The Space Between Two Homes

By Marlee Savery 

The first time I realized we were leaving England, it wasn’t during a packing conversation or when the posting message came through. It was an ordinary school morning.  We were rushing our the door in our little village, negotiating shoes and snack boxes, when my five-year-old stopped to point out the Red Arrows flying overhead, painting the sky with red, blue, and white stripes. “Look, Mum! The Red Arrows!” he said excitedly. The view had become a regular feature, but still drawing excitement from my children every time.  

Then it hit me; soon, this view would not be a regular part of our landscape.  

When we arrived in England in 2023 for our OUTCAN posting, everything felt temporary. We told ourselves it was just three years. An adventure. A chapter. We would soak it up and return to Canada, the place that felt solid and familiar and permanent.  

Except somewhere along the way, England stopped feeling like a chapter and started feeling like real life. We learned how to navigate narrow roads bordered by hedgerows. We grew used to calling strollers “pushchairs” or “buggies” and vacations “holidays”. The kids slipped into their little uniforms like they’d been wearing them forever. We found our favourite pubs. Favourite parks. Favourite weekend walks. We made local friends.  

We stopped feeling like visitors. Now we are packing it all up again, and I feel like I’m standing in the space between two homes.  

Missing a Place Before It’s Gone 

I didn’t expect to feel protective of England. I find myself memorizing things: the colour of the stone buildings and walls, the rhythm of our little village and the city down the road, the way everything feels layered with history. I’m acutely aware that our time here is finite now. Every school pick up, every train ride into London, every rainy afternoon feels numbered.  

There’s a quiet grief in that.  

Not because we regret coming: quite the opposite. Because it became so good.  

And I worry about how it will feel when it’s no longer ours. I worry that Canada will feel loud and wide and unfamiliar after the coziness of England. I worry that I’ll compare too much. That I’ll romanticize this life once it’s behind us.  

Returning “Home” Isn’t Simple 

Canada is home. It’s where our families are. It’s where our history is. It’s the place that shaped us. But returning after three years abroad feels different than just going back. Life there has kept moving. Friends have new routines. Communities have shifted. Our families have experienced major life events with us on the periphery. We aren’t stepping back into the exact same spaces we left. We aren’t the same either.  

Living overseas stretches you in subtle ways. It forces you to rebuild community and create your own village. To adapt. To redefine normal. It makes you braver than you realized you could be. Now we have to do it again, except this time, it’s in a place that once felt effortless. That’s the part that feels daunting. There’s something vulnerable about going back to where you’re “supposed” to fit and wondering if you still will.  

Our Children and the Unknown 

If I could carry all of this lightly, it would be because of our kids. They are three and five – small enough that this move will blur at the edges of memory, but old enough that England is woven into their sense of normal. For my son, Oscar, who was only four months old when we moved here, it is all he has ever known. Their friends are here. Their teachers. Their routines. I watch them run confidently into school and I wonder what it will feel like to ask them to start over. New classrooms, new playground dynamics, new accents around them. Will they miss this place in ways they can’t quite explain? Will their grief come out sideways, in tired tears at bedtime or sudden bursts of frustration? Probably.  

But I’ve also watched them adapt before. I watched my son Henry, only two and a half when we arrived, tentative and wide-eyed, and slowly build comfort. Children are remarkably brave when adults around them are steady. Maybe that’s my role now. Not to have all the answers, but to model the courage of beginning again.  

Building Another Normal 

The truth is, England didn’t become home all at once. It happened in layers. In grocery shops and library visits. In birthday parties and playground chats. In learning the rhythm of the seasons here. In realizing we had a favourite everything. Normal wasn’t handed to us, we built it. And that realization softens the fear, because if we built it here, we can build it there too.  

Canada won’t look exactly like it did before, and we won’t either. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe this move isn’t about returning to who we were in 2023. Maybe it’s about carrying forward everything these three years have given to us. Resilience. Perspective. Gratitude. Confidence that we can land somewhere unfamiliar and make it ours.  

I know there will be hard days. Days when I ache for English countryside walks or the sight of the Red Arrows soaring over our back garden. Days when the kids miss their old school and their best friends. Days when we question whether we have made the right choice. But I also know this: we’ve done brave things before. We left once, not knowing what waited for us and found a life better than we could have imagined. Now we return, carrying more than we had when we came: more experience, more connection, more belief in our ability to start over.  

Home, I’m learning, isn’t a single place on a map. It’s the life we build together. And we’re pretty good at building.