travel | Dualchas

I am on a UK Catholic dating site. I want to marry a Catholic Scotsman. Finding a single, age appropriate, Catholic Scotsman to whom I am attracted, is like locating a unicorn, which ironically is Scotland’s national animal. I would like him to be fit and have his own teeth and some hair. I’m not asking for the moon, but I may as well be.

The men who contact me are usually morbidly obese, and not educated. They feel they are ‘slender’, ‘athletic’, ‘handsome’ and ‘educated’ though they can only manage to play golf as a form of exercise, and they went to secondary school for perhaps five minutes. You have to admire the confidence of men. I feel offended that they think that they have a chance with me. Many are not even divorced yet, which is alarming since the Catholic Church does not recognize divorce and once a Catholic is divorced they must still pursue an annulment. That all takes considerable time, time I just don’t have. I’m not waiting around for some guy to get his house in order. His house should be in order before he goes looking for a partner.

I stopped putting a particular picture on dating sites. It is a flattering portrait of myself that was professionally taken in 2010. It is also airbrushed. I had my makeup professionally done that day, and I am wearing false eyelashes and hair extensions. When the photographer sent me the proofs, all I saw were the lines in my face. I was shocked and devastated by those lines. When I looked in the mirror, I still saw a relatively young woman. I saw few lines in my face, but the camera is a truth-sayer. I still don’t see many lines in my face, and I can only imagine how many more wrinkles there are now – fourteen years later – that others must see, but I still refuse to focus on.

I asked the photographer to take some of the lines out. The photographer, who seemed to fancy me during the shoot, said he thought that I was beautiful as I was, but I couldn’t see myself or that picture of me through his eyes. I only saw the lines around my own eyes when I looked at that picture. He did take out the lines around my eyes. In that photograph, I am wearing a red dress that I bought for five pounds at a Charity shop in Clapham Junction when I lived in London, England in 2009. I had to get the dress taken in quite a lot because I was super skinny then. When people admire that photograph of me, they are looking into the airbrushed face of a neurotic, starving woman with an active eating disorder that is ravaging her soul. I used the picture in different online dating sites over the years. When I met a man in person, I saw the disappointment in his eyes. I wasn’t her. I wasn’t the lady in red.

A week or so ago, I put that picture up on the dating site alongside the pictures of myself, which had been taken in the last year, already on there. You can tell Red Dress is an old picture just by looking at the quality of the photograph. I added it because some of the men on the site have posted pictures of themselves from high school so you can see they used to be cute and once-upon-a-time had hair and a waistline. After Red Dress made her debut on that Catholic dating site, I received all sorts of likes and ‘hellos’. It occurred to me that they only reached out to me once the starving girl in the red dress made an appearance in my photo gallery. That is pretty pathetic for a Catholic dating site.

They comment on how beautiful I am. These men who have reached out are no oil paintings. For them to think that they deserve Red Dress is laughable. More than that, I ask you, what age does a woman need to reach before she is no longer valued solely for her looks and her thin body? It’s offensive but at age 59, I am still just a face and a body when it comes to men. I am tired of being valued for my looks. I was beautiful once. When I was lovely, I never knew that I was. I wasted my youth and beauty trying to be perfect rather than embracing and enjoying my life, youth and beauty. I am educated and I have a relationship with God. On a Catholic dating site, especially amongst people in their 50s and 60s, that should be the priority, but it isn’t. It’s sad…for them. They think they seek a Proverbs’ bride, but they are really looking for Jezebel in a red dress. I hope they find what they seek and then heaven help them when they do.

Dualchas is the Gaelic that refers to one’s belonging to a landscape. Scotland is the land of my birth and the landscape for which I have always longed.

When you’re Scottish, you can never fully be anything else. Yet, when you are taken out of Scotland as a child, you can never be fully Scots either. You are forevermore without a country, and when you are in one of those countries in the future, you inevitably feel homesick for the other place. You are destined to be an outsider in both places. You are forever without a home.

I was born in Scotland in 1965. When we immigrated to Canada in 1966, I was sixteen months old. My Uncle Peter said I was dressed all in pink for the farewell to family at Prestwick Airport on April 25th, 1966. “You were not a happy bunny,” Uncle Peter said. “You cried and screamed and kicked in your mother’s arms. You did not want to go.”

I grew up a North American. A blonde, blue-eyed girl who liked to tan, swim like a fish, wear cut-offs and run barefoot through the hot Canadian summer. I longed to look like Farrah Fawcett, I cheered passionately for the Montréal Canadiens and loved David Cassidy, Bobby Sherman and Lee Majors. We went home to Scotland for one summer and two Christmases. Family in Scotland also came to Canada for summer holidays.

I went to teacher’s college in Glasgow in 1990. I was 25 and newly married to a Canadian. He remained in Canada teaching while I earned my teaching credential in Scotland though I asked him to come with me for the year to have an adventure as a young married couple. He wouldn’t. I often wished I was single then, free to meet a Scotsman, and free to remain in Scotland upon graduation to make a life in the country of my birth; however, I wasn’t. I had a commitment to return to in Canada so begrudgingly back I went. I returned to my husband and taught in Canada for the next 35 years.

Through a divorce, and many career transitions, I continued to long for Scotland and that Scotsman I dreamed of whispering sweet everything into my ear in his rugged brogue. I created vision boards, a dream box and prayed to God daily to lead me home to Scotland and to the Catholic Scotsman He had chosen as my husband.

I had been working as a principal in Canada since 2019. Still, returning to Scotland remained in my heart. Last summer, I interviewed for positions in Scotland from Canada. I rose at 4 AM to speak to different personnel in Scottish schools at 3 PM their time. I was offered work as a supply teacher in two different Scottish districts for August 2023. They advised me to start there and eventually I would find a full-time position in a school.

I was staying in Vancouver with a friend and her husband over the 2023 summer, interviewing for various positions in Canada as well as Scotland. I was offered a position as a supply teacher in Vancouver, BC. I interviewed for a principal’s position in Alberta. It was a Catholic School named for the patron saint of Scotland. I was offered the job. I decided it was a sign from God. It was a wink from heaven telling me that He had heard my prayers for Scotland. Scotland would happen but not yet. I did want to work as a Catholic school principal, just not in rural Alberta.

During the summer, as I prayed for direction, many little signs came to point me in the direction of Scotland. On one occasion, I went to Mass at a Catholic Church in Vancouver. They had a bazaar that day. I didn’t want anything but decided to poke about. I saw an old book of Psalms that fit in the palm of my hand and bought it for 50 cents. When I got back to my friend’s place, I saw that little book was published in Scotland.

As the summer drew to a close, I asked God for a specific sign. I asked Him if I was meant to go to Scotland to let me come across someone that day with a Scottish accent. I was teaching summer school in downtown in Vancouver. I took the Skye Train into the city and back home each day. After school that afternoon, two men sat next to me on the Skye Train and proceeded to speak to one another in thick Scottish accents. I told my friend that night and she dismissed it as a coincidence. I didn’t agree with her. The next day, the two Scotsmen were on the same train carriage with me again. That wasn’t a coincidence; it was a God-incidence.

The safer choice, in my opinion, was to take the principal’s position in Alberta and put off Scotland yet again. I was sick to my stomach at the thought of taking the position in Alberta. That is another sign from God. How you feel about a decision is God’s direction. When I left Canada’s north that summer, June 2023, I swore I would never go back. Now I was returning to the north of Canada, to winters of -50 degree Celsius temperatures and to another small farming community. There were also no available houses in the rural Alberta town. I had to rent a basement suite for me and my small dog, Oona. I had lived my life in the basement of my parents’ house as a child and youth, and swore I’d never live in a basement again. I was desolate going there.

The day before I left British Columbia to drive to Alberta to prepare to begin the principal’s position, my friend told me that Rod Stewart was playing in Vancouver’s Roger’s Centre.

“Is that another sign?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

It was another sign for me to go to Scotland. Still, I ignored it and forced myself to go to Edmonton where I would stay the night before continuing further north to the small Alberta town where I was to work in a few weeks’ time. The night I was in Edmonton, Rod Stewart was playing in the stadium across the road from my Edmonton hotel. I bought a ticket for the show, dug out my Scotland t-shirt and went to see my sexy countryman perform. God was telling me to go home. I still didn’t.

The reason I didn’t was a simple one: money. I didn’t feel that I could afford to go to Scotland. Any decision that I have ever made based on money has always turned out to be the wrong one. I never seem to learn that lesson. Once I got to Alberta, it cost me $3500 to certify my car, and over $3000 to buy a bed and other necessities. I also treated my staff and students with my customary generosity as their school leader. Going to Alberta didn’t save me any money. I was also placed at the bottom of the Alberta teachers’ salary grid while Alberta TQS took six months to properly place me and pay me accordingly. That process wasn’t sorted until after I left Alberta on January 30th, 2024.

These too are signposts as God directs steps. There were those many obstacles establishing myself in Alberta. I was very unhappy living in the basement suite. The woman that I rented from had two dogs that barked constantly when she wasn’t home. When I complained about the non-stop barking, she told me to leave. By then I had a job offer in Scotland to teach English. I felt losing my living situation in a town with no other living options was another signpost. I needed to seize the opportunity and go. I felt dreadful leaving my school, my staff and the students, but I was very unhappy in Alberta and I needed to give myself this chance of living my dream and moving back home to Scotland and meeting my Scots’ Catholic husband. Time was ticking on. I wasn’t getting any younger or prettier working in northern Alberta.

On January 31st, 2024, on my 59th birthday, after leaving my job as a Catholic principal in Alberta, Canada, I gave away all that I owned, sold my car, got on a plane in Calgary, Alberta and flew to London, Heathrow with my dog. We stayed the night in London before taking the Caledonian Sleeper overnight train to Scotland and arrived in Inverness on February 2nd, 2024. We were home.