Where is home?

Home is a place to live: a place of retreat, rest, comfort, refuge. It can be the house or the town or the country in which we grew up or feel we belong. Some cultures include nomadic people whose homes are mobile, and home can simply refer to a mental or emotional place of peace.

Cervantes said ‘Wouldn’t it be better to stay peacefully at home, and not roam about the world seeking better bread than is made of wheat…?’ Yet for almost twenty five years, we have ignored his unimaginative advice and roamed like gypsies around the globe.  Nomad, gypsy, footloose, peripatetic, traveller, transient, drifter, wanderlust: all words relating to the migratory habits of the expatriate.

So where is home? Finding an answer is the perennial problem of any expatriate. I have been asked that question so many times, I should have an answer down pat, yet still I stare, glazed and witless, like a stunned mullet, or a rabbit in headlights. Of course I know where I was born and spent a large part of my childhood, but is that still what I call home?

Whenever you move houses or countries, home is probably what you feel you are leaving behind. And for the time you spend in no-man’s land you may find yourself gravitating back to the city of your birth, in need of assuring yourself that you have roots somewhere.

Resettlement varies depending on the new location, and your age. As you get older, your sense of adventure may not be flagging exactly, but your patience with all the palaver of setting up home again in a foreign country has inevitably taken a beating. For the first few months you will find yourself alternately up to your neck in unpacking and organizing the future, while looking ever backwards to old haunts, familiar faces, familiar tastes. You ring your mother, best friend or sister almost daily, and wonder if you will ever find new friends as good as the last batch.

The last boxes unpacked, you head anxiously out to join social clubs and PTAs, sports clubs or language classes. And suddenly you discover you have ten new names in your cell phone, and you can mostly march them to their faces. You are settling in and finding your feet. You know where to find the local butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker. Your parents are planning their first visit, and you are starting to feel confident that all will be well.

The final lynch pin is the first trip back to base.  Three or four weeks is always fun, but never a holiday, as you work through the long list of friends and family you absolutely must see at least once. Lunches and dinners are all accounted for, and in the final days you find yourselves squeezing in breakfasts or afternoon teas until you are fit to burst.

And quite suddenly you feel it’s time to go home. And home is the place, you realize, where you felt new and nervous only a few weeks before. Yet now you want your own bed, your own kitchen, your kids and your partner all under the same roof. And the penny drops. Home is here, at your place, wherever your partner and your pillow is… for now!

* As published in the April issue of the ANZA magazine.