Going Home - Wherever Home Is.

Am I still an expat or is that just what I’ve been calling myself?

Honestly, I’m not entirely sure the label fits. The notion crept up on me slowly, quietly, and without any grand plan. One day I just looked around and realised - oh. I live here now. But does that still make me an expat? Or something else entirely?

Because here’s the thing: “Expat” is a label that sounds tidy but refuses to behave. It’s not Prada - too elevated. It’s not Marks & Spencer - too reliably middle-ground. It’s certainly not Primark - nothing throwaway about it. It’s something altogether more slippery.

As the writer Taiye Selasi once put it: “Don’t ask where I’m from, ask where I’m local.” That resonated with me in a way I hadn’t expected, because the expat experience, whatever we decide to call it, is fundamentally about negotiating that question.

It’s not émigré. Not immigrant. Not refugee. It’s a category that sits slightly outside all the others, and the nuances are genuinely hard to articulate. What I can tell you is this: the feeling of being an outsider looking in is completely real. I’ve felt it more times than I can count - that strange, hovering sensation, like pressing your nose against a misted window, gazing into somewhere warm and familiar that you’re not quite sure you belong in. Is that then the feeling of being an expat?

For a long time, I told myself it was temporary. A brief ailment. Easily cured by a flight home to Devon for a long English summer that reminded me who I was. I genuinely believed that going back for good meant returning to a considered Utopia and finally, gratefully, shedding the expat label forever.

Hmm. It’s not quite that simple.

I’ve grown to accept that being an expat is not something that you shed like a too warm overcoat on a hot day.

I also now realise that ”going home” after a life of expatdom isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m home, but not ‘birth roots’ home, thoroughly enjoying the wide open spaces of Western Australia.

Incredibly, after a life on the move internationally, we’ve unpacked for the last time, and I love everything about it from being able to wake each up day and know that we are living in safety, free from political instability or the threat of bombs. It’s wonderful to speak the same language as everyone else and to enjoy the conveniences of a modern, egalitarian, society. Plus it’s remote, and oh so beautiful.

But although I’m settled, and now a citizen, I still feel like an expat. A blow-in if you ask my Aussie mates.

On the bright side expatdom in WA is different to some of the other places we’ve lived; we have a dog that’s unlikely to contract rabies, we can safely drink the water and we’re unlikely to get Delhi belly or any other nasty food or water born diseases. That thump on the roof in the dead of night? Burglar wielding a panga? Nah, just a possum leaping across from a nearby tree branch.

Leaving the Philippines in April 2000, bound for expat retirement in England after a life living and working abroad, should have felt fulfilling and comforting. This was the last time we were going to move. I was 41 years old. We had moved internationally 7 times, now we were going home to our roots. Yes, we were going to settle down - long past the prescribed age for settling down but not yet senile. It was time to stay put, buy a house and be near our kith and kin.

Yet I was filled with unease. And after several months I knew I didn’t fit in to England anymore.

I thought I was returning to an England I knew, my country of birth, and a people with whom I had much in common. There was a culture of which I should be proud, and a social system which I would understand. I was returning to the land of roses and cream teas, where my friends would be keen to hear tales of my life abroad and a little bit interested to glimpse some of the snapshots. A place where people would be happy to include me in their friendship groups because of my diverse history, where I would be welcomed to dinner with offers of ‘spag bol’ and a couple of beers.

In fact I was sure that in England I would immediately relate to people, and feel at ease.

Not a bit of it. I didn’t fit in anymore, and the people I made friends with had long settled roots in England. They were looking after homes and families, and connecting to wider, geographically more settled communities. They didn’t really want someone new around, someone with a whole different set of values and expectations, to unsettle things.

My tales and photos of Eastern adventure were greeted by dazed looks. I could tell that my new friends looked at me with some pity wondering why the hell we’s been living in such uncomfortable foreign outposts - though they were already distracted and thinking about their next day’s complex home and work juggling.

Gee, on the face of it I was so full of my own importance, and yet on the other hand, I just wanted to share my life as I knew it.

After a year in Devon in our own house for the first time as a family, my sense of belonging should have been rooted and complete. But it wasn’t, and it was clear that something in me was disconnected; something big was missing.

I found out what it was whilst visiting Dave in Taiwan, who was working on what he said would be his final international project.

The trip to visit him was both exciting and rewarding in the strangest of ways. Not merely because it was great to see him as we’d been apart for a few months, but also because after only a short time in Taiwan I found that I was ‘home’ again.

This overwhelming emotion took place at the International Women’s Group’s monthly fundraising luncheon on a hot spring day.

At the Taiwan luncheon that day, I met women who didn’t open their eyes wide in horror when I told them our children had been to 5 schools before the age of 12; who didn’t think it was strange to live in a different country every few years; who listened eagerly for tales of the countries we’d lived in and who had common stories of trials, tribulations and joys of living away from extended family, and bringing up children abroad. They could relate, and it felt great.

I spoke of Third Culture Kids and instead of asking if it was a new pop group, people nodded in agreement and discussed the merits of international acceptance, and the challenges of children without roots. They knew where Mugling was in connection to Kathmandu, for instance, and commiserated about breastfeeding a baby, while being three hours from the nearest doctor.

I didn’t have any tales about my extended family or living in the same place for 3 generations, or living amongst friends I’d been to school with since I was 5. I had no stories like that to share and neither did they.

I also met some women whom I’d known briefly at other times in other places overseas. We spoke about our lives lived away from our birth countries. I listened avidly to other people’s successes, achievements and worries. I rabbited on to women who made me feel as if I’d known them all my life.

Back ‘home’ in England I was a new face with a diverse history and different experiences which didn’t tally with those of my friends. Being the new old girl I was an enigma, and not a particularly welcome one - possibly, I suppose because I was someone who might just up sticks and jet off again. And like my teenage son kept on telling me at the time, “You’ve got to be the same as everyone else Mum. Try not to stand out!”

In Australia as an expat, emigre, or from anywhere other than here, wherever here might be, you may be known as a ‘blow-in,’ and on many occasions I’ve been referred to as a ‘Pom,’ meant in jest (as I’ve always taken it) yet underneath I know it’s a slightly disparaging label.

And yet I’m not a true Pom anymore? So what am I?

Am I a good mate? This egalitarian country is kind and accepting as long as you’re a ‘good mate’ and willing to ‘have-a-go’ and get involved. Then you’re likely to be welcomed into the fold with open arms and community sausage sizzles.

But to really belong in a country I think you need common values, shared beliefs, and sometimes a memory which goes back three generations in the same region. All this, I have lost in the days of our traveling.

After 16 years in Australia, the longest we’ve lived anywhere in our lives, I’ve been lucky to make good friends who don’t think I’m too weird, or too aloof, or not a good enough mate, and I’ve very much enjoyed learning how to fit in with Aussie culture; the beach life, the barbies, the sausage sizzles, and outdoor living. I’ve loved learning that being a good mate is not dependent on the size of your house, your job or your income. It’s been fun learning Aussie slang, drinking beer straight out of the bottle, laughing like a drain, and considering Bali to be our own backyard (from Western Australia it’s our nearest overseas destination.)

I’ve tried to localise, and can talk about the weather from severe heatwaves, the threat of bush fires, and how bad the flies or mosquitoes are this year, even vocalizing doubts as to whether there will be enough rain for the Wheatbelt farmers. I’ve learnt not to be a tall poppy. Aussies dislike them more than anything. And I’ve got used to being called a “Pom.”

However, I don’t have the deeply connected roots or friendship groups that are so important for most of my friends, nor can I join in the conversations they’ve shared time and time again over many years.

Yes, I have been disconnected by geography, and in some way spoiled I suppose. Because there is, or perhaps there was I believe, a common throng of women who travel the world with their spouses, offering support and encouragement, bringing up children, helping their adopted communities, finding their own way through the newness of each location, and coming out of the melting pot with values in common and stories about territories with similar veins.

It’s a tribe of women I thought I could leave behind.

But now I know, it’s the tribe of women to which I belong.

So overall I suppose I’m still an expat, yet without my tribe, at home in a beautiful country where I now belong.

What do you think? Please add your own insights about what ‘home’ means to you in the comments :)

Until next time,

Jo x