Leaving Ireland

Posted by maartje on April 26th, 2008 | Categorized as General Forum | 272 views and 16 Comments

I was 26 when I went to Ireland. It involved an airplane flight and after a lovely holiday, on my way out of Ireland I cried uncontrollably. I thought it was weird because well, I hadn’t been in Ireland for long (2 weeks), I wasn’t leaving anyone behind there… my reaction bemused me.

Ireland was the very first country that I had visited on my own accord, not dictated by my family or anyone else. I went to Ireland because I wanted to. I was leaving because my time there was up, not because I was moving elsewhere. There was no excitement about where I would go next - I knew to what I was returning.

This was my moment to grieve for all the times I was forced to uproot, pack up and move due to my father’s job. There was no place then to grieve or express myself negatively as a child - the move was beyond my control. I was used to denying the grief and focus on what was coming next; it was a pattern, so that my sanity could survive in the craziness of moving every so often.

I enjoyed my time in Ireland, the traveling, putting the skills that I had learned during my childhood to use and totally immersing myself in the cultural foundations… Aspects of myself that had been dormant for so long, which had moved into a lull of complacency and almost into oblivion after living in Holland for 15 years… I basked in the feeling of nomadism that I experienced while on holiday in a country not far from where I lived, in the safety of knowing I could return within a day if something would go wrong… and now this newly rekindled part of myself would have to be shut down again when back in Holland where I had a steady job, a place to live, friendships and the stability everyone around me deemed so important.

So during that short flight back from Ireland to Holland with a stop-over in Cardiff (Wales), I grieved. I grieved for all the times I left and couldn’t grieve. I grieved for rekindling a part of myself that had to go back into hiding if I was going to be able to live my “well-adjusted” life again. I grieved for the newfound sense of freedom and independence. Everything was on my own terms, as an adult, and ready to come to the surface to be observed, experienced, explored and, over time, healed.

Two months later I left Holland, and moved to the UK. A year later I moved to Canada with my husband, whom I’d met in Ireland during the trip that changed my future, and that reconnected me with the emotions I hadn’t allowed myself as a child.