Articles and Stories

August 27, 2014

It was in me just like in my mother, the travel bug, that longing to get to know a new place, its culture and social norms, what insiders do and don’t do, to find the finest of what my latest place of residence had to offer. To get to know its people, its cuisine, its history and what it carried over into the present. And, not having a trust fund to live off, having to find employment in a foreign job market. As the language of the new places was never foreign to me, things were a lot easier than if I had to learn a new one from scratch.

When you go back home to visit, people see you like the person you were when you left, just a little older, with the addition of a child or two, a husband, and they might recognize by your clothing or language that something from your new surroundings has rubbed off on you. In your mind you think that this is truly home, and while there you redo all the things you loved doing in the past, reinforcing that great feeling of comfort and happiness.

It is reassuring to have that place to always go back to and to find the big piece of your heart left there, time after time. And at every visit you think that one day you might be back for good, though with less and less of a certainty as time goes by.

Then life happens, and you cannot move back, not even close, circumstances make you stay where you are, far away. Before you know it, you lived away from home longer than you ever lived at home, you start thinking in a different language than your native one, your almost adult children and husband truly represent the culture that you now live in, and you are proud of them as you feel that they add to it. Your youngest son could even run for president of your latest home country.

So you start feeling like a multinational citizen, you are not sure what your roots are, but you would never give up the road you have traveled. Your spirit evolved, there is no way to quite describe how it feels to leave everything you know behind and start anew. It takes a few years and it is a learning experience like no other. Nothing in the educational system can quite prepare you for it.

Once you have been through it, you long to find others who speak the language you have learned in the process, not English, Spanish, German or Korean, but one in which people understand what it feels to adapt, change, grow by assimilating from a new culture, then one day go home and start feeling like a foreigner in your own hometown.

To part means to die a little,
To die for what you love.
It is to leave a piece of your heart,
Any time, any place, any part.
(Edmond Haraucourt, translated from French)