The last two times I went to England were very different than the trip we’re taking in a week. For those of you just catching up to our show, here are ways in which it was different:
1. Hello, in May I was flying on a plane to see my fiance, for, like, the second time ever. The little part of my brain that had some how been asleep for the past two months woke up somewhere over Greenland and went, “DOUBLE YOU TEE EFF, LADY?!” and I spent the rest of the flight having butterflies about meeting his family, seeing him at the airport, whether my dress was pretty, what the HELL I WAS DOING, were we right. For those of you keeping score, we were.
2. The weekend in July was spent happily cloistered together in Hatfield, a place made more charming because we were in love but still somewhat bereft by charm. Like charm dumped it, cruelly, on New Year’s, and it had never recovered.
This time, we’re going together on the plane. We’re packing together, even our toiletries exist happily in the same handy travel toiletry bag (actually, I snobbily refer to it as a necessaire, something that endears me to Stuart and probably no one else, except my mom, which is where I got the word). We are buying train tickets together, ferry tickets together, and the only time I plan to be apart from Stuart on this trip is in the separate customs lines, getting into the UK and then into the US.
This is critical because it is indicative of our life now, versus last summer. We are married now. We have been married, as I giddily like to say, “since last year”, which makes it sound SO established, loves it. We are going home to see his family, possibly the most important thing we will have done all year. We fought tooth and nail for this trip, begging the INS for a special travel visa, waiting on pins and nails and needles and porcupines and rhinos for the special travel visa to come through, taking critical vacation time to do so. Attending Shiv’s wedding will be the fun and much-anticipated end to our trip, but for that first week, we’re spending every minute with his family.
Me, I’m spoiled. I see my parents every few weeks or so, my brother every few months (and that’s still not often enough). I have a small family but damn if they don’t rock that casbah. Stuart has been, as it is with so many emigrees, very far away from his wonderful nuclear (and so similar to mine) family for ten months now. That is such a heartbreakingly long time to be away from parents, when I try to imagine it, I can’t, which is one of the reasons we’re living here in the US (because I am a spoiled baby).
So going home = huge big important wonderful thing. But so is going home as a couple – one of the reasons we wouldn’t split this trip for the world, me going now and Stuart going later or vice versa. We’re going home to his family as a pair, as a team, and maybe for the first time, I’ll really get to feel part of someone else’s family instead of just nervously (but wonderfully) meeting them. I’m going to visit my in-laws. His mom will see the rings on our fingers for the first time. They can legitimately tease us about grandkids now.
Am I sufficiently conveying how huge this is, spelt all in capitals like AITCH YOU GEE EEE? It’s huge. So because it’s huge, its hugeness and sentimentality and importance and brilliance and success is almost too much for me to think about. Every time I think about what Stuart has gone through to be at my side – the waiting for the visa, the part where he told his family he was leaving England for a girl he’d known for a week, the part where they were supportive but struggled to come to grips with his decision, the part where he said goodbye to biscuits and whiskey sold at grocery stores and the National Health and hedgerows and the Solent and Jim and Len and Lynn and imperial pints, and the part where he was unemployed here because of my government and .. and – every time I realize the immense weight of the sacrifices he’s made and with what grace and good will and cheer he’s done them for me, it’s all I can do not to impulsively wrap up the entire world in a big bow and give it right back to him, move to England tomorrow just to prove I could do it all too.
So going to England in all its hugeness, doing everything in my power including crying on the phone (twice!) to INS officers begging them to expedite this and realizing I’d have to miss my best friend’s wedding to get this trip right even if it meant a month late, going to England is all I can do to pay back the wonderful gift Stuart has bestowed on me. So how do I cope? I get obsessed about trains, and train times, and tubes, and where we can leave our luggage, and how to get around the island, and how many times we can take his mom to the beach and whether I’ll be able to find ingredients to cook them a Brasilian dish and oh my god, will they really love me and see how happy we are and be glad that we’re a little family now, even if it means we’re a little family thousands of miles away? And since this post is long enough already I can tell you that I’ve printed up a google map of the roads around his home and have marked down the places I already know, the places Stuart has told me about that I want to see, what inns to check out to see if my parents can find someplace to stay if they come for Christmas. I can tell you that I know the entire Southwest train schedule from Waterloo to Portsmouth by heart, that I know all the subways that take us to Waterloo including alternate routes in case of closure, that I’ve asked around and timed out the exact Heathrow-to-island time frame, and I can also tell you HOW COMPLETELY USELESS this process is because the ironic thing is, it’s STUART’S HOME. He knows how all the things work there. Why am I even getting obsessed over it?
Because it’s the only way I can cope with how excited I am to be at his side when this happens, to watch him take it all in, to watch him hug his mother again and get grilling tips from his dad and tease his sister and walk down to the shore along the High Street and to watch his face as he looks at his homeland with eyes of an expat, a married man, and yet still an islander. I can only obsess over the maps because it’s a good way to not cry with joy and excitement and if I were a chihuahua instead of a neurotic New Yorker, I would just pee all over everything all the time and fall asleep from the exhaustion of anticipation.
So it’s all I can do to keep checking train times as an obsessive-compulsive way to make this trip perfect, to tell Stuart that I know how much this means to him, and because I know how much this means, to you, honey, here’s a typed-out, cross-referenced and highlighted schedule of all the trains and buses and tubes and ferries and cabs and dune-buggies and rickshaws and unwilling french manservants.
All the ways we’re going home.