What they don’t tell you about moving abroad

They don’t tell you that you will be tired for a year. That you will be tired every day all the time. That you’ll be tired in the evening when you go to bed, and you’ll see a tired face when you look in the mirror in the morning. That living outside your comfort zone is exhausting. That you will have no comfort zone for a long time, and that when it comes, it will be patchy, like pieces of a jigsaw coming together to make a tree here, a house there, a boat in the distance. You won’t be able to dwell in the patches. They won’t join up to make a whole picture. Not for a long time.

They don’t tell you that you will watch a year of films without seeing their endings. They don’t tell you that you will say to yourself “I can’t be pregnant” more often than is comfortable, thinking you recognize the first signs of that old brain-slowness and body-heaviness. They don’t tell you that you will discover you can fall asleep, sitting bolt upright on a hard wood floor, playing trains with a three year old. “Open lor eyes, Mummy, open lor eyes”, as the small sharp fingers jab at your face, making you flinch and turn away. They don’t tell you that health food shops sell a thousand different combinations of vitamins and minerals, and that your tablet of choice will be called 'Unbounded Energy'. They don’t tell you that the labels on the bottles make all kinds of claims for how their contents can help weariness of body, but none of them dares suggest they can help weariness of soul.

Weary. I like that word. I remember when my oldest started nursery, and I picked him up at the close of the afternoon session, his teacher told me “He was wearying towards the end, but he’s been fine”. To my English ears, newly arrived in Scotland, the word 'wearying' sounded like 'weeing' (a word always close to a mother's anxiety zone), and I thought what an extraordinary thing she had said. That was when I first started noticing the word 'weary'. I don’t think it was the right word for her to use. Three year olds don’t get weary. They get tired; they have low blood sugar; they get grumpy; they get tetchy. I don’t think they get weary. The old get weary. The sad, the ill, the bereaved get weary. The relocated get weary.

Grey is the colour of weary. Not early morning wispy mist horizon grey, or cold depths North Sea grey. Just dull nothing grey. Weary rhymes with dreary, with teary, and I think too it hints at fear-y. Worry is a bedfellow of weary. Weary is what you are when life is wearing. Life is wearing.

Weary makes me think of Lowry, and his grey, tired, bowed matchstick men and women. Oh dear. I’ve just looked at a few of his paintings (isn’t the internet a wonderful thing? all this at my fingertips), and I find that his people don’t look weary at all. They look rather purposeful, hurrying along with intent. They are in groups, or twos: the luxury of companionship. There’s a rather pert little dog. Oh my. I must have it bad, when Lowry looks cheerful. What next? I’d probably think Munch’s Scream was roaring with laughter. I'm not even going to look.

I can’t think of a way to end this post. I can’t think of an ingenious twist, a witty one-liner, or an appropriate reflection to wrap it cleverly up. That is rather apt, though, don’t you think? When you are weary, you can’t see an end to it at all.