Our backstory: love in Vietnam, Vermont, London and beyond
Summer 2010 - Vietnam
My husband and I met at a reggae bar in Hanoi. Well, first we bumped into each other at Mao’s, a communist-themed bar completely covered in red. He said something snarky and I was charmed, of course. When I saw him later at Roots, the reggae bar, I thought, “Great, he’s an expat like me! We can be friends!” I recognized him by the Batman-looking tribal tattoo on his bicep. (I found out later that he got the tattoo when he was 15 by an artist with questionable ethics. Don’t get tattoos when you’re 15.)
It turns out he wasn’t an expat like me. I was living in Hanoi teaching English, while he was on a month-long backpacking trip with his brother. But it didn’t matter. We hit it off and hung out all night, rolling and smoking unfiltered cigarettes that gave me a headache. I drove him to my apartment on the back of my motorbike and his trilby flew off like we were in a rom-com. Except that I’d never had a passenger on my bike so it was a wobbly, terrifying ride home.
We spent a week together and decided that was it.
Fall 2010 - Vermont
I was planning to start an MFA program in Vermont in the fall, so he went back to London and quit his job and apartment and booked a one-way ticket to the States. We met up at O’Hare in Chicago and drove to Vermont together. He didn’t have his license yet, so I had to drive the whole way, but the tradeoff was that I got to explain the entire Harry Potter series chapter by chapter to my now-boyfriend who had never even read them! Gasp!
Against our better judgement, we took the long (scenic?) route through Canada, meaning we crept along a two-lane highway behind endless semis. Driving in the pitch black at night was terrifying. It was like we were on another planet. A creepy, empty planet called Canada. And when we got to Vermont it wasn’t much better.
We spent two years together in the middle of nowhere, and at the end of it we got married.
Winter 2013 - London
After a low-key wedding at the beach - just us, the officiant and my brother in board shorts (he forgot his suit) - we spent six months backpacking through South America. When we finally flew back to London, we were grimy, broke and hungry to settle down.
Fast-forward two years, and we were no longer grimy, a little less broke and still trying to figure out the whole settling down thing. London may be the coolest city in the world, but it’s fiercely competitive and unwieldy if you’re trying to start a graphic design career as an outsider-nobody with few connections and resources (more about London later).
We decided we were ready to buy a house and start a family - and we could do that better in the States. We could actually afford a house there, my family was on hand, and we were ready (again) to try to settle down.
Summer 2015 - Midwest
We had a relatively soft landing. After just a couple of months in the States we both found jobs in our fields, we had an offer accepted on a cute little house, and we were making friends and settling in.
Then, the gods laughed at our perfect plans and threw them back in our faces. First, US and UK politics imploded (more about that later). Then, we struggled to conceive (more about our IVF journey later). Later, the pandemic upended everything.
In 2019, our daughter was born, and we were simultaneously smitten and overwhelmed. We moved to a bigger house while managing to keep our first home and convert it into an investment property - a lifelong goal achieved, woot!
In 2022, our second daughter was born and our family was complete. During all this, the pandemic was making us re-evaluate our lives. We were already thinking about moving after we were done growing our family, and after three years of quarantining and social distancing and masking and testing - we were ready for a fresh start and a new adventure.