home again, nine months in

Home is such a tedious, overdone subject for those of us who have moved a lot. Where are we from? Where did we live before this move? How long does it take before a new place becomes a home?  Is it the people, the unpacked bags, the routines, knowing multiple ways to get to a single destination, the Legos on the floor?

Talking about home in an expat crowd is as cliché as talking about the weather, but we just can’t let go of it, any more than we can stop talking about how hot is in Qatar. I have gotten so tired of myself as I have worked on this post, so sick of talking about home home home that I keep closing the file and walking away.  And then I meet yet another someone who says “oh you got here last August, you’re still so new!” and I start in on thinking some more about home.

We’ve been here nine months now. Nine months, in my experience, is about when I usually start feeling like I have the hang of a new place- when the “trailing” part of this undesirable label stops weighing so heavily on me.  I’m more relaxed and independent, I explore this no-longer-quite-new home less tentatively.  

All these moves may have not been good for my resume but I’d say I’m highly qualified to talk about the concept of home.  Somehow in the past ten years I became the home-maker, the one who assembles and arranges the furniture and books and art, who decides which utensils, pots, and pans belong on which shelves. I hire and manage any domestic staff we happen to have. I have experienced what having a reliable permanent home is like- I grew up in one house from ages 3-16, the same one to which we still return for visits to my parents.  I went to the same camp as a camper and later staff for all but three of the summers between 1983 and 2001.  Then at 16 I left for 9 months in France and since then I have spent an average of around 12 months anywhere I’ve lived in the past 24 years (not counting traveling, but I do count places that for various reasons I/we meant to live for a year or more but had to leave earlier than intended).  The average goes up to 17 months for the 11 years since we had kids.

In America I have a more complicated relationship with home and all the expectations around it.  In 2009 we returned from Vietnam to the US to live, doing that deliberately for the first time as a family. We bought a house near Atlanta, letting ourselves imagine that it might be our “forever” home. We chose it because we loved it best of the dozens of houses we looked at, with its quirky oldness and a modern angular addition.  It has a big backyard and friendly neighbors on all sides.

After three years there, longer than any place I’ve lived since childhood, a layoff forced a move to San Francisco and I swore I’d never want to own a house again, wished we’d never bought that house in the first place.  We moved to duplex in a park, a neighborhood of drab rentals down the hill from some of the most expensive mansions in the city.  Where before I used to eye others’ houses and imagine what it would be like if I lived there, now I was thoroughly and fiercely not envious of their posh permanence, their views and landscaping. Nine months into San Francisco, I wrote this: I know my way around, enough that I only turn on my GPS about once a month or so.  I've been through the honeymoon phase, when I loved it so much I thought it hurt, and the hating phase, when I was done with this traffic-clotted unfriendly place, and now I nearly feel like I'm home.   A couple of friends lately have gently suggested that it may be time to put down roots.  I politely decline, at least to put down the kinds of roots they're thinking of.  I used to think that the ultimate goal was to get a house and plant a garden and make it all beautiful and cozy and welcoming.  We tried that in Georgia and for a number of reasons it was a colossal mistake. 

I would walk the loop around the rim of the watershed above our house and try to resist loving the greenery and the view and the herons hunting frogs and gophers.  I resisted as hard as I loved it, because after Georgia I couldn’t trust I would get to keep it. 

I was right. One early morning in June, a year and a half after driving in over the Bay Bridge, the kids and I left over the Golden Gate Bridge as we headed East towards Qatar- driving across the US and then flying over to the other side of the world.

Our second night out on our drive west, we stayed in a house belonging to a friend from grad school.  After a day of driving across the barren wasteland of northern Nevada and then the even more barren wasteland of Utah salt flats, their house and the lushly green avenues of Salt Lake City were a welcoming oasis. Their house had a beautiful balance of history and home and child-friendliness that reminded me, for the first time since we left GA, that owning and living in a house indefinitely could be something positive.

And now we’re talking about selling our house in Georgia. Living as an expat makes it easier to get my mind around the concept of multiple homes and suddenly I’m not sure I want to get rid of the house that just a year ago I wished had never been bought. Do I hate that we are giving up a great house in a sweet neighborhood because I have duped myself into buying into the mythical American dream, that I should own a house in the US in order to feel settled?  Or is it just that given our history and the slight but real precariousness of living abroad, I want to have a safe haven in my home country, where I know I can stay if we have to return before we’re ready? I’ll surely come around to the idea of selling, I of all people should understand that it’s not up to any of us to define home for other people or even for ourselves.

I don’t love Qatar.  I appreciate the experiences I’m having and I love moments but I don’t want to make peace with the forces underlying our existence here.  Doha represents so much of what I distrust about modern humanity- the total manipulation of environment, the dependence on fossil fuels, the lack of local resources for so much of what we eat and use every day, the highly divided class/employment system. And despite all that, for now, it’s home. I hope that all this moving is teaching my kids that home isn’t a thing with fixed boundaries, outside of which everything is strange and fearsome. I’d like to think they will understand that home is something you choose, that it’s a feeling of familiarity with your environment, any place you can relax into your best self, and that even the most unlikely places can feel like home.