I got a lovely comment yesterday calling me a "fellow expat". It took me a second, but with a slight sigh I realised I am not (any more). I feel like one, though.
I lived in Belgium until I was fifteen, when my whole family upped and left to Edinburgh, in Scotland. I finished my school there. After those two years, the rest of my family moved to Belgium, but I went to study in Cambridge, England for three years. After that, I stuck around for a year studying in Dundee, Scotland, until Babes was done studying and we both moved back to Belgium.
Of course I only lived there for six and a half years, but I do feel like an honorary Brit. It helps being married to one, and raising our children bilingually. We have the BBC as channels one and two on the TV. We import Irn Bru (only for Babes, but still). I make a mean chicken chowder.
Now I'm living in my native Flanders. It's good. The food is great, I "get" the people, we have a lot of governments to make fun of. I'm close to my family. In fact, it's not a bad place at all. But I can't quite come home. Once you leave, it's as if all the deep connections to a place are lost somehow, and you can still love it and know it but you can never be truly at home again. Anywhere, for that matter. Or that's what I believe just now anyway. I'm hoping this will change as I see my children growing up here.
The Flemish are lovely. They are funny and, once you get to know them, loyal and warm friends. However, sometimes I wouldn't mind if they could be a little more shallow or whatever you would call it and just SAY HELLO, even if you haven't known each other for fifteen years. If it's this hard for me to move back here and make new friends, I don't even want to think about how hard it must be for a real expat to settle here.
I have some friends who have never moved further than a few miles from their birthplace. They have friends they have known since nursery school. They do family stuff several times a week. They have more than ten places to drop their children if they need a night out. I envy them quite a bit.
Then again, I have friends all over the world, have travelled to weddings in many countries and I feel as at home in English as I do in Dutch. I have opened my mind to so many ideas and different ways of life that I can now question a lot of the ideas my fellow Flemish people take for granted. And then there's the internet of course, where a bit of an anglophilia never hurt anyone.
I don't think I would swap with them if I had the chance. Maybe I would, actually. Just think of all the free babysitters.
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Free babysitters would be SOOOO nice. We live three hours from our closest family. But I wouldn't change my life if I could, either. I do hope we up and move to europe one day...maybe not Wales - we visit there often enough - but somewhere across the pond would be nice.
ReplyDeleteThis is very thoughtfully written and eloquent. I think anywhere we live is always a trade-off. I do not have family or close friends nearby, which often makes me sad (and makes me long for free babysitting!) but at times I cherish the solitude and freedom this brings. Now, if I were rich enough to have TWO houses, THAT would be ideal, lol.
ReplyDeleteI loved being born and brought up in the same place. My mum still lives in the house I was born in. But I've come to see the advantages of moving around, with children - broader perspectives and all that.
ReplyDeleteI've lived in different places thanks to a military father and I loved every bit of every move and every bit of every destination.
ReplyDeleteAlmost 2 years ago, I moved away from my family and I look at it as another life experience. My husband has a few relatives in the area and like him, they'd never moved around, except the initial departure from their birth country.
I so get this. It has been the same here, where I've moved around so much in my life, I barely have a handful of friends who can tolerate my vagrancy.
ReplyDeleteI dont know that it's true that when you leave a place you lose the deep connections. I wonder if its more that you lose the superficial connections. The deep stuff is still there (thus the yearning, homesickness feeling) without the little ties and binds that stick us to everyday life (a job to go to, routines like which shop you buy your groceries in, the butcher you chat to on Saturday mornings etc)
ReplyDeleteAll of this stuff can just disappear so easily but its the miniscule little exchanges like that that make up the bulk of our attachments to places, so when you lose that you're left with the deeper stuff that will probably never be lost, but isn't enough, somehow, when you turn up on your own old doorstep ten years later, to really feel At Home.
This is part of that thing they talk about "Third Culture Kids" syndrome...when you move around too much when you're younger.
There's a quote I really like by...who? Can't remember. Something like: "The curse of the immigrant- the new country never becomes a real home, and home becomes foreign"