Returning to your Home Country
Visits to family and friends far away make you realize: you can never go home again
Jul 11, 2006
Leaving home was hard enough, especially if you were and are happy there. But you chose to go very far away, and now you only get to visit once in a while. You conquered your initial homesickness, then why do you get hit with this other, different kind of nostalgia each time you go back home?
That's just it: as the saying goes, you really can't ever go home again. For, let's face it, the home you left all those years ago is not the home you are returning to.
On each visit to Antwerp, I'm tempted to say that nothing much has changed. I stay with my parents, who are a bit older but still quite themselves. I stay in my old room, which is more or less the way I left it. I see the rest of my family, meet my friends in the same old pubs.
But I don't fit in the old fabric anymore, or it doesn't fit me. I bring along a husband and a child, each of a different nationality. In my absence my parents retired, grew a bit stiff in the knees, and started wearing funny little reading glasses. My sister's children have grown many inches. Each year more friends have become strangers.
Living so far away and getting to see the old places at most only once a year, these changes are extra evident to me. Not so much to my sister, who lives half an hour's drive away and visits every weekend. You could say that she hasn't left home at all. For in a sense, what makes a place your home is not that it remains unchanged - nothing does - but that you change with it and retain your fit.
Nostalgia for the old days, then, is an extravagance reserved especially for those who have left.
But that is not the end of it. For of course the family and good friends you say goodbye to at the airport are still your loved-ones. So besides missing everything as it used to be, you also get to miss things as they are now.
Having left, then, is in some ways a no-win situation. You wish you could have it both ways: your own home close to your old home. Many, even most people do have it both ways. They might never understand what motivates a person to leave. And they might never know what is to feel homesick.
Related articles:
Leaving Home: A Journey Through Homesickness
Why Did You Leave Home? Defending Your Decision to Leave
The Precariousness of Home: Did You Know That Having a Baby Changes Everything?
