Baby Shock and Homesickness
Precarious familiarity: big changes and the stranger in your home
If you live far away from home and family, "being at home" can be a precarious thing, as I experienced when we brought our firstborn home.
When you go and settle in another country, you may at first experience homesickness and culture shock. Thankfully, it is straightforward, with clear-cut spatial dimensions, an abrupt beginning in time and a more gradual yet undeniable ending.
Yes, it passes. But you may never get rid of its backwater cousin: the suspicion that you are, still, a stranger. No matter how much you make yourself "at home," you will never secure the kind of native familiarity that you had in the country where you grew up and where your family is.
There are always immigration papers to remind me that I am an "alien," but in daily life this is negligible. I am at home: all grown-up, making my own money, owning my own place and a car, married, even a parent! But it was exactly the parent-thing that made me realize how precarious my "new home" is.
When I was in the hospital, holding my baby, I couldn't wait to go home. But the moment I came in the door, I just knew: it was gone. I barely recognized the place. Not that anyone had come in and changed anything. I had changed, so profoundly that the rooms, the furniture, the books and pictures, even my husband and my own reflection in the mirror had become unfamiliar to me.
For weeks I suffered from this intense alienation, a homesickness caused by a culture shock of sorts: I had left behind a carefree life for a shocking responsibility. The only constant was the utterly new and inexperienced thing: the baby-mother unit. For weeks I struggled to regain my footing. In my journal I wrote: "I wish things were normal again." I didn't mean normal like they used to be - I knew that was gone forever - but a new normal. And a new home, for home is where everything is, simply, normal.
Would this have happened had I been "home", I mean: in Belgium? If I had lived around the corner from my family, my mother in particular? If she could have popped in once in a while? If the old family had been there - not on a visit from far away, but simply already there - to shore up the suddenly shaky new family?
Things did slowly turn to normal (though that word will never again have the old meaning). The three of us have grown into our home anew. And it is even more of a home now: larger, richer. I can dream of a time when my daughter has a baby and I can pop by to say hello...
Related articles:
Leaving Home: A Journey Through Homesickness
You Can Never Go Home Again: On Not Fitting In Anymore
Why Did You Leave Home? Defending Your Decision to Leave
