I am a woman who crossed borders, fell in love, built a family, keeps looking for the place that finally feels like ours, creates things out of love, and is trying to make sense of all of it while raising a little boy.
IsaWhere it started, and where we are now.
Cork gave us everything we hoped for, and it was enough for a while, till it wasn't. It's where I met Ivan, where Ian was born, and where he took his very first step, straight toward me, while I happened to be filming. English stopped being just a language here. It became the language of our family.
Požega is really about family, his baca and dida especially. He doesn't speak Croatian well yet, though he understands the basics. They don't speak any English at all. Somehow, that hasn't stopped them from finding their way to each other. They dance together, in the park, in the living room, wherever the afternoon takes them. They garden together, they plant together, all the ordinary things a kid is supposed to do with his grandparents, even without a shared language.
The whole route, all at once. Tap any stop on the map to read its story below.
Belgium gave Ian his first snow. He didn't know yet that snow means cold, or traffic, or someone forgetting to clear the driveway. He just knew it was falling from the sky and he could touch it. For a few minutes, the whole world changed.
Luxembourg gave him his first soft play area, his first time surrounded by other kids his size. He wasn't quite a toddler yet, more what we jokingly called a wobbler, still catching his balance from that very first step in Ireland. He spent the whole time holding onto the walls and the soft padded shapes, just trying to stay on his feet, and he loved every second of it.
I'd been to Italy before Ian, so I thought I knew it. Going back with him, I discovered a different one. Strangers softened the second they saw him, in Trieste, in Como, in Lecco, it didn't matter who they were. Somewhere along those trips he had his first chestnuts and became completely obsessed. So did I.
Beautiful Slovenia, good food, gorgeous landscapes, it reminds us so much of Croatia, and yet it's completely its own. Koper is where we finally caught it on camera, Ian walking properly along the waterfront, holding onto Ivan's two fingers, while I threw myself sideways trying to get one good shot and ended up with about seven hundred videos instead.
We expected the landscapes. What surprised us was the people, warm, easy to talk to, endlessly patient with our English. Ian ran around parks, and somewhere in Sweden he decided, entirely on his own terms, that two naps was plenty.
Lugano looked like a postcard someone had made real. Ian just wanted the lake. That was the birthday Ivan had a song written for us, the story of our life together, and somehow everything around it matched, the mountains, the water, the three of us there together. It felt like the whole place had been waiting for that exact moment.
In Graz I told Ian I didn't speak German. He looked at me and said, very confidently, Mama, German. So I made up nonsense German for the rest of the trip, which he found hilarious. At dinner one night, in a restaurant full of Austrians, a waitress answered every single question the same way: of course. Somehow, it worked.
Santander is where we chose to call home, for five months. We fell in love with it, sitting right in that spot between the beach and the mountains, and we were happy there. Life had other plans, and we came to live in Croatia instead. But Santander stayed in our hearts. So did Spanish, in Ian's. He still asks me to speak it around the house, just because he loves the sound of it.
France was really just a stop, barely more than a day. And still, driving through it, watching the light change over all those greens, I remember thinking: wow.
Monaco wasn't really our place, too narrow, too many steps. Ian didn't care. He just wanted to hold his father's hand and touch the cold Mediterranean. That's the part I remember.
Brazil is where Ian gets to know the other half of his family, my mother, my brothers, the people who raised me. He was five months old on that first trip, straight from Irish winter into real heat, and suddenly surrounded by people who had been waiting to hold him. That was also the trip he discovered he could roll clear across a bed on his own, delighted with himself every single time.
We've loved pieces of all of them, Ireland, Sweden, Slovenia, Switzerland, Spain.
Maybe there was never going to be one flawless place waiting for us. Maybe we're just looking for our place, the one where Ivan and I stop needing to ask each other if we could build a life here.
Maybe it's not a place at all. Maybe it's just the three of us.