Just NB

The concept of “home” is a funny thing. There are all kinds of cheesey phrases, “Home is where the heart is”, “Home is where your story begins”… you know them all. Right now, I struggle to define home. Home is a condo in one of the towns named after a Saint in Quebec (of which there are thousands) where I live with my…inherited dog (that I am embarrassed to admit how much I love). Home is a messy, noisy, funny, condo with two girls that I love to the end of earth but don’t always know how to deal with, a husband that I see 25% of the time, and that same dog. Home is a chair at a desk in a big building in the biggest city that I have, or ever will (I think) live in. I spend 75% of my time there, it holds my only friends in Quebec, and it’s where I have the most social interaction. Home is my signature on a mortgage on a condo in Edmonton, of which I never plan or intend to live in, ever, just touch down for a visit from time to time. Home is the baseme...

Today is a bad Quebec day for me. I'm tired of not knowing where to go, how to get there, or what's going on. We're in the thick of getting all our Canadian/Quebec documents like health care, car registration, new insurance, new driving licenses...you name it. All of these processes are completely foreign to me. It seems complicated - especially so because I'm not fully "thinking" in French (yet) which means I think in English first and then translate into French and it's exhausting. 99% of the time it's a mild annoyance, but today, I hate it all.  I'm tired of not totally understanding and tired of being a foreigner.  When I was an expat, at the end of the day, I came back to camp and spent most of my time with people like me. So I had the language thing, but at the end of the day I had like-minded people that spoke the same language as me.  I hate to have a "poor me" defeatist attitude, but today, I'm just ...