Moving to London

A month or so after we touched ground in London, a fellow American expat asked me how I was settling in. He raised his eyebrows in amazement when I shrugged and said, “Fine.” “Five years I’ve been here,” he said, “five years and I’m just now feeling settled.” That made me think, how are we really doing?

Sometimes the answer seems to change daily, if not hourly. On good days I am dizzy with the opportunities life in London has to offer. On bad days I leave hate texts on my husband’s cell phone and rant about how nothing is different from life in the States—only here he is working more hours, seeing us less, and my life is remarkable for its lack—lack of support, lack of old friends, lack of family.

Before we moved our fantasy was of the “European lifestyle.” We imagined spending a lot of time sitting in cafes, sun on our faces, gazing deeply into each other’s eyes and talking about things that really matter, like chucking our day-to-day lives and buying a vineyard. I sound facetious, but what I really mean is we wished to remind ourselves that while busily working to make a living, we must find time to make a life. We thought that would be easier in England. The move meant we would expose the children to Europe. London would be our classroom in and out of school. By the year’s end our eight-year-old would have finished his first screenplay, or five-year old would be singing chanson in French and our baby’s first phrase would be “Mind the Gap.”

Reality was we were unknowingly saddled with the estate/ management company with the worst reputation in London and worse hours than we had had back in the States simply because my husband was now accessible to two continents in two different time zones. He’s up and in the office early, and due to his commute, he arrives home later than in the States. Whereas back home we’d made it a priority to eat most dinners together as a family, now my husband barely arrives in time for table clearing and then fields phone calls from two different Blackberrys through bedtime and beyond, as when business is being put to bed here in England it is just hitting it’s midday stride in the States. Often times he’s on conference calls until 3 in the morning. And those leisurely café breakfasts we’d dreamed of? Still largely a thing of fiction (but we are working on that).

Having lived in a number of different cities and countries on my own and with my husband, I wasn’t too concerned about moving from suburban Princeton, NJ to London, England. Not concerned for myself, that is. Uprooting three kids ages one, five, and eight years is another thing. Most of the stresses I feel in my daily life are because I am trying to make things work for the kids—after all they didn’t choose to leave their lives as they knew them to come here.

We held our collective breaths until school (our biggest priority) was ironed out, then the final (we thought) hurdle: a home. My husband, B, scouted out the Chiswick area on a four day’s foray to London. He took pictures with his phone of a lovely five-bedroom furnished home with views of the Thames in the Strand-on-the-Green area of Chiswick. How lucky we thought we were! There was one hitch: it was only available as of October 1st, and we were arriving, rather late for us, September 1st. The estate agent begged us to trust her to find a short let. We agreed. Days went by, weeks went by, nothing. Finally a mere seven days before our arrival she told us she had nothing; that we should try another estate agency. We scrambled and came up with a great last minute find—an apartment just came on the market and was in an even more convenient part of Chiswick as we could walk to school. The catch: it wasn’t furnished. So my husband haggled and at the end of the day, we got the house with bare-bones furniture. We signed the contract via fax the day before we landed at Gatwick.

Triumphant, we threw ourselves into the last-minute preparations. People thought we were crazy, but I insisted on keeping things business-as-usual for the kids as much as possible. As such, hours before we were due at the airport my middle child, little G, and I were at a birthday party for one of his best friends. We also spent a month, as we do every summer, at my parent’s second home at Lake George in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, during the time I really needed to be packing up the house. We managed to get everything done, but I can’t say it was easy. Nonetheless we smiled as we got all three kids buckled into their car seats in the minivan we had hired to drive us to the airport. Well done, we thought, as the car pulled away from our home. We thought we had everything covered.

Little did we know.

Walking into our new home was a bit of a shock. Though we had had the agent take pictures of the rooms on her phone and email them to us, we weren’t prepared for the state of the home—the things that just can’t be captured on camera like carpets so worn we were loath to put Baby Lulu, our newly walking baby down on them. The walls were crying for a coat of paint. The estate agent had promised us that a painter was scheduled, but we later discovered that only two rooms were to be painted, and not the one where the previous tenant’s child had apparently decorated the walls with yellow highlighter. Within the first few months the washing machine, the dishwasher, and the refrigerator all broke, not to mention the kids had no heat in their rooms. Of course we didn’t realize how tricky it would be to impress upon said management company how urgently we needed say, heat or refrigeration of our food. Calls to the management company went unanswered. Getting our agent to okay any work in the apartment was like pulling teeth. In fact it wasn’t until some serious hints were dropped about squatters’ rights (with a spoonful of sugar of course) that we got anyone’s attention at all.

School started a mere four days after we touched down on British soil. We explored our new surroundings during every spare moment. The kids were in heaven sussing out the location of the secret door in the White Room during a tour of the Buckingham Palace state rooms, sitting ‘first row up top” on the double decker buses, and staging mutinies in the pirate ship at Princess Diana’s Memorial playground. We had lured them from their comfy lives in the States with promises of Paddington Bear, Harry Potter, kings, castles, knights and Neverland, after all. After a madcap few weeks of this ‘residential tourism,’ we had to slow down. Whereas the answer to “what are we doing today” used to be sunset spinning on the London Eye, learning to be spies at the Science Museum Spy Exhibit, and “burrowing” in the Badger’s Sett at Kew Gardens, it became simply “homework and bed.” We were no longer on an extended vacation, we were living our lives. And everyday life, the kids quickly learned, isn’t always an exciting holiday.

To make matters worse, we simply didn’t pack enough. Let me rephrase that, we packed heaps—just not into the suitcases that were coming to London. Our basement in Princeton has plastic bin stalactites reaching to the ceiling with all our worldly possessions—or at least those I naively thought we wouldn’t need or could easily replace with something better here. People told me that London was incredibly expensive, but Princeton, NJ, from which we hail, isn’t exactly cheap. How bad could it be? It turns out that the prices here are exactly the same as they are back home—except in pounds, so they are really twice the price in dollars. I found myself balking at buying necessities (like that winter coat) out of sheer principal. I’m still waiting for the day I don’t convert pounds to dollars in my head before I buy something. But we finally had to give in and buy those coats, toys and shoes we were missing.

Then there was the fact that attending a private school means less outside contact with school friends. In the States we live down the block from school and most families stay on the school grounds to play until dusk. Playdates are easy to schedule or just arrange spontaneously on the playground. Here, on the other hand, most kids in the boys’ classes take the bus home. I didn’t know any of the children’s’ last names, let alone how to reach them. So until the PTA school directory came out, I had a very frustrated and sad five-year-old on my hands, especially on those afternoons that his older brother played at his friend’s house.

Another huge adjustment was going from a community which was so safe we didn’t need to lock our doors to a city environment. Most days the kids would just burst out of doors after school and play happily in the woods around our house digging holes to China, or making “factories” or simply climbing trees. They would often come home at dusk, covered in dirt or mud or dripping with rain, get undressed in the mudroom and then hit the bath to wash the day from their skins. Now playing outside, with the exception of our narrow garden (each backyard play session entailing a great number of balls lost to the neighbor’s yard), was an event to be planned. We have to haul scooters, heelys, balls, diaper bags, snacks, etc. to whatever green spot we can find. And green spot is sometimes an overstatement, like when I found our toddler playing on Turnham Green with broken glass. It is no wonder that out of all the many exciting sights the boys visited around London in our first few weeks, St. James’s Park was their absolute favorite. Here they ran around freely, feeding the birds and trying to get them to land on their arms coached by a homeless man they affectionately dubbed, “Bird Man Bert.” It was the closest these boys could get to nature in the big city.

Driving was another hurdle. My husband, perhaps chagrined by the difficulties he had driving the car home from his office (barreling through the congestion zone many times over and flattening many a side-view mirror), nagged me constantly to get behind the wheel. It wasn’t just a problem of ‘wrong side of the road’ and ‘wrong side of the car.’ Rather it was the car itself. Had we been gotten a sleek compact car, I might have tried sooner. But in this land of mini Coopers and Smart Cars and impossibly impassable narrow lanes what would my husband have me drive? A minivan! The very car we smugly avoided driving back home in the States where three kids + a minivan was de rigueur. Forget the fact that I would have to learn how to drive on the opposite side of the road, how could I drive a minivan? Furthermore, back home where the vast distances often necessitated driving I counted myself happiest on days when my car was not used at all. So I was content, I told my husband, not to drive. “What will you do when it gets cold?” he challenged. I bought a foot muff for the stroller. “What about taking the kids to after-school activities?” I signed them up for school clubs only.

He begged me to practice driving every weekend. I refused. There was no way I was going to practice driving with all three kids and my husband in the car. It would have to be on my own terms. Other mothers suggested taking a driving class or two. I just smiled noncommittally. Every day for me was framed by the am and pm walk to school. I felt like a martinet marching the kids to and fro in all weather. “Walk quicker,” I told them when they complained about the cold. “It’ll circulate the blood and your fingers will thaw.” I finally had to give in one day because of the baby. Baby Lulu was always such a good sport, but she’d had it with all the time in the push car. Before she was mobile she was a sling baby, carried all the time, and now she wanted to walk on her own. Just the mention of the hated buggy would send her into hysterics. I always prayed Baby L would be ready for a nap on the way home from home so that the twenty minute walk didn’t turn into an hour. I ployed her with food and push car books that attached to her safety straps.

But one day after spending much of the morning buggy bound she woke up from her nap too late to walk. I knew I had to do it—I mentally sketched my route on the road to school focusing on the turning. Lefts are easy, rights are hard was my mantra. It got me all the way to school (all lefts) and all the way back (all rights) safety. By the end of the trip, both boys and even L were chanting along. We had survived.


Our lives now are not all stress and challenge. It is really a trade-off: nature in our backyard for culture on our doorstep. On inset Wednesdays we sometimes take the tube into the city to visit a museum before dinner. One lazy afternoon during break my husband and eldest son had a few hours to spare while the rest of the family recuperated from colds. They hopped on the tube and twenty minutes later they were face to face with a blue whale in the National History Museum. Before the baby woke from her nap they were back with promises to return with the whole family for the Polar Ice exhibit. Despite our proximity to NYC in the States a trip like that would be a full day’s excursion.

My husband and I get a kick out of the fact that when we discuss global events the boys race to the world map that covers our reception room wall to locate it. We love the fact that when we plan our vacations our kids want to go to Madrid because that is where their good friend Javier hails from, or way up north because they’ve got friends from Iceland. No matter where we end up traveling, the kids insist on a phrase book to help speak the local language. And the thrill they feel in mastering new languages is wonderful to see. In fact, there are some hours during some days during which our five-year-old attempts to answer us only in French. A gift of being part of the international IB school community is that the boys finally appreciate having a mother tongue in addition to English—something that they never quite understood before they didn’t get to go to mother tongue instruction! We are tickled each time L sings her newly learned British songs, and even more tickled when the boys chime in, in their best British accents and loudest singing voices.

Recently we celebrated the American holiday of Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is a feast during which we give thanks for the year’s bounty. Ironically, it originated as a holiday to celebrate our ancestors leaving England in search of religious freedom in the New World. It is most importantly a celebration of friendship, as the native Americans helped the English settlers survive by teaching them how to cultivate the crops which would prosper in the harsh New England soil, and survival, for without the native Americans the settlers would not have made it through that first winter. The most important ingredients for a Thanksgiving feast are family, and a whole roast turkey among numerous other dishes, the ingredients for which stumped the nice people at Sainsbury’s (local market) to no end.

I knew that this year the extended family wouldn’t be on the menu, but I assumed roast turkey would be. After all, the Brits were the only practically the only other people I knew of who ate turkey—a pretty dry and difficult bird to cook just right. Having been here now three months with many a holiday under my belt I was feeling cocky and left the grand shopping expedition (not unlike the turkey hunt my Colonial ancestors must have undertaken for the earliest Thanksgiving celebration) until the night before. Since the kids didn’t have the day off from school as they would in the States I figured I had plenty of time for last minute forays to the market for supplies. Little did I know my folly.

Evidently whole turkeys are impossible to find except during Christmas. As I loaded my cart with various bird pieces in an attempt to create a sort of Frankenstein’s monster of a bird, I bamboozled the Sainsbury’s staff with requests for products that they had apparently never dreamed of, let alone heard of. This year I am thankful for finding a recipe for “Deconstructed Turkey” on epicurious.com, which called for the bird more or less in pieces. Despite the fact I had to use a premade crust for the pumpkin pies (don’t tell my mother!), despite the fact I’ve missed Thanksgiving with my parents only two times in my life and never in the kids’ experience, it somehow worked out. We Skyped my family throughout the meal and sat down to eat about 9—a good hour-and-a-half past the kids’ bedtimes.

As we went around the table for the traditional giving of thanks, the boys, each in turn, said they were thankful for the opportunity to be here in London. They felt privileged to be in a school with kids and teachers from so many different countries. That they enjoyed hearing so many different languages being spoken, and that they looked forward to what London had in store for them in the coming months. The baby threw her cranberry sauce-laden spoon, so I knew she concurred. I thought of my expat friend and his question about how we were settling in. I realized that our Thanksgiving feast was a lot like our transition experience. We didn’t have exactly everything we needed. Everything wasn’t perfect. Getting it together was challenging and stressful, but in the end, rewarding and special in its own way. And yes, it’s taken us three months to actually get a bank account. And yes, the management company is still a hassle. But we are getting by. So, cleaning up cranberry sauce off the floor, I thought to myself, just maybe, we were settling in well enough.