expert novice

All these moves have made me practically expert at being new, so wonderfully experienced at being inexperienced.  Irony and contradiction, both. I’m writing to work my own way through how I’m feeling about the latest bout of repatriation and maybe help some others who are trying it for the first time. It’s the new ones who look for input from the outside and thus will follow whatever tags led them here. Those of us on our umpteenth new home know we have to look inside ourselves, there's more help there than we might imagine.

The circumstances of being new have shifted since my own first moves. Starting out in Kosovo, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Bangladesh, my initial contacts were torn stubs of paper with scribbled telephone numbers. Vietnam, Atlanta, San Francisco, and Doha had various levels of online groups to join.  With this one somehow I’m back to having no online group and with social media-based connections that seem more flimsy than those penciled phone numbers.

It’s hard every time in new ways, partly because the kids and I are all at different stages in our lives, partly because moving is hard work, no matter what. I read this article recently that I liked, about how it feels to repatriate to a place that you felt was home and how it won’t be, it can’t be. Making it work requires lowering and shifting expectations. I do love it here and I suspect the bouts of struggling with it are just phases. I’m hoping intensely that it’s just a phase. Isn’t that the base of so much? Trying to decide if whatever you’re dealing with is worth it to work hard on and pass through or if you should abandon it because staying’s worse than leaving. Three years is our max in one place, let's see if we can beat that this time around. 

What follows are some loose suggestions and ideas for you new ones and you experienced ones who want to commiserate, and for me to read every once in awhile if I'm losing perspective. Really they apply as much to new expat homes as to being a repat, though remember that as a repat community-building and friend-making go soo muuucchh mooorrrre sloooooooowwlllllyyyy than in the speedy expat world.

Rules

There’s only one, with a twist: accept all invitations, complicated by the combination of remembering that you don’t have to pretend to be someone you’re not while trying to keep conversations going with people to see where connections can be made. I suppose it comes down to “stay interested but don’t lie.”

Choices:

A few weeks ago I had a choice: drive a couple of hours to go skiing with people I have known for a long time, with whom I know I have things in common, or go to a village event where it’s likely I will meet new neighbors and just maybe some of them will eventually turn out to be friends. Against my own rules I opted to meet up with the old friends and was glad. We skied, we caught up, and I reconnected with fellow Vermonters, even if they live two hours away.  Lessons: make time with people who share some of your history, and break your own rules once in awhile.

Roots

I don’t think the roots are a given, that you can do those on purpose. I think those grow and then after years and years you just realize you have them.  I thought I had them here- I grew up in this state after all and worked here and finished undergrad and went to grad school here and I love it. Isn’t that enough? I’m starting to think no. On this return I’m feeling like an imposter, ready to hand in my Vermonter credentials and pretend I have to learn everything from scratch. But I shouldn’t, right? I know where maple syrup comes from and how to get around Burlington on foot, bike, and in a car. I know back roads in three counties. I remember when the Nordic ski center at Bolton Valley was a little shack with a woodstove in it. It’s confusing to be both native and foreign at the same time. I’m not worrying about it too much. 

We serial expats benefit by letting go of our identities being tied to any one place, and that becomes most clear upon repatriation. There has always been some contention over who gets to be American, with the most recent arrivals being the ones who are least welcome to claim it, as though it’s a single continuum of arrival. Those of us who started here and then left and came back and left again, or stayed away for a long time, may have USA on our passports but feel less American than some who have most of their lives here and aren't yet citizens.

Reading about it

You can read all the blogs and memes you want but really you are the one who has to make it home. Reading just puts it off so don’t overdo it.

There’s a genre of repat narratives that mostly involve complaining that people don’t “get” us, that they have no interest in where we’ve been or all the places we hold inside of us, and that’s why it’s so hard to assimilate back into our home country and make friends. In my experience a good number of the people who are interested are often more interested in the story, which in Vermont just emphasizes our differences.  It’s valuable to find other ways to connect than just talking about yourself.

Finally I can’t be much help to my fellow recent repats, except for the same old thing I tell myself: that as long as you make some effort and some occasional progress, little by little the new home will feel like home eventually or you will give up and move back abroad. (we have not gotten to this phase yet, so don’t even think about starting to worry, parents and other concerned friends). Big world, lotta people, lotta possibilities, don’t beat yourself up.

excuse me, just a tiny glass of repat whine

I’m not an expat anymore.  For the first time I’m experiencing the peace that comes with moving to a once-familiar place I actually want to live in, rather than choosing a job and making the best of the new destination that goes with it. I’ve been longing to live all four seasons in these hills for years now. I thought repatriation would be a cinch. 

Doha was a challenge, to which I had to rise or let it crush me. I did, with plenty of hard work and good company, and it didn’t. I miss it hard. Not in that freshly wrenched way of the first couple of months, all raw and halfway still there in my head, but with an ache that knows I’m probably never going back and probably never going to see most of those people ever again in real life. Social media keeps us connected but nothing replaces random encounters and regular adventures around the city, tea and world-problem-solving in each other’s kitchens, shared hilarity and despair. 

I dress like anyone else and drive an old Subaru Forester. I can pass for a Vermonter at first glance and probably even second, but locals know I’m new to town and ask where did I move from? They expect me to say Tinmouth or Pittsford or maybe something more exotic like Massachusetts or even Virginia but then I say Qatar and the conversation has been efficiently and effectively killed.  I stopped offering it up, but word has probably gotten around the village by now anyway. I know my way around, but I’ve been too long gone to quite remember how I’m supposed to behave and where I’m welcome.

I love where we’ve landed. It’s the green and hills I’ve been missing for years. I love seeing the clear light of New England fall and eating fresh macs for the first time in ten years. It’s just tricky to work on feeling at home and making it home at the same time and I’m lonely for easygoing company.  Cold dark weather looms. I’m envious of my youngest who started at her new school last week and is already planning who will be at her birthday party at the end of the month. I wish we could all be thrown into first grade again upon arrival in a new home. By the second day on the playground who cares where we’ve lived for the past three years, we just need to figure out how to do the most scary trick together on the big swing without getting hurt. 

a citizen of worlds

A friend posted the following video a few months ago and this was my first reaction to the post, before I even watched the video: Oh please.  Stop telling me what to think and how to say it. When I ask where are you from I want to know where you feel at home. In fact, the question I’ve acquired here in Doha is “what is your country?” which is often the limit of what our language barrier will permit, but still the beginning of connection and exchange.

That is what I thought and then I watched the video. I loved it.

I’ve been thinking about it ever since. And now it’s International Week at the kids’ school again. My youngest came home with this sheet and a paper doll figure to cut out and decorate. The questions on the back of the sheet asked what language people speak in our home country, what kinds of food we like to eat there, and what special holidays we celebrate.

Forget about "Where are you from" -"What is your home country is even more difficult to be honest about. 

“We would like to help the children develop their awareness and appreciation of the diversity of the classmates with whom they work and play each day. One way of doing this is by discovering the many different countries that the children call home.”

Funny that the American school, of all schools, would try to simplify this so much- the United States is one of the hardest places to choose a national costume and one single language that people speak. The first food my daughter chose to draw in the box provided was sushi. For languages we ended up answering “English plus more than 300 others,” as we learned from a quick google search. We also learned that 14 million American households have a first language other than English. What would be our national costume? Sure we're American but we’ve lived in Vermont, Georgia, and California… Snowsuit? Jeans and a t-shirt? Gun?

“We would like to suggest that you focus on one country only. Perhaps next time your child has a homeland project to do, they can focus on the country of the parent whose culture was not explored this time.”

As if all the parents here had one homeland! As if each country had one single culture of its own. One woman I know resists the “where are you from?” question because her parents are from two different countries, she grew up away from both of those, her husband is from yet another country and they are raising their children in Doha. What is their country? Or parents could be from the same country but from different ethnic groups or within that country.  Or like Taiye Selasi, they are from countries that didn’t even exist when they were born. So many possibilities.

What if the school talked more to the kids about culture in terms of rituals and relationships? What if the worksheet said “think about where you feel like you’re from- talk to your parents about where they feel like they’re from. Where is home? What would you like to share about that place? What are you most proud of there? What are you most looking forward to doing the next time you are there? What cultural practices (foods, clothes, music, values, family traditions) have you added as you’ve lived in different places and/or met people from other cultures?”

I think we can do better. Let’s celebrate the school as an intersection of people with a vast diversity of cultural experiences and not limit that to “what country are you from?”

“She is not a citizen of the world, she is a citizen of worlds.” –Taiye Selasi

leaping into the void

Or at least that’s the way it feels, five and a half months from the leap. We’re intending to return to my home state, our home country, at the end of this latest bout of expat-ing.

This choice, more emotional than logical, was based in part on how I was feeling two summers ago, after our first year in Doha- so enormously relieved to be back in a place with mountains and green and people who drive slowly. Back then I decided we should make moving back there the goal for when my husband’s contract finishes in Qatar. Since then I can’t say I’ve grown to love Doha but I have grown to tolerate it, with great affection for certain people and certain corners. The whole process has reminded me that anywhere can become home eventually and has weakened my resolve that there is one most perfect place for us to move.

Another factor is that in all our moves, none have landed us in places where we knew more than a handful of people. My home state has a web of connection with family and friends and the idea of that is very appealing.

  

I have fears and misgivings. Having never, as an adult, lived in one place for more than three years, I’m not even sure that I can, even while we talk about this next move being to the place where we will see all the kids grow up and graduate from high school.  As if we can possibly know enough to make the right choice, especially as the stakes seem to get higher with each successive move. The part that doesn’t let me go back to sleep when I wake up at 3am is the part about how there is no long-term anything without an income, and the planning so far has not included jobs.

And then recently, just when my trust in my own decision-making was at a very low point, one of my favorite people suggested moving to her hometown, and except for the fact that it’s thousands of miles from my home state, it has everything- mountains, friendly people, indoor and outdoor climbing for one kid, horses for another, great schools for all three. I couldn’t not put it on the list of possibilities.

I know that it’s better to talk about this in terms of “intentions” rather than “plans,” as I'm aware from abundant experience what can happen to plans, and very quickly too. I also know how hard it is to “re-pat”: to re-orient and re-calibrate to the culture and pace of one’s home country after living abroad. We surely have plenty of work ahead of us, no matter where we end up.

P.S. also going to keep in mind this one, about how it isn't really a void at all.