eslalwani

so glad i found this although wished i had found it a long time ago. Anyway i came back in 2006 with my 8 week old and 20 month old with the hopes my husband would follow, anyway lots of trips back and forth and after getting advice on how to get my husband here we are now at the cross roads, my husband says i have to go back to the us or else!!! but the thought of leaving my mum and family is killing me. My daughter has just finished reception and has made friends, i am so torned i cry every night with the thoughts of this. I do not love the ukbut it is wherei am from. I was in the us for 10 years before i cam home and i was always planning my trip home. Now if my mum could come with me i would not have an issue with this. My two kids love her so much and the thought of her not being in thier everyday live hurts so much i can not breathe.

salgb

follow your heart - I think you already gave yourself the answer. Good luck.

Mummy in the foothills

Agreed.

Erica

What a difficult situation you are in. Where in the USA is your husband? Why can't he move the UK to be with you? Is it because he doesn't want to or because he can't for immigration reasons or work reasons? Have you been single parenting for the last 5 years with the help of your Mum? I don't really get a sense of what your relationship with him is like or his relationship with his kids but saying "you have to go back or else" seems like a very tough ultimatum to give you and to ask you to leave the support of your Mum and the rest of your family is a very all order, especially since you have small children to think of. How do you think it would be if it were just you, your husband and your kids in the US? Can the two of you get some kind of couples counselling about this?

Londonuck

Gawd blimey

UK - Canada - UK - Canada and now maybe UK again!

It sounds like my next 20 years!

Londonuck

Unfortunately your heart doesn't put food on the table!

Mummy in the foothills

She seems to have been doing it so far.
Plus if she does move to the US, and the marriage doesn't make it (it's been a long while since they've been a "family") she could be stuck there by him and refused permission to move back to UK with the kids.
Ultimatums don't sit well with me, I get that gut reaction to go opposite what they are trying to order me to do.

eslalwani

washington dcis where he is from. i just kinda think he is not thinking it through. but if i do not go i will never know if this was to be but if it does not work out i will be damned if i stay and i will return with the kids.

Mummy in the foothills

Get that in writing and notarized, sign by him and a solicitor or something, cause being damned if you'll stay means nothing to the US courts when your Dh a USC stops you from leaving the country with his USC children. You will lose on this if you end up separated in the US.
Do a search there are many many UKC women (and men) stuck in the US because of separation and divorce and unable to remove the kids. You can't even take them for a holiday to UK without the other parents permission. I was stopped at the border one summer taking my two teenagers to Grandma for the summer. Since then I always get a signed letter from Dh giving me permission to leave.

ExKiwilass

You may have no choice.

I'm sure there is some kind of international agreement between the UK/and the US re: child abductions.

Think seriously about this.

eslalwani

good god another thing to confuse me

sallysimmons

Better you hear about this stuff now than after you've gone back and it's too late. Investigate this carefully because you may be making a decision you can never reverse.

Lothianlad

All the text books and atlases show London to be located in England, but that's as far as it goes. The simple fact is that London isn't really part of England at all - it's a part of practically every other country on Earth, a city in which there are over 300 different languages spoken on a daily basis, and you'd be hard pressed to hear any English spoken in very many instances.

Whatever else London may be, cosmopolitan it most certainly is, and some of the poorer inner city areas, such as Hackney, Plaistow, Peckham, Brixton and Camberwell, among others, are almost entirely taken over by immigrants, legal as well as otherwise. Sure enough there are some very well heeled, very prosperous areas of London but even here many of the residents are not native born Brits. Twice I have been stopped in London by tourists requesting information who first asked me if I spoke English. I am a fair haired, fair skinned and blue eyed Scot so I responded the same way on both occasions: "Yes, I do speak English, almost like a native!" I could, of course, have gone all Simon Pegg like and in my best RP English merely shrugged my shoulders and said: "Sorry, no, mate - I can't speak a single word of English!"

But venture beyond the circular M25 and you do find yourself entering what could well be described as England, where English is very widely spoken, and much as it hurts me to say this, as a Scot, England thereabouts can be very, very lovely to look at in many respects, with a lot going for it scenically and culturally, and so easily reached by either car, bus or train from any of the main London termini, and where you will be most unlikely to be asked if you speak English.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxUm-2x-2dM

transatlantic_chap

I am very much in this situation. Born and raised in the UK (dual US/UK citizen), moved over to the US when I was 24 -- met my wife, got married, had 2 kids. Began to be plagued by homesickness and the wish to return to the UK. Finally get to it: sold the house, the car, quit the jobs, hauled everyone over the Atlantic in September last year.

Weird thing is, though, that several months before we left the States (lovely college town in the Midwest) I began to look around me with great sadness about everything I would be giving up. The friends, the community, the ease, the affordability, the sort of golden glow to the summers, with kids running around at twilight with fireflies and the sounds of crickets, etc. etc. It all suddenly started to look and feel very idyllic. But it was too late -- I had already pressed the self-destruct button and the countdown was unstoppable.

Our time in the UK has been pretty sad -- the first few months were especially hard (no jobs, no friends, no school place for our daughter, everything feeling very expensive and rainy). And then gradually the pieces started falling into place: the job thing happened, we moved down to the south coast, renting a nice house, round the corner from a good-ish primary school, etc etc.

But I am still haunted by that sense of regret, that sadness at what we gave up. I think my reasons for wanting to come to the UK were largely selfish and sentimental, and although the kids have been very 'up for it', we're all still pretty isolated.

Put simply: I feel like I've gone from living in a town to living in a house. The scenery down here is beautiful, of course, but no amount of scenery can match the simple pleasure of having people who look forward to seeing you and whom you look forward to seeing. People who know your name and your kids' names and who would happily drop in and say hi when they were passing the house or call you up and invite you out for dinner at last-minute notice.

Hmpf. At the moment I am pondering the move back to the US. I don't regret coming over here and giving the UK a try -- something I had to get out of my system, I think -- but sometimes you only figure out whether something is a good idea by doing it.

sallysimmons

I suppose so much of this is about where you have the emotional ties and what you are actually leaving behind. For me, I never made friends here like the ones I have in England and I find I am quite lonely, although I have my husband so I'm not entirely alone. All my family is in the UK too and I miss them.

So unlike you, I'm not leaving much behind here - just material possessions. Oh and the sun, although I'm off that after this hideous summer we're having.