I took my youngest child to school this morning and as I turned the car around in a small side street I saw a woman whose children attend the same school. This is somebody I have spoken to on and off for probably six or seven years now. She is a very nice person as far as I know but somebody who brings out the bad side of me. I feel irritated and/or insecure when I see her.
The point I want to make about this is not connected to a direct account of why I have negative emotions in this respect. It is rather that as I looked at her I imagined myself 10 or 15 years in the future, still living in the same area, and still occasionally crossing paths with this particular person. I moved into this area with no idea what it would lead to. However as the children grew up I have become embedded in the area and now have spent longer in this house than anywhere else I have ever lived and now cannot really see myself leaving this area until the children are grown up and even then I imagine we will be based here.
This was a decision that we have all made piecemeal as time has passed. We wanted our children to grow up with something neither of us had which was somewhere we came from, somewhere we belonged. By moving from where you live as a child and then continuing to shift again and again you easily leave behind people like the woman I saw this morning. By moving on you no longer see their faces and with that you don’t have too experience the same emotional negativity. Changing location gives you freedom from that and even if relationships will tend to be repeated over a period of time, in other words you can’t escape from yourself, you repeat the same circumstances in a new place, it may take time that they return. However, it does take time before these feelings do return and this morning I was acutely aware that this time round I wouldn’t be moving on and I would have two live with the mistakes I have made, as well as the positive.