Setting up a Home Abroad
Are familiar items a domestic comfort when everything around you is alien?
Leaving home can be difficult. And when you move far, far away, culture shock can aggravate your homesickness, which strikes in surprisingly subtle and complex ways.
There are many kinds of homesickness, as many as there are kinds of home. But the feeling of home and the journey through homesickness need not be opposites. Perhaps the latter can complement the former: make us appreciate home more and shed light, however oblique, on what a home is, what it means to make a home, and to lose it.
Imagine my situation - though perhaps you don't have to, because it is not that extraordinary. Imagine you've moved far, far away. How far? Far enough so that your return visits and the reciprocal visits from family and friends aren't really visits as much as vacations. So to another state, another country, another continent altogether. For argument's sake, let's just insert 3,460.02 miles, which happens to be the distance between Antwerp, Belgium, and Boston, USA.
When I first arrived in Boston, eight years ago, I suffered terribly from homesickness. It was exacerbated by culture shock. The latter caught me by surprise, for I came from a Western society and surely America isn't that much different. But of course it is, in the little things, and it was exactly in those that the culture shock lay in hiding, sending through tiny, but deeply resonating tremors each time I touched them. I'm talking of truly silly things, like the gallons instead of the liters of soda, and the bathroom tissue being of a different size. In America everything truly is bigger, and soon my daily life was bent out of proportion. Don't laugh, but for a long time I couldn't even throw away the Belgian tube of toothpaste, long empty.
Also in the medium of daily language I felt unmoored. My formal English was fluent, but not having used it on a daily basis, I was ignorant of such small expressions as "You're welcome" or just "Sure". I was dumbstruck each time someone offered me a "How are you?"
Then, one day, I was over it. I had settled in, acquired friends, then a husband, a flat, a child, and now I feel I am, truly, at home. Is it true, then, that "home is where your stuff is"? And how strange, that I hadn't really, consciously "made myself at home": it had just... come to me, like a gift from my psyche, saying: "Gee, here, if you really need it so badly".
Now, when visitors from Belgium come, I greet them at the airport with a proud sense of ownership. Welcome to my part of town, let me show you around! But when I return home (to B, I waver. It's still there, the nostalgia, but for which home? The one you left so many years ago, or the one you just left behind? But that's a different kind of homesickness.
More articles on Homesickness in "Customs and Holidays":
You Can Never Go Home Again: On Not Fitting In Anymore
Why Did You Leave Home? Defending Your Decision to Leave
The Precariousness of Home: Did You Know That Having a Baby Changes Everything?
Related article on Suite101:
Getting through It: Culture Shock
