Tom over at Eat Rio posted a blog yesterday called Big Changes Take Time. He happened to be talking about his blog undergoing changes. I thought it was pretty relative to my overall life at the moment.

Something I miss enormously about Brazil is my therapist. I just have so many questions and uncertainties about my family relationships and I feel ill-equipped to deal with them. I feel angry and annoyed. Often. But why? Some kind of childhood resentment that has stuck with me? Feelings that I can't seem to shake... my relationship and position within my family leaves me feeling confused, frustrated, hurt, and angry.

I guess my recent over-analyzation of my familial relationships is due to the fact that I am FULL FREAKING TERM and therefore have been thinking A LOT about how I want to raise my baby and what kind of relationship I want to have within my own family.  I guess, if I'm being honest with myself, part of my disappointment is that I am looking for a lot of special attention, love and selfless support right now and maybe not getting exactly what I expected coming home to have my baby in Canada. 

To be more honest, I think I'm looking for the family dynamic I see in my Brazilian family and that's not just fair to expect that. These two families couldn't be more different.

I try very hard to keep that in perspective. Different cultures, different family make-up, different proximity to extended family. Different, different, different. I still sometimes feel like Ro and I are going it alone though, and that kind of sucks atthisverymoment, when we need a lot of extra support and understanding and came back, y'know, kind of expecting it.  

On a positive note, my mom has provided us with the financial resources to make our space in her house personal, beautiful and comfortable. It's so comfortable, in fact, that we're now talking about doing a home birth, which is what we wanted right from the beginning. I know she is trying to make us feel comfortable here the best way she knows how.

That, and she and my sister and my friend threw us a beautiful baby shower, making us feel very loved.

Under all the 'changing' circumstances, we are sensitive right now and needing a little extra TLC...

Big changes take time, is what I started out by saying... and even though moving 'back' to your own country, your childhood city, your childhood home may not seem, in theory, much of a new experience, I think it's been a bigger adjustment simply because of that fact.

At least in Brazil, I knew everything was new and different and I felt out of place because I was different. There's a certain sense of forgiveness and patience and willingness to learn in that situation, from both parties.
 Here everything feels new and different but it's the exact same as it was before I left. I feel this strange expectation to 'understand' how things have always been but when I don't, there's an equally strange feeling of being excluded, only this time I'm not a foreigner.

Big changes take time. I might argue that I'm currently experiencing one of my biggest changes of my young life. But if Brazil took 2 years to adjust to.... what does that mean for Canada??