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In the autumn of 2017 my husband got sick.
Not the kind of sick that comes and goes in a week. The kind that settles in without explanation and stays. Severe stomach cramps. Pain that would double him over. Diarrhea. Sometimes vomiting. At its worst it was happening twice a month, and over the course of six to eight months he lost nearly seventy pounds, dropping from around two hundred and forty down to one hundred and seventy. That is not nothing.
We went to doctors. Multiple doctors. He had colonoscopies and endoscopies. He had blood drawn and results analysed and opinions offered. He cut out gluten. He cut out corn. He cut out soy. He tried each for four to six weeks, noticed no improvement, and quietly went back to eating them. One doctor suggested his body wasn’t processing sugars properly, something like lactose intolerance but broader, affecting all sugars. He took enzymes for six months. They helped a little. Not enough to matter.
And then came the cancer diagnosis.
I will say this plainly. We knew it was wrong almost immediately. Not because we were in denial, but because we researched what they said he had and it simply didn’t fit. We still took it seriously for a couple of months, because you do. Our daughter was frightened in the way that only a young person who has not yet learned to sit with uncertainty can be frightened. She worried he would die. We did the follow up labs at six months. Everything was the same. At the one year mark we requested a new doctor.
The first doctor had not been someone you could talk to. Questions went unanswered. The second doctor was the head of the cancer centre. He was kind and thorough and sorry that we had been through it. And that was the end of that.
What stayed with me from that whole period was not the fear. I am not particularly given to fear. What stayed with me was the frustration. The endless prodding and testing and theorising that led nowhere useful. I could manage him being ill. What I could not manage was watching him go through all of that without a single answer that made him better. When he finally said he was done with doctors I understood completely. We were both done.
The attacks did slow on their own over time, spreading further apart, becoming slightly less severe. We had no explanation for that either. We simply noticed it and carried on.
Then, a year or two ago, we came across a video that stopped us both in our tracks.
The argument was straightforward. Unlike animals, plants cannot fight off attackers. They cannot run. They cannot bite. Their only defence is chemical:— releasing compounds when they are cut or broken that do not agree with the digestive systems of those consuming them. Every living thing resists its own destruction. Plants are no different. They simply do it quietly and from the inside.
I thought about our garden. When you snap a vegetable from its vine or cut into it, something is always released. You can see it. We had both seen it for years without thinking much about it. Suddenly it made a different kind of sense.
We stopped eating vegetables. Mostly. Our diet shifted toward meat, fruit, potatoes, and things that would naturally fall from a plant without resistance. For me it was easy. I had never been especially fond of vegetables to begin with. For him it was a harder adjustment. But we both noticed changes. He felt better. I felt better. And we both noticed, almost as an afterthought, that we smelled less. We still sweat. But the odour was different. Reduced. It seemed a small thing until we started wondering why.
That wondering is where everything changed.
If what we eat affects how we feel and how we function in ways that doctors never mentioned, what else had we been told or not told? We started reading labels. We started avoiding seed oils, refined oils, heavily processed ingredients, things with names that require a chemistry degree to pronounce. We switched our kitchen materials. Glass instead of plastic. Real dishes instead of paper. Stainless steel pans instead of non-stick coatings that nobody seems entirely certain about.
And we started looking backward.
There is a photograph from roughly a hundred years ago of an ordinary street full of ordinary people. They are not athletes. They are not wealthy. They are simply people going about their lives. And they look well. Not perfect, but well. Lean and capable and present in their bodies in a way that is harder to find in a crowd today.
We began asking ourselves what they knew that we have forgotten. What they ate, how they cooked it, what they reached for when something went wrong before there was a pharmacy on every corner telling them what to reach for instead.
We do not have all the answers. We may never have a complete explanation for what happened to my husband in 2017 or why. But we have found something that feels more honest than anything a waiting room ever offered us.
We are looking backward. And so far, what we find there is making us better.
— Kate
I grew up in a neighbourhood where six families, including ours, used to gather for game nights. Someone’s kitchen table, a collection of mismatched chairs, the adults talking long after the children had run out of things to do. It happened regularly and naturally, without much planning that I was ever aware of. We were simply taken along, and it felt completely ordinary.
In winter, when a proper snow came, one of the older children would take out a quad bike and pack down the road. The sledders appreciated it. The snowploughs almost certainly did not. We had metal rail sleds, the kind you could actually steer, and if you started at the house up the hill and made the first turn correctly, you could carry enough speed to make it down two full blocks, round the second corner, and come to a stop more or less in front of our house. The whole neighbourhood would be outside by then, without anyone having been formally invited.
It simply happened.
Those are the details I remember most clearly now. Not the game nights themselves, but the ease of them. Not the sledding exactly, but the fact that it required no arrangement. Community, in that place and at that time, was something you were carried along by rather than something you had to build.
I live in a small town again now. About three thousand people within the town limits, thirty thousand or so in the whole county. It is quiet. The roads are unhurried. The pace of life is slower than anything you would find in a city.
But it is not quite what I remember.
I know the names of the people directly across from us, and a handful of others in the neighbourhood, mostly through church or my husband’s work. I would not describe any of them as friends. We don’t gather around each other’s kitchen tables. Nobody drops by without warning. The streets are quiet in winter in a different way than they used to be.
And when two cars pass on a quiet road, most drivers keep both hands on the wheel.
Every now and then an older driver still lifts a hand in greeting. My grandfather is one of them. He will be ninety this December, and he has never stopped doing it. A small lift of the fingers from the steering wheel as another car passes, natural and unhurried, the way breathing is natural. About two years ago I was his passenger when a car coming the other way gave that same quiet wave. I asked him if he knew the driver. He didn’t. He just nodded as if that was entirely beside the point, because of course it was. More recently he was my passenger, and I watched him lift his hand from his lap as another car passed, instinctively, without thinking. He doesn’t even need to be behind the wheel. That small gesture, so automatic he probably doesn’t think about it, felt like watching something rare. The sort of thing you don’t fully appreciate until you realise how few people still do it.
I drive a Jeep now, so I wave to other Jeeps. But otherwise both of my hands stay on the wheel. I don’t stop by my neighbours unannounced. I don’t organise game nights. If that sense of easy community were to come back to this street, I would not be the one to create it, and I think I should be honest about that. I miss something from childhood that I was simply carried along by. Now that creating it would require effort, I find I don’t particularly want to make that effort. That is probably worth sitting with.
And yet I notice the older driver who still waves. I notice the absence of children on the street in winter. I notice that I know my neighbours’ names and almost nothing else about them.
Perhaps noticing is its own kind of caring, even when it doesn’t lead anywhere. Or perhaps it is simply what happens when you miss something and aren’t quite ready to admit you’ve let it go.
— Kate
I was sitting in a waiting room while my daughter was in surgery, passing the time on my phone, when my mum sent me a message. She asked if my husband was there with me. He wasn’t. Then she said, “You shouldn’t be there alone.”
I remember chuckling to myself and asking her why not. She said I should have support, and I understood what she meant. For many people, waiting rooms are the sort of place where you want someone beside you, someone to talk to while the time passes. But for me, being there alone didn’t feel wrong at all. It felt completely normal.
What I thought, reading her message, was something I have thought many times before. Not unkindly, just honestly. Mum. You have known me my whole life. Why do you still not know this about me?
My grandmother had the same reaction when she found out. She rang and asked if I was all right, and I could hear the concern in her voice, genuine and sweet. She has never liked being alone in her own house, and I understood that she was speaking from that place. It was tender, really. I wanted to reach through the phone and reassure her that I was perfectly fine, that I was quite enjoying the quiet if anything.
This is not a new quality. It has been part of me for as long as I can remember.
When my father passed away, I was nine. I didn’t cry in front of anyone, not because I was holding something back, but because I genuinely didn’t feel the need to. Later, on my own, I cried quietly, and that felt far more natural than doing it in front of other people would have. Years later, when my stepfather died, my mum collapsed when she got the call. Someone had to stay steady, and I did. Not because I chose to take on that role, but because that is simply how I respond. I carried on through the flight, through the family gatherings, and through the funeral without falling apart. Not because I felt nothing. Because I don’t experience things the way most people seem to.
When my husband has been away for stretches, my grandmother would always ask if I wanted to come and stay with her so I wasn’t alone. Every time, I would thank her and tell her I was fine. Every time, I meant it. My mum never questioned it in the same way, perhaps because she understood from her own experience that a woman can manage perfectly well on her own when she needs to. But my grandmother couldn’t quite accept it, and I never once held that against her. She asked because she would have hated it. I stayed home because I didn’t.
Over time, I’ve noticed the way people respond to this quality in me. There is often a look, a slight pause, as if they are trying to work out whether I am holding something back or simply not feeling what I am supposed to feel. It isn’t usually said directly. It is just there. As if I am a bit odd.
But there is nothing missing. I am not covering anything up, and I am not trying to appear unaffected. This is simply how I am. I process things quietly and then I move forward.
Sitting in that waiting room, watching people come and go, I didn’t feel anxious or unsettled. I didn’t feel the need to fill the silence. I didn’t feel that I should have someone beside me simply because that is what people expect in that sort of moment.
I was exactly where I needed to be.
For some people, being alone like that would feel overwhelming. For me, it feels like space. Space to think, space to sit quietly, space to let things settle without noise or interruption. That has always been enough for me.
So when someone says I shouldn’t be alone, I understand what they mean. They are speaking from what would feel right to them.
But that isn’t how it feels to me. And after all this time, I have stopped being surprised that people find that surprising.
— Kate
After twenty years of marriage, people tend to assume they know what love looks like. Comfort. Familiarity. Quiet evenings and shared routines that no longer need much explanation.
In many ways, they’re right. My husband and I have built a life that feels steady. We talk easily. We enjoy long drives together, the kind where conversation fills the time without effort. We can sit in the same room without needing constant attention from each other. There is a deep friendship in that kind of marriage, and in many ways, it is good. Very good.
But that isn’t the whole picture.
Last week made that quite clear. Every day that week, I wanted to have sex with my husband. Not in a vague, romantic sense. I mean I wanted sex. I thought about it. I went to bed expecting there was a fair chance it would happen.
Some nights I curled up next to him, waiting to see if he would turn toward me. Other nights I put my hand on his leg so it was obvious where I stood. There was nothing particularly subtle about it.
And every night, there was a reason it didn’t happen. He didn’t feel well. He was sore from working out. He was exhausted. It was late. All of those things were true. None of them were unreasonable.
And yet I still wanted sex.
Not because anything was wrong between us. Not because I felt unloved. I wasn’t lying there wondering if he cared about me. I knew he did. But being loved and being wanted sexually are not the same thing, and I was very aware of that difference by the end of the week.
I do initiate sometimes. But if I’m honest, I prefer when he does. There is something about being chosen in that moment that feels different. Especially now, when I am more aware of my body than I used to be. I am not the size I once was, and while I don’t spend much time dwelling on that, it sits there quietly in the background. When he initiates, it tells me he still finds me attractive. Not in a general, long-married way. Not in the of course I love you sense. It tells me he looks at me and wants me. That matters more than I tend to admit.
Years ago, we attended marriage retreats, and the message in the wives’ sessions was always the same. Your husband has needs. Physical needs. Be attentive to them. Year after year, the same theme. I sat in those rooms and felt something between annoyance and quiet anger. Not because the message was entirely wrong, but because it assumed a dynamic that has never quite fitted my marriage. I would look around at the other wives and wonder, quite privately, whether any of them felt what I felt. Whether any of them were lying awake wanting more than their husbands did. Nobody said so. I was left to wonder if I was simply rather odd.
I don’t suppose I am. I think it is just not something women say aloud.
I came to faith later than some, and I did not always live by the beliefs I now hold. I had other partners before my husband, and I wish I hadn’t. Not out of guilt exactly, but because I have found, over twenty years of marriage, that intimacy within a covenant is a different thing entirely. It is more connected. More present. More everything, if I’m honest. I tried to tell my daughter that once, not as a rule to enforce but as something I genuinely found to be true. She made her own choices, as she should. But I meant what I said.
I believe sex belongs within marriage. Not as a restriction but as a context, the one in which it becomes what it is actually meant to be. And because I believe that, because I have experienced it, I pray about this. I pray for my husband to reach for me more. I pray for myself to initiate more easily. It is a small and very specific prayer, but I mean it.
In a long marriage, desire doesn’t line up neatly. It shifts with energy, stress, health, and timing. Some nights it matches. Some nights it doesn’t. Nothing is broken. Nothing is wrong. But the difference is still there, and pretending otherwise would not be honest.
You can have a good marriage, a steady one, a happy one, and still lie next to your husband wanting more. That longing doesn’t disappear simply because everything else is working. But I have come to understand that the longing itself is not a problem. It is evidence of something. That after twenty years, I still want him. That what we have built is worth wanting more of.
That feels like something to be grateful for, even on the nights when nothing happens.
— Kate
There is something different about going to church now. Not just where we go, but how it feels to go at all.
After we left, we gave ourselves time before we began looking in earnest. We visited a Presbyterian church several times, drawn in by the warmth of the welcome and hopeful that something might take hold. There were good moments. The messages contained things worth thinking about, points I hadn’t considered before. But something kept us at a distance. The pastor read her sermons, and while I understand that many do, there was very little beyond the reading itself. No lift in the voice at the right moment, no sense that she knew it well enough to look up from the page and mean it. My husband found it nearly impossible to stay fully present. And if the person delivering the message cannot quite inhabit it, it is rather difficult for the congregation to either.
So we kept looking.
We had begun to understand something about what we were after, even if it was hard to put into words. We didn’t want to be overwhelmed when we walked in. Some churches greet you so aggressively that you feel processed rather than welcomed. People come immediately with questions and information before you have even had a moment to take the place in. There is nothing wrong with that approach. It simply wasn’t what we needed. The churches we found ourselves returning to were the ones that let you sit. Perhaps one person says hello, and then you are left to settle. That felt right.
Then we visited a Catholic church, and everything was different.
We walked in to silence. Not the awkward silence of a room that hasn’t filled yet, but the intentional quiet of people who had come to do something specific. There was no music, no greetings, no conversation. People came in, moved to their pew, and knelt to pray before the service began. I stood and watched and felt something shift in me. I had attended church my entire life and it had never once occurred to me to pray before the service. Every church I had known opened with someone else’s prayer on behalf of the congregation. This was different. This was personal, and it was chosen, and I have started doing it myself since.
The structure of the Mass was unlike anything I had experienced before. There were two readings from scripture and then a reading from the Gospel, and the priest’s message drew directly from those readings. You followed along in the Source and Summit Missal rather than flipping through a Bible trying to locate whatever passage the pastor had just referenced. I had never realised how much energy I spent doing that until I didn’t have to anymore. Here, you listened to the readings, you followed along, and you were ready. The message landed because you were already settled into it.
We talked about it on the way home. We talked about it during the week. That had not always been the case with church, and we noticed the difference.
We have been back many times since. Mass has become our regular choice, and something has grown from it that we did not entirely anticipate. We downloaded the Source and Summit app and began reading the daily readings together as a couple. We have recently added a daily reflection as well, a short message connected to one of the readings for that day. Our faith is more present in our daily life now than it was when we were attending church three or four times a week.
There is still much we want to understand before we could say with any certainty where this is leading. The Catholic faith is deep and layered and we are conscious of how much we do not yet know. But we are learning, and we are doing so willingly, which feels like something worth paying attention to.
Our faith has not changed in its foundation. But it is being examined more carefully than it ever has been, and that examination has brought us closer to God rather than further away. We talk about faith more now. We think about it more deliberately. We are more intentional than we have ever been.
We don’t know exactly where this leads. But for the first time in a long time, we are not simply attending church. We are seeking something. And it seems, quietly and unexpectedly, that something may be seeking us as well.
— Kate
There is something I have never felt comfortable saying out loud.
I never wanted to be a mother.
I knew that long before I ever became one. When I was younger and told friends as much, they thought I was joking. They told me I would change my mind. I didn’t. In university, I started getting serious with my first boyfriend. He told me he couldn’t have children, delivering the news as though he were disappointing me. I remember letting him believe that. Not because it was true, but because admitting I didn’t want children at all felt like something that would make him think less of me. So I stayed quiet.
And eventually, I followed the path most people follow without particularly questioning it. You meet someone. You marry. You have children. My husband and I did the same. Years later, when I brought it up, he looked at me and said, “Then why did we?” Neither of us had a satisfying answer. We did what we thought we were supposed to do, and we did not stop to ask whether we actually wanted to.
When I became pregnant, I wasn’t excited. There was no overwhelming sense of anticipation, no emotional moment when everything shifted. I knew then what I had always known.
After she was born, I loved her. That was never in question. But the role itself never felt natural. I took care of her. I kept her fed and safe and attended to. I did everything I was supposed to do, and I did it willingly, because she was mine and I loved her. But I am not a hugger. I was the one who, when she came to me with some minor injury, would ask, “Are you bleeding?” She would say no. I would say, “Then you’re fine.” I avoided field trips when I could. I didn’t photograph every occasion. I didn’t get emotional when she started school or left for university. Those moments never felt like losses. They felt like things moving forward, as they ought to.
When she has been ill or needed looking after, I have done it. But I will not pretend it doesn’t exhaust me in a way that other things don’t. Being needed in that particular way has always felt like work. I don’t think that makes me monstrous. I think it makes me honest.
I have never been one of those people who goes soft at the sight of a baby. I don’t feel the pull to hold them or coo over them. I can acknowledge that a baby exists, offer my congratulations, and move along quite contentedly. It is not that I wish them any ill. I simply don’t feel the need to perform an enthusiasm I don’t have. When we were attending church, I quietly asked not to be put in the nursery. It seemed the honest thing to do for everyone involved.
What I have come to understand, over time, is that loving your child and wanting motherhood are not the same thing. They are quite separate. I love my daughter. That has never been in question. But I did not want the role, and no amount of time or tenderness has changed that fundamental truth.
What I do want, and what I find I am beginning to have, is something that feels less like motherhood and more like friendship. She came home recently to vote. We drove across town together, talking about the candidates, what we liked, what we didn’t. No drama, no weight. Just easy conversation between two people who happen to know each other rather well. That is the relationship I was always hoping we would find our way to. One where she knows she can bring me her troubles if she truly needs to, but where most of the time we simply enjoy each other’s company without the machinery of mother and child getting in the way.
I never wanted to be a mum. That has always been true, and it remains true now.
But I find I quite like the person my daughter has become. And I think she might feel the same about me.
— Kate
The first time I realised I might be different from other mothers, we were standing in a driveway on prom night.
Our children were dressed up, awkward and beautiful, posing for photographs before heading off to dinner. I was chatting with another mum about university plans, where her son was looking, where my daughter was considering.
She mentioned a school in Florida her son was thinking about, a local community college her daughter might attend. Then she said, almost wistfully, “Honestly, I hope they both decide to stay here. I’d be perfectly happy if they never left home.”
I remember nodding politely and thinking, why on earth wouldn’t they leave?
I love my daughter. Fiercely. I am proud of her independence, her ambition, her willingness to move eight hours away and build a life entirely her own. But I have never quite understood the desire to keep her close simply because it makes me feel better.
When her final year of school approached, other mothers spoke about the coming emptiness as though it were a tragedy. They asked if I was ready. If I would cry. If I would miss her terribly. I smiled and said I would miss her, which is true, but I did not feel devastation. I felt readiness.
I have always believed children are meant to leave. Not because we want rid of them, but because we have raised them to stand.
When the time came, we drove her up, helped her move into her dorm, and drove home. She was happy. We were happy. It felt exactly as it ought to. She has since chosen to stay at university over the summer rather than come home, and some people seem to expect me to be heartbroken about that. I find I’m not particularly. She is building her life. That is rather the point.
I did not build my entire identity around motherhood. I did not centre my world on her schedule or her presence. Even when she was young, I encouraged sleep-away camps and independence. She thrived. So did we.
I sometimes look at mothers who struggle enormously when their children leave and find myself quietly wondering about them. Whether they have poured so much of themselves into their children that they no longer quite know what they are without them. Whether they don’t entirely trust their children to get on without them. And for those who are married, I find myself wondering quietly about their husbands. Surely an empty house has its appeal.
I don’t say any of that out loud, of course.
Loving your child and being ready for them to go are not opposites. They can exist quite comfortably side by side. Pride does not always look like tears. Sometimes it looks like dropping them off, driving home, and feeling nothing but glad for them.
— Kate
I have been content on my own for as long as I can remember.
My grandmother likes to tell a story about me as a toddler. I was in one of those old wooden playpens, happily occupied. If I wanted out, I would remove a slat, climb out, have a look about while my mother was napping, and then climb back in.
Not because I was trapped.
Because I was content.
My mother says I didn’t cry much. I didn’t fuss. I wasn’t dramatic. I was observant. Quiet. Self-contained. She says this as though she is still slightly puzzled by it, even now.
For most of my life, I never thought much about it. I did not feel misunderstood or wrong. I simply assumed everyone processed the world internally the way I did. It took some years to realise that was not quite the case, and a few more to understand why some people found that surprising about me.
Friendships were uncomplicated, which was perhaps made easier by the fact that most of my friends were boys, both growing up in England and after we moved to the States. There was very little emotional analysis, very little drama. We talked, we laughed, we moved on. When something hurt, I thought about it privately and then got on with things. It wasn’t suppression. It was regulation. And it suited me perfectly well.
As I grew older, I began to notice how differently some people move through the world. Some need to speak their thoughts aloud to make sense of them. Some need regular reassurance. Some need visible affection and affirmation in quantities that would exhaust me simply to think about. I do not say that unkindly. People are wired differently. I have simply always been wired rather quietly.
I have always needed very little of any of that.
That independence has served me well. It has made me capable and resilient. It has allowed me to stand on my own two feet without placing much demand on anyone else. I am not a worrier. I do not spiral. I am rarely overwhelmed, and on the occasions when something does land heavily, I process it quietly and move forward without much fuss.
But I sometimes wonder what it costs, being the steady one. People assume you are fine because you present as fine. They assume nothing hurts because you do not make it visible. They assume you prefer to handle things alone because you always seem to manage it.
And honestly, they are usually right.
Being reserved does not mean being empty. It simply means the waters run deep and still, rather than loud and visible.
People rely on me, and I don’t particularly mind that, up to a point. There is something straightforward about being trusted to hold things together. But steadiness, I have noticed, has a way of becoming an expectation rather than a gift, and I am not infinitely patient with that distinction being lost on people.
The girl in the playpen did not need rescuing. She was content in her own company, curious about the world on her own terms, and perfectly capable of letting herself out when she chose to.
The woman she became is much the same. She loves the people in her life fully and without reservation. And she knows, quietly and without drama, that whatever comes her way, she would be alright. There is a particular kind of freedom in that knowledge. Not coldness. Not distance. Just the steady, certain understanding that she was built to stand.
— Kate
There is a kind of grief people don’t often talk about.
The quiet grief of leaving a church you once believed would always be your home.
For many years, our lives were deeply connected to one congregation. We weren’t simply Sunday morning attendees. We were there for Sunday school, morning services, evening services, and Wednesday nights. I sang in the choir, played in the orchestra, and took part in the music ministry in ways that genuinely fed something in me. Our daughter attended the school connected to the church. In many ways, our lives were woven into that place.
And for a long time, it felt right.
We had joined not long after we began attending. The sermons were meaningful, the people seemed welcoming, and our daughter loved being there with her friends. After leaving another church where we had stopped feeling connected, it truly felt as though we had found where we belonged. For years, we were committed in the way that only happens when something feels worth giving yourself to.
But sometimes things change slowly, almost quietly, until one day you realise something feels different.
For us, that shift began with a situation involving church leadership. It was handled in ways that raised questions we found difficult to set aside. We tried, for a time. We focused on our faith and on the genuine good that was still happening around us. But when trust shifts even slightly, it changes how you hear everything that comes afterward. Over time, we began noticing other things more clearly.
There was a meeting, eventually, that changed something permanently for my husband. I will not go into the particulars. What I will say is that respect, once lost, is very difficult to rebuild. He continued attending with me for a while because we both valued our Sunday school teacher and felt we were learning something worth learning. But something had shifted in him that did not shift back.
For a while we kept attending anyway. Sometimes people stay longer than they should because leaving feels harder than remaining.
Eventually I had to admit something to myself. The only parts of church I still felt truly connected to were Sunday school and the music. When our Sunday school teacher announced he would be leaving to take up a position elsewhere, it forced the admission I had been avoiding. If those were the only reasons I was still there, then perhaps I was no longer truly part of that church. And church ought never to be reduced to a schedule of obligations you feel bound to honour.
So we left.
Looking back now, something else stands out that we didn’t fully recognise at the time. Toward the end, getting to church had begun to feel like something we had to push ourselves to do. We were always there, but often rushing in at the last minute, sometimes arriving just as things were starting.
Since leaving, something curious has happened. On the Sundays we do attend somewhere, we are ready early. So early that we often sit in the car for a few minutes before going in. I mentioned that to my husband recently and said perhaps it told us something about the church we had left.
He thought for a moment and said something that has stayed with me.
“Toward the end it started to feel like a job. Like keeping up appearances. Not like going to worship.”
Hearing him say that, I thought he was probably right.
When we stopped attending, I assumed at least a few people might reach out. After all, we had been deeply involved for years. One person did. Just one. It was not anyone in church leadership. Another message came months later, but it felt less like genuine concern and more like someone confirming something they had already heard.
That silence told us something important. Perhaps the sense of family we believed existed there had not been quite as real as we had thought.
Even so, leaving did not damage our faith. If anything, it clarified it. Our faith was never meant to be tied to one building or one group of people. It is something steadier than that.
We still attend church most Sundays, visiting different congregations and taking in what we can along the way. We haven’t found a new place to call home yet.
But we are looking. And we are looking more carefully than we did before.
— Kate
I have lived in two countries long enough to know that neither one stays the way you left it.
I was fourteen when I came to America. Old enough to remember England clearly — the neighbourhood, the game nights around someone’s kitchen table, the winters when the whole street came outside without anyone having to be asked. Old enough to carry those things with me. Young enough, perhaps, to build something new without too much difficulty.
The hardest part was the school. I worried my marks might slip with the change in curriculum, the different way of teaching things. I worried about walking into a place where everyone already knew each other and finding my footing. As it turned out, a teacher took it upon herself to introduce me to four girls on my first visit. We sat together at lunch throughout school. We talked in the corridors. There was a sleepover once, I think in the final year. They were good enough friends for what I needed, and I did not need much. That has always been true of me.
America shaped my adulthood in the way that only the place where you truly begin can. I married here. Built a life here. Became whoever I actually am here, rather than whoever I might have become had I stayed. It is home in the truest sense of the word, not because I was born here or because it has always felt familiar, but because it is where I chose to plant myself and grow.
England exists for me now mostly as memory. When I go back, I am always quietly startled by how much has changed. New buildings where old ones stood. Roads that didn’t used to be there. The places I loved simply gone, replaced by something I have no feeling for. It makes me sad in a way that is hard to explain, not grief exactly, but something adjacent to it. The sadness of realising that the place you remember never really existed except in a particular moment in time, and that moment has long since passed.
I don’t feel a pull to go back. England is where I am from. America is where I am. Those are different things and I have made my peace with that distinction.
Though I will say this. I still say England when someone asks where I am from. Not America, not both, not it’s complicated. England. Because that is the honest answer, and because some things stay with you regardless of how many years and how many miles sit between you and them.
My accent has never left. People mention it still, after all this time. I don’t mind. It is the most visible reminder of something I carry quietly and don’t often talk about. That I grew up somewhere else. That I remember a different way of things. That I belong, in some sense, to both places and fully to neither.
And that, I have found, is not such a bad thing to be.
— Kate
Kate Alderwick 