Dear Chambana Newbies:
It’s turn-over time here in Chambana.
Yes, the undergraduates are returning in a trickle — soon to become a fire hose on Thursday, the official University of Illinois “Move-In Day,” and by the way, avoid going to Target this week AT ALL COSTS — but that’s not who I’m talking about (or to).
I’m talking about you — the family who came here from points east, west, north or south for your spouse’s or partner’s work or schooling.
If you lived here, you'd be home by now. Credit: nodomain1, Flickr
I’m here to tell you: It is going to be OK.
Some days, you’re going to hate it with all your heart. Some days you are going to wish with all your might that you stayed put where you were.
Some days, when the homesickness is really bad, and you’re missing your friends and family back home, you might even hide in the bathroom and cry, so your kids don’t see it.
If you’re like me, it might take you a long time to adjust, even though the move is an investment in the future of your family.
On Aug. 26, 2006, I washed up on the shores of Chambana in a Honda minivan packed with items I didn’t trust to the moving truck. I’d left my baby behind with her grandmother, so my husband and I could get our house in order before she arrived.
I stepped out of the car on a cloudy, hot afternoon, looked around, and had one singular thought.
Yuck.
Sometimes, I still have a not-so-fresh attitude, especially after returning from long stints on the East Coast. In fact, some people would call me a hater. But the thing is, I’m not, really. Not anymore. It’s just that sometimes, you’re going to get homesick — and sometimes you’re going to get annoyed by all those four-way stops.
I mean, seriously, Chambana. What is the deal with all the four-way stops?
Anyways, I have some advice for you.
Go with it for awhile. Let yourself feel it, and then turn that frown upside down, Cupcake. Look around you. See the good stuff. Find something you really, really like. Look for something — and it might just be one thing, at least for a few months — that makes you happy, even if it’s just a place to get frozen yogurt.
I like to call it my “List of Things I Don’t Hate Things That Don’t Suck Things I Love About Chambana,” and it goes like this:
- Sholem Pool and the Urbana Indoor Aquatic Center — hello, long naps!
- The fantastic park system here, including one with an outdoor! water! park! that! is! totally! free!
- The Apple Dumpling — beef and noodles over mashed potatoes. Need I say more?
- The Urbana Free Library and the Champaign Public Library — excellent for kids and grown-ups, too.
- The Urbana Market at the Square, a locavore’s dream come true.
- The UI Meat Salesroom; it has a weird name, but it’s seriously the best meat. Like, ever.
- My friends.
- My friends.
- Did I mention my friends? It might take you awhile, but you’ll find them. I promise.
- Chambanamoms.com, of course, which was created with you in mind, my fellow newbie.
I’ve walked in your shoes, and I have the blisters to prove it. It isn’t always easy, but once you break them in, they can be pretty damn comfy.
Fondly,
Amy
Amy L. Hatch is a co-founder of chambanamoms.com, and she likes to keep her tongue firmly tucked in her cheek. She writes “From There to Here,” a column about being a Northeastern transplant, wife, mother and writer on Tuesdays. You can reach her at amy@chambanamoms.com, if you want to take her out for a latte.
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“I’m talking about you — the family who came here from points east, west, north or south for your spouse’s or partner’s work or schooling.”
Don’t forget the families who come here because of the woman/mother/wife’s work or schooling. Some of us women come here because we ourselves have things to learn or jobs to do (not just following spouses or partners).
***
I hope newbies reading this post don’t get the wrong idea and think that there is something to hate about this town before they have a chance to experience it for themselves. Of course there are annoyances *anywhere* you live.
But this is a wonderful town. Especially for raising young families!
My advice: skip over the part where Amy says “Some days, you’re going to hate it with all your heart,” even if she goes on to say she has embraced C-U now. Why start your life here on a negative note.
Don’t waste time pining for a different life. Embrace this one.
Don’t think about the past or the future. Embrace the present.
Don’t think about some place else. Embrace the here.
If you come here with an open mind, you might just stay a while…and love it!
I’d love to write an article for you guys sometimes about why I turned down a sweet job next to the Columbia river with a gorgeous, scenic commute every day in Washington after I’d already committed to it and turned in my resignation at my C-U job because my spouse and I realized that this is an amazing, friendly, healthy community full of opportunities that we couldn’t imagine replicating anywhere else for ourselves or our son. It was actually the 2nd time I turned down a good job in another locale others often find more desirable because of how much I enjoy C-U. There are many perspectives on the C-U experience, and Amy’s is a valid one amongst many others. I’d like to hear a few from the perspective of moms who honestly love this place, there are a lot of us out here.
Jacqueline – we’d love to have an article from you any day of the week.
I think there are some things about living in C-U that you can’t thoroughly appreciate if you HAVEN’T lived and raised children somewhere else for a time:
1. the ease of getting everywhere. Driving 20 – 30 minutes (including sitting in traffic) for groceries used to feel completely normal to me. Now the 15 – 20 minutes it takes to get to the synagogue once a week feels like a real hardship.
2. the sense of interconnected social-school-work-kid networks: people you meet in one context turn up in another. When we first moved here five years ago I was convinced that this running-into-people would eventually come to feel incestuous and claustrophic–but instead I’ve really come to like the feeling of community.
3. the lack of materialism. Where we were before, it always felt like anytime I was chatting with other mommies on a playground, the conversation would eventually turn to STUFF: where to buy it, how to maintain it, who to find to service it, the relative merits of different brands, etc. Here it feels like people find a lot of other things to talk about.
Excellent blueprint for the new transplant. I recall not so very long ago (2006? My how time flies!) reading of your own trials and tribulations in charting this course, so I know what a heartfelt one it is. Bravo!
Thank you, Erin.
Doesn’t everyone hate where they live some of the time? Those of you don’t — I’ll have what you’re having:)
I’m having a glass that’s half full.
I’m with Erin and Hollee! I think this (like all Amy’s contributions to this site) is a brilliant, funny, well-written piece. It’s tongue-in-cheek. Those that can’t see that need to lighten-up!!
Amy, Chambana is lucky to have you! How refreshing that Chambanamoms.com is a website with ACTUAL CONTENT…a true local gem for us-moms!!
Amen. I couldn’t have said it better myself!
Hmm, I am surprised to hear that some feel the comments came across down on Amy’s article. As I said, the perspective is valid and its good to hear many voices, but yes, for some of us, we love this place as a place to live pretty much all the time. Those of us who chose to live here get to hear the dislikes of transplants who come to enjoy the resources of our town for their career/education a lot. It would be nice to hear from parents who love C-U and there are clearly many of us, just judging from the comments alone. C-U will never be some folks’ cup of tea just as big cities will never be mine. That’s fine. But think about your favorite place to live and then think of reading an article outlining how to make living in that place bearable after a while and maybe even fun now and again, as if that was hard. You wouldn’t necessarily feel angry or like you couldn’t see how someone might feel that way now and again, but I am pretty sure you’d like to share how great the place so near and dear to your heart. Its not a lack of sense of humor and throwing that cut at others instead of just sharing your perspective on the article or town does not seem necessary.
What’s great about the post is how it reflects the writer’s real and heartfelt experience, which may well speak to some recent arrivals. (And yeah, what IS up with all the four-way stops???)
What’s dismaying is that it assumes all new arrivals will be as repelled and homesick as she was in this new place.
One can have a sense of humor and still find that assumption off-putting (after all, it’s not presented ironically).
good enough…Amy’s bio at the bottom of this letter says that she “keeps her tongue firmly tucked in her cheek”…So, it is presented with some measure of sarcasm and irony.
I love Amy’s writing, her honesty, and her wit. Really, I do. But this piece is a little off. Sarcasm and irony speak for themselves. If they work, they don’t need a blanket waiver at the bottom of the screen to draw an audience into shared assumptions.
The letter isn’t addressed to “people who moved here unwillingly, feel profound attachments to other places, and are unhappy being here,” it’s addressed to “newbies” generally. Had I read this when I was a newby myself five years ago, it would not have given me the impression that “Chambanamoms.com” was an online community for me. My spouse and I jointly made the decision to move here to advance both our careers, I found the town much more livable and friendly than our previous location, and it put me closer to my family of origin. I had nothing really to feel homesick for, although any major move has its moments of discombobulation and dislocation.
Lines like
“some days you’re going to hate it with all your heart” and
“Look for something — and it might just be one thing, at least for a few months — that makes you happy” and
“List of [Things I Don’t Hate Things That Don’t Suck] Things I Love About Chambana”
are amusing about Amy’s reactions as a newcomer (certainly I’ve had many friends here who shared her “Yuck”), but they are a little too raw and specific to Amy’s circumstances to humorously evoke a universal experience of being new to CU.
I certainly don’t bleed orange-and-blue, and I’ll cheerfully defend anyone’s right to feel as alienated or at home here as they want. But one can recognize Amy’s humor AND still think that this piece misses the mark as a helpful intervention for all the newbies out there.
Good enough – This piece is Amy’s column, an opinion piece, her perspective. It’s not one of the site’s newsy, listy, informational pieces – and it is clearly marked as such.
I read her column as well as Laura’s because I enjoy looking at life through their eye view.
Amy cracks me up and the only true intervention that needs to happen in this town is just after Unofficial.
Momologist, you’re certainly right about Unofficial! But silly me–I took the “Open Letter” format and the link from the chambanamoms Facebook page as cues that this particular post was part of the overall chambanamoms.com project of community building. Guess not.
I read this piece with high hopes, because I am relatively new here and I thought it might tell me something useful. I’m an old pro at moving to new places and making friends. I grew up in a family that moved every five years, and I continued that pattern as an adult. I even moved to Alaska, where I knew no one. I’ve never in my life had trouble making friends anywhere.
Until here.
Maybe it’s because I’m an “older” mom. Maybe it’s because I don’t work at the University. Maybe it’s because I’m single? Maybe it’s because I don’t do yoga? I don’t know, but it’s not my imagination. In the days before Thanksgiving, I called Urbana High School and volunteered to do any job they needed to help with the free dinner they were serving to less fortunate people. No one even returned my call.
I have two beautiful, amazing, wonderful children who have made many friends here. They are happy, and that’s all that really matters to me. But as soon as my older child graduates from high school in May, I’m gone.
I am so sorry that you’ve had that experience here. What brought you to CU? I am also not affiliated with the University, which always seems to baffle people for some reason….(For the record, I’m a CU native.)
Just me, I had a really good friend here who had exactly your experience–she’d lived and made friends in all kinds of different contexts and places and situations. Until here. And, like you, she really tried! Church, volunteering, being friendly to strangers…She ended up moving away after about 7 years. I couldn’t ever figure out what made it so hard for her and so easy for me–I’m not a very extroverted person. All I could guess is that maybe this community can be hard on people in nontraditional families (which she is and I am not) who don’t have ready access to the social networks of a UIUC job. And she didn’t do yoga, either
I wish I had some sage advice, but it sounds like your life experience trumps anything I could tell you.
Bizarrely enough, one thing that started to turn things around for my friend was Facebook. It seemed like that allowed her to tap some of the intersecting connections between people she knew at church, her step-kids’ school, her partner’s job and helped to introduce her to a wider range of people in the community (including me).
It’s not your imagination Just Me. I’ve heard the same thing from several people. I don’t live in CU but I have the same issue in the small nearby town where I live. I introduced myself to a woman out walking with a son the same age as mine and she bluntly told me she had enough friends. Well alrighty then.
Here’s the problem. The person who wrote this has said over and over and over again how awful this place is. How boring and yucky it is. And now that she has decided to have a website devoted to local moms it seems like she needs to change her tune. I love that you are all about C U now that it benefits you It’s insulting to people who live here and work here and are happy here.
Write about something else besides longing to go back to your family compound out east. And enough with the open letters on the website. Cannot wait til you leave
Anonymous, you hit the nail squarely on the head.
amen to that
It is a simple reality that the population of small college towns like ours has a high turnover rate. I feel confident this post resonated with many who have spent time (even if just a moment) wondering how they got in this big cornfield. I know I certainly did.
If you’ve been reading the author long enough, you would see that she has changed her tune and deepened her connection to this place in a genuine way. I am dismayed that anyone would suggest that authenticity should not be central to community. Isn’t is the REAL people that make this place so great?
Anonymous – your most recent comment was over the line, and that is why it was taken down. Discourse is one thing; invoking personal tragedies is another. That won’t be tolerated.
one last point. there was nothing offensive and i wasn’t invoking anyone’s “personal tragedies.”
i think it’s funny you won’t post the comment but you will post your response to the comment. good luck with the website…where only one person gets to say what they want
Anonymous ~ Considering there are 25 other comments on this post you can hardly justify saying that there is only one voice here.
Publish your name and maybe we can take you seriously.
Right, cuz “momologist” is *your* real name. :eye roll:
See…this whole thing is something we ALL talk about all the time. The self-centered circle jerk of “local celebrity” is laughable. And that’s the nicest thing I can say.
Also, IP addresses don’t lie? Yah, there’s about 40 of us in this building with consecutive IP addresses so maybe you should get your facts straight. Bite me, indeed.
Yes because my name here links to a website where I am clearly identified.
Cyber bullying at it’s best and a reminder of why I surround myself with beautiful women and mothers who build each other up.
Wow. Um I’m just speechless on all these comments. Really?
You know, it would have eased my difficult transition if I had read something like this column upon arrival in C-U. (Of course if I had read the comments, I might have wondered what kinds of nasty was in the drinking water.)
Several years and two kids later, I’m still homesick for my old zip code, but, like Amy, I can see and appreciate what C-U has to offer me and my family. Newcomers, I hope you will, too – sooner than later, even.
Welcome.
I just e-mailed Amy and Laura (with my real name) to say
“that thread has taken an ugly turn, and I’m sorry if I added fuel to the fire now raging there. Obviously, I had some issues with the post–but there’s nothing in it that warrants those personal attacks.”
FWIW. Newbies, we really are nicer than this!
I think things took a nasty turn when editors at the site were tweeting about IP addresses and were trying to track people down.