Moving to Germany with my kids didn’t feel like moving at first. It felt more like one of those strange summer holidays where nobody knows what day it is. The suitcases stay half unpacked. Children live almost entirely on pastries and sunshine, yet still somehow find endless reasons to argue.
Leaving Ireland had been heavy. There were tears at the airport, tired hugs, and that strange numbness that comes when life changes faster than your emotions can catch up. But then we landed in Germany and everything felt oddly temporary. It was warmer. Sunnier. We could sleep in. School wouldn’t start until mid-September, so the girls treated the whole thing like an adventure.
For the kids, it felt like a holiday. For me, it felt like holding my breath.
It Still Felt Like Summer Holidays
The strangest part was how normal everything felt at first.
Not normal in the sense that life was normal — it absolutely wasn’t — but rather normal in the way our summers in Germany had always been. The familiar roads. The bakeries. The heat. The church bells drifting through the windows in the morning. Meanwhile, the girls slipped straight back into their usual routines, which mostly involved arguing over chargers, blankets, and who had looked at who “in a weird way.”
For the first two nights, we stayed with my mum and stepdad while we tried to sort out the apartment. We needed another bed, furniture had to be rearranged, and somehow space had to be made for three more people in a home already full of memories and other people’s belongings.
At the same time, the apartment still carried traces of my grandparents, my aunt, and my uncle everywhere. There were drawers full of forgotten things, old dishes nobody had used in years, and furniture that had clearly survived several family disagreements and at least three different decorating eras.
Even the important errands didn’t fully break the holiday feeling. Of course, we did our first runs to the town hall and the school, armed with folders full of paperwork and the vague hope that my school German would somehow carry us through modern German bureaucracy.
Still, every stressful trip somehow ended the same way — sitting at an ice cream shop afterwards.
And because our boxes wouldn’t arrive for another two weeks, we lived mostly out of suitcases anyway. As a result, everything continued to feel temporary. Like we hadn’t really moved to Germany at all yet. We were simply staying for an unusually emotional summer holiday.
The House of Cards — Germany and the Bureaucracy
This was the point where the holiday feeling crash-landed.
I knew Germany was famous for paperwork. Everyone tells you that before you move. However, nobody really explains that it’s not just the amount of paperwork — it’s the order of the paperwork. One document depends on another document, which somehow cannot exist until a completely different appointment has happened first.
At one point, I genuinely felt like I had wandered into that Asterix and Obelix scene where they try to get a permit from a Roman office and slowly lose the will to live.
First, there was the town hall registration. Then the tax number, health insurance, the school paperwork. Then the bank account. Except, of course, some places wanted online forms, while others wanted physical copies. Some needed appointments. Others worked on a mysterious “just turn up and hope for the best” system.
Meanwhile, I was carrying around a folder thick enough to qualify as hand luggage.
And then came the choices. Back in Ireland, I never spent this much time thinking about health insurance or banks. Suddenly I was comparing providers, reading reviews, translating terms I didn’t fully understand, and wondering why opening a bank account felt like signing a small international treaty.
At the same time, life around the paperwork continued. The girls still argued. Someone was always hungry. There were still beds to organise and rooms to sort through.
So, piece by piece, form by form, our new life slowly started building itself — like a very fragile house of cards.
The Biggest Point of Confusion — Signing the Kids Up for School
Before we moved, I had tried to research the German school system through Google, ChatGPT, and my mum, who had gone to the local school to ask questions. The conclusion seemed simple enough. Faye was easy. She would start 2nd class in September. Ruby, however, came with a giant question mark attached.
She had finished 4th class in Ireland, and according to everything I read, the best option seemed to be repeating 4th in German primary school while learning the language properly.
Simple in theory.
Our first visit to the school failed because the secretary was off. Honestly, I wasn’t too bothered. In my head, the girls had finished school for the year. Germany, however, strongly disagreed.
When we finally met the secretary, the first thing she did was scold me for not bringing the girls sooner because “children are required to attend school in Germany.” Once I pointed out that we actually had come earlier and she hadn’t been there, things became noticeably friendlier.
Then came more forms, photocopies, and waiting.
The headmaster accepted Faye immediately but not Ruby. Instead, we were sent from school to school like a very stressful educational relay race. One conversation included being asked how Ruby was supposed to follow lessons without German and why I hadn’t already taught the girls the language. It took serious self-control not to turn that meeting into an international incident.
Eventually, the education office decided Ruby should attend a German integration class in a nearby Gymnasium.
Problem solved.
Until three days before school started, when the Gymnasium suddenly decided her Irish grades were good enough after all.
In true Mario Kart fashion, we went from completely outside the German school system to suddenly being launched straight into the fast lane.
5. Making the Flat Feel Like Home
Money was tight during those first weeks. I only had a small amount to stretch until my first paycheck arrived, so buying furniture was completely out of the question. Decorative bits and cosy ornaments didn’t even make the list.
Thankfully, we got incredibly lucky.
My uncle and aunt had replaced most things in their own flat, so the house still held plenty of furniture and basics. We even got a second double bed for free. Honestly, at that stage, any furniture that didn’t cost money instantly became my favourite piece in the house.
The flat itself just needed somebody to bring it back to life. Upstairs had a mould problem before we arrived, and although my uncle had cleaned the walls, they still needed fresh paint. Luckily, having a granddad who once owned a painting business finally came in useful.
So before we properly moved in, I marched down to the basement and dug out rollers, brushes, paint trays, and enough equipment to make me feel strangely professional.
Then Faye and I got to work.
We turned the music up, opened the windows, and painted walls while performing what we considered impressive dance routines. In reality, it mostly involved me nearly stepping into paint trays while Faye laughed at me. Meanwhile, Ruby fully embraced German culture within days by disappearing off to a local soccer camp.
Slowly, the place began to change.
I unpacked our paintings, lined our books onto shelves, and filled corners with the familiar things we had brought from Ireland. Somewhere between the fresh paint, inherited furniture, half-unpacked suitcases, and questionable dancing, the flat stopped feeling like somebody else’s home and slowly became ours.
The Unexpected Part — Guilt
During those first weeks, I stayed busy.
There was always something that needed doing. Paperwork. Painting. Rearranging furniture. Finding school supplies. Trying to make this huge life change still feel a little bit like summer holidays for the girls.
And for a while, that worked.
But eventually, the important and immediate things had all been handled, and school was still weeks away. Suddenly there was space to think. Space to sit still for five minutes without holding a paint roller or filling out a form.
That was when the guilt arrived.
Quietly. Unexpectedly. Like our black cat creeping into a room before suddenly digging its claws deep into your leg.
The girls started missing little things too. The house in Ireland. The estate. Familiar routines. Even the sunshine here, which had seemed magical at first, started wearing them down. Apparently children can, in fact, become tired of perfect weather. Something I still struggle to relate to.
Meanwhile, I avoided opening certain boxes.
I couldn’t take out the photo albums or unpack some of the ornaments because every single thing carried memories with it. Beautiful moments. Peaceful moments. Tiny snapshots of the life we had left behind.
A life that, in truth, had already started disappearing long before we moved.
But guilt doesn’t care about logic. It doesn’t play fair.
Instead, it whispers simple questions into your head late at night.
Are you selfish?
Was it really that bad?
Could you not have tried harder to save it?
And somehow those quiet little questions hurt far more than the chaos ever did.
Slowly Arriving
Then, slowly, life started settling into a rhythm.
School began, and with it came a whole new level of chaos. There were bus mix-ups, confusing timetables, and the occasional emotional wobble when the girls realised they couldn’t fully understand everything around them yet. Some afternoons felt very long.
Still, people were kind.
The teachers were welcoming, classmates included the girls quickly, and little by little they started finding their feet. Suddenly there were new friends, school stories at the dinner table, and invitations to things I still needed Google Translate to fully understand.
At the same time, we began building small routines of our own. We found a favourite ice cream place. A beautiful library. Little activities nearby that simply wouldn’t have been possible for us back in Ireland.
And somewhere amongst all of that, Germany slowly stopped feeling like a place we were temporarily staying in.
The flat filled with houseplants. The girls laughed more again. We spent long evenings together, and I started reconnecting with people I had known years ago. Familiar faces from another chapter of life suddenly became part of this new one.
Nothing changed overnight. It wasn’t some magical movie moment where everything suddenly became perfect.
But little by little, things felt lighter.
And perhaps that is what arriving somewhere really means. Not the moment the plane lands, or the paperwork gets stamped, or the boxes finally arrive. Maybe arriving happens much more quietly than that.
Maybe it begins the first time laughter sounds natural again.
