Returning home: a parent's london re-entry isn't quite like the brochure

For nearly a decade, Brooklyn pulsed through my veins. Now, back in south London with a toddler who speaks with a transatlantic twang and a near-unshakeable craving for apple and cinnamon Cheerios, the homecoming is proving…complicated. It’s less a triumphant return, more a slow-motion negotiation with a city subtly, yet profoundly, altered.

The uncanny valley of familiarity

I left London in 2016, intending a twelve-month reporting stint focused on a pivotal election year. The plan was to sequester a chapter for a future memoir, a snapshot of “My Brooklyn Year.” Instead, I built a life. A life involving silvery streaks appearing at my temples, a palate expanded to accommodate the glories of North American cuisine, and a peculiar involuntary noise whenever I stood up from my desk. Now, with a three-year-old in tow, I'm recalibrating. The ease of solo existence—a tiny flat above a cafe, a disposable income dedicated to personal indulgences—is a distant memory.

The Young V&A, formerly the Museum of Childhood, has become a more frequent haunt than my beloved Geffrye Museum (now, bafflingly, The Museum of the Home). Even the theatre has taken on a new dimension; My Neighbor Totoro was cut short by the toddler’s distress over the soot sprites, necessitating a strategic ice-cream intervention. My geographical bearings are shot. New buses, new cafes, a pervasive sense of being a stranger in a land I once knew intimately. The city, it seems, has been subtly rewired.

The curious case of british reticence

But the most striking shift isn't physical. It's the people. After a decade immersed in the boisterous, unapologetically gregarious culture of New York, returning to London feels like stepping into an uncanny valley. The ingrained British reticence—that quiet recoil from spontaneous connection—is a constant surprise. One particularly jarring incident involved a shushing in the Royal Academy of Arts when my son, brimming with childlike enthusiasm, pointed out the eyes on a Kerry James Marshall painting. And the sheer lack of offers to assist with the buggy on the Underground is a testament to this subtle distancing. It’s not that London has changed; it’s that I have.

I don’t mourn the loss of New York so much as I miss the New Yorkers. Their willingness to strike up a conversation with a stranger, to offer a compliment (or, admittedly, an insult) across the street, to celebrate a visible pregnancy—that casual, uninhibited humanity—is something I find acutely absent here. London’s green spaces are undeniably superior. But what I truly crave is the vibrant, lived-in feeling that permeates a Brooklyn sidewalk, a feeling born from the sheer density of humanity and their willingness to engage with it.

Thomas Wolfe was only partially wrong. You can go home again. But you bring a notebook—and a toddler—and a profound awareness of the subtle, and sometimes unsettling, shifts that occur when a decade passes.