecting heavy, 1960s teak furniture, something we’ve never felt settled enough for before.
But, if I’ve learned anything, it’s that life has its own plans. I need specialist medical treatment, and we’re lucky we can access it in, as we immigrants term it here, our “home country”.
So, in one week, the minutiae of our family will be loaded into a van by a very nice Czech man, pleasingly also called Petr, and driven with one angry black cat and an extremely farty dog from Prague to a tenement in Glasgow’s southside.
These three years have brought many sudden changes to our family. A longed-for, but entirely unexpected baby, after two years of unexplained infertility. Only to be followed, a few weeks later, by a global pandemic, which changed everyone’s perspective of the future irrevocably. Then, this year, a rare, one in 400,000, airway disease.
Won’t leaving Prague be a wrench? I know I should be mourning the life we have here, which is so safe and comfortable, with blue skies and the city’s astounding beauty filling each day. I know I will miss these things.
I also know we should be stressed by the task of moving our family of five across borders during a heatwave with only a few weeks’ notice. Indeed, you’d think I’d be closer to a nervous breakdown.
In fact, I feel very calm and positive. Perhaps this is because I’ve moved home 43 times in my 41 years. From my earliest life, my mum was constantly shuttling us around from B&B to caravan park to council estate, with the occasional panicked night sleeping in coach stations. She always believed that hallowed “fresh start” was just a National Express coach journey away.
New territory is not new territory for me
In my adulthood, I took that nomadic existence and translated it, more happily, into being a travelling writer, spending months in Buenos Aires, Hanoi, Sarajevo, Lisbon and Berlin. Even in Prague, where we’ve felt very “settled down”, I now realise we’ve lived in four apartments.
Our surprise relocation to Glasgow will bring us as much as we are saying goodbye to
So, new territory is not new territory for me. A saying that’s got me through the worst times in life – relationship breakups and homelessness, ill health and poverty – is: “It’s happening anyway.” I can let it floor me or I can adapt. As simple as that.
Well, not really simple. It takes daily, intentional work to reach this perspective. Now, I try to emphasise what might go right. Rather than the possible pitfalls of the scary unknown, I think of the glorious possibilities of unknowns.
Our surprise relocation to Glasgow will bring us as much as we are saying goodbye to. Friends and family, so my son can be with people who love him and who he loves, who will be a constant in his life. In Glasgow, he’ll grow up in a diverse, welcoming city, too, with new, vibrant, creative and LGBTQI+ communities. I very much want him to witness that example of tolerance and cultural exchange every single day.
I will be able to re-engage with my political and creative community again, something that I’ve missed greatly here, where officials only ask: “What does your husband do?”
Get the kettle on, Scotland
After a childhood of coming home to suitcases in the hallway and hasty moonlit flits, I know it’s important to say goodbye properly. This weekend, my husband and I got a babysitter and retraced our most sentimental steps.
We returned to the leafy café courtyard where I told him I suspected I was pregnant, then climbed up to Petřín, an outlook over the city, where I sat while six months pregnant during the pandemic. We walked across the Charles Bridge with throngs of tourists, and I rubbed a statue – a little brass dog’s belly – just as I did when I was wishing that it might keep our baby safe.
Then, we caught a tram home over the river, full of gratitude for what the city has given us. Grateful, too, that we have the opportunity to make a new life.
Even an anxious soul like me knows I cannot control everything. But, I can control how I respond to what life throws at me.
Here’s to new things. Here’s to the glorious possibilities of unknowns. Here’s to our “home country”. Get the kettle on, Scotland, we’re coming home.
Kerry Hudson is an Aberdeen-born, award-winning writer of novels, memoirs and screenplays
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