Visiting home

When you live abroad home is never far from your mind. Our expat lives must offer us something special otherwise we wouldn’t be here but however great and glamorous our time in these strange lands are they can never replace that what we left behind.

Family.

Friends who really know you.

Places that stir feelings.

Pubs where everybody still knows your name.

The longer you stay away the more rose tinted the glasses become, when you actually go home… what is it really like?

Where is home?

For me home is three places. I am from England and my long distance family is ever present in my thoughts. I spent six years in Cape Town and my memories are a kaleidoscope of beloved faces and places too. I now live in Kenya and am putting down roots and embracing friendships.

Surely home is ones mother country? I went back to the UK at Christmas after two years and my family welcomed me with open arms. With them it felt as though I had never left. Relationships picked up without the need for backstory or filling in, it was indisputably fabulous. In reality though my family and close friendships were the only thing that felt familiar, I was a stranger in my own country.

When the familiar is unfamiliar

A lot of it was basic things. Money: I converted pounds back to rand and had to constantly double-check the coins and notes I handed over. I repeatedly went to hand cashiers my bank car to be greeted with a horrified stare ‘put it in the machine yourself’

We were tourists in the supermarkets. Tesco’s was a wonderland of cheap cheese and fantastical new chocolates. I think I spent more time in supermarkets than anywhere else, mostly just gazing in awe at the selection.

I’d forgotten how to take public transport… do you have to press the buttons on the train when it pulls in? Which side of the escalators do you stand? Where does the Bakerloo line go again?

I was ill equipped. My family possessed no warm winter clothes. I spent the entire trip wearing 3-quarter length trousers with gumboots. My children shivered in borrowed coats. We didn’t have car seats (and hadn’t realized that almost 7 year olds still needed them).

In almost every aspect I felt like a fish out of water. I constantly felt compelled to apologize. ‘Sorry we don’t live here’ I stuttered as I cocked up some other societal norm that had passed me by or been forgotten.

Friends. Old friends.

Then there were my friends. I left with 20 years worth of friends. My husband and I had a big leaving party and a million promises to keep in touch. 6 years later I met up with only about 8 people outside of my family. Those relationships so infinitely precious at one point, have been reverted to Facebook likes. Our lives so utterly different we don’t know how to begin the conversation. Of course, this isn’t true of everyone. If going away tells you anything it makes you realise who your real friends are. As with family true friends don’t need constant contact to maintain the love. True friends can pick up where you left off without pause of awkwardness. My New Years Eve was spent with friends I hadn’t seen for a year and it took all of 5 minutes before we settled into the usual banter. When I got back on the plane though, the memory of those people we didn’t see haunted me. The question unasked, ‘if we returned home for good would those friendships be rekindled or are they gone for good?’

The truth about going home

The truth about going home is that reality never conforms to memory. Those days can never be recaptured. People aren’t waiting feverishly for you to come back. It’s easier to admit that as an expat you may never feel 100% at home in your new country but it comes as a shock that you don’t feel at home in your own country either. We stand a foot each side of the equator trying to find comfort in the familiar when the familiar is a nebulous concept now…

The trick, I suppose, is to revel in our unusual lives, to embrace the differences and the challenges. To concentrate on the people that matter and visit them wherever they may live. The expat life is an uneasy path, one that swerves comforting familiarity. Your ability to adapt is what makes or breaks an expat posting.

The truth is in the old adage ‘home is where your heart is’. For me home is my family and those friends that I still have close and easy relationships with. For me home is Cape Town as much as it is England. Once we leave here home will probably be Kenya too. I accept that things have changed. That people and places move on and that home is my husband and kids. Everything else, even a visit to good old Blighty, is an adventure, a holiday, a step into the unexpected. This is what keeps me strong. This is what keeps me free.

Never look back.

Onwards and Upwards