Expat Living: Another Bee In My Bonnet
All of your wordly possessions are located in one of those crates.
While working at my first job, back in 1999 on a street called Free School Lane* in Cambridge, I had a boss who took a great interest in my background and where I had been growing up. A former history teacher, she was and continues to be the best boss ever for lending me the phrase, “So, ‘home’ is where you hang your hat.”
I’ve had many “homes” then, in over 35 different countries and across 4 continents. Realistically though, when I feel the pangs of homesickness, they are usually narrowed down to only 3 or 4 specific places, where I have actually lived for more extended periods of time: the small town where my family still lives in Italy; England (both Cambridge and London); Singapore, where I spent my teenage years; and occasionally, my mother’s house which, like me, moves in shape and distance across the globe like ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’.
Growing up, I hated being an expat kid. I had no idea how good I actually had it. By living as an expatriate, you inadvertently get to enjoy the best of what any country offers, without getting bogged down by the financial and political injustices of paying their taxes, voting in their elections, or having to get involved in any “longer term” associations. Most other people you tend to meet are also expatriates with a similar understanding that the duration of your friendship may be long or short, and will depend largely on your ability to keep on moving, traveling, and hanging your hat in pastures new.
Now that I am an adult, married, and living in one flat for longer than 2 years at a time (this is a first for me!), I find that wherever I am, I still think about where I will be next. It’s as though the foundations of my living situation will drop out from under me tomorrow and I will have to drive to LAX and decide on the spot, looking up at the flipping departure board, “Where to now?”.
I am unreasonably lucky to have two passports, which allow me to travel and live in lots and lots of nice places. Including Cuba, which might be a tad lonely since my husband is American. (Or a tad expensive, since Americans can actually visit Cuba, just not spend any money there. The point is, it may be more trouble than it’s worth.) And it doesn’t help that my husband has a touch of wanderlust about him as well, and is completely open to packing up and heading to France or England or Hong Kong for a while.
So the bee in my bonnet is this: Can someone who has spent her whole life moving around actually stay living in one place, and is this nagging feeling about living somewhere else just a reflection of my childhood? With the economy doing what it’s doing these days, it seems the US dollar may not be the wisest currency to be hanging on to. And yet, in the last three years I found myself in a comfortable place surrounded by family (new: I am a proud newlywed to a Californian native, and old: my parents live here now, as well as a brother, sister-in-law, and nephew). So I inadvertently hung my hat in Southern California and it’s grown some roots, but the bee inside it keeps buzzing all the same.
Maybe one of these days I’ll give up thinking that I should be moving somewhere else. One day I might understand that I’m already somewhere else, too. I guess the important thing is that I’m happy where I am, and that should the rug fly out from under me, there’s always LAX, my passports, and that flippin’ destination board.
*Incidentally, the school I worked for back in the day is in the very same building where Watson and Crick built their first model of DNA. For me, it was just an excellent view of The Eagle (one of my favorite pubs in Cambridge).
