Culture shock.

I've moved interstate, back to Tassie where I grew up. I'm having good days and bad days about it. The good days are looking up at the mountain looming over the city from every vantage point, seeing my mum and dad and other relatives easily and without that intensity that the fleeting visits of the past necessitated, and knowing how much good stuff is a short drive away (though I haven't yet taken many short drives to the good stuff). The bad days are feeling a keen longing for Melbourne, for markets with choice and ethnic variety, for running into people I know as I walk down the street, and for that exciting sense of anything might happen, anything might be discovered that I still got frequently even after a dozen years living there. I have to be honest though, part of my melancholy is a longing for the life and the me before I had a baby - cycling to life modelling jobs or the pool, doing two hours of yoga uninterrupted if I felt the urge, poking around the op shops without navigating a hummer of a pram (I love my buggy, don't get me wrong) and timing my pottering by the tolerance level of a bored baby. But of course, and I really mean this, I'm not just being tokenistic, I wouldn't exchange my motherhood or my boy for ANYTHING, and having him is easily and unquestionably the best thing I've ever achieved. I also am able to recognise that another contributing factor to my homesickness is that I left a well-entrenched and longtime sense of belonging in Melbourne to come to a place that is both familiar and strange (in many senses of the word), one where despite my family links, I feel a distinct lack of belonging. So far. This will change once I have found a playgroup I like and some simpatico mothers to hang out with, and also once I increase my human-powered mobility (never mind the petrol prices, I'd rather use the car as little as possible on a day to day basis. Bodies were designed to move themselves about.) via some sort of baby-seat for the pushie. Then I can ride to the city, the docks, the art school to meet Dan when he is studying, the Botanical Gardens, the museum. We kind of fluked it when we ended up moving to Glenorchy. It turns out I can walk to the library (a great one, too, with the best Rock 'n' Ryhme I've ever participated in), supermarkets and fruit market, pool and basically all the local amenities worth using within half an hour, which satisfies my daily exercise fix. But Glenorchy is no Preston, despite being a northern suburb, and Hobart is no Melbourne, no matter how you look at it. I'm just going to have to come to terms with that.