Clicking my Ruby Slippers

Funny Go Home Welcome Mat (Photo credits: www.xpressmats.com)

Recently, I've read a few posts on home sickness and the malaise that seems to afflict more and more of us these days as we negotiate an increasingly smaller world and greater itinerancy. It seems serendipitous as I begin my own journey into new lands that these posts have popped up in such a timely fashion… but perhaps there was more design in their appearance than I'm allowing credit for. Or maybe it's like when you buy a new car - just before you buy it, you don't see a single one of the same make or model, but the second you drive your brand-spanking-new cool-mobile out of the dealership, the exact same make and model and colour are EVERYWHERE. Maybe seeing posts about home sickness and a sense of place/home has more to do with my own sensitivity to those feelings at the moment.

It's true that I'm struggling this week. The last few weeks haven't been as bad because there have been other distractions. Initially, we had just arrived and the shiny-newness of everything was charming. We approached everything with wide-eyed wonder and childish awe. LomL had leave and we traipsed about in a fog of jet-lag, insulated by a cloak of holiday-ness (that's the one you only wear on special occasions, the one that lets you feel like you can completely relax and let your guard down). We did holiday things, went to holiday places and LomL was excited about showing us all the attractions. Then he went back to work, and the boys and I were still in holiday mode. We didn't stress about school work, or even getting into a school, we didn't fight the fact that there was no routine, no plan for the day, we hadn't yet begun to flounder.

Towards the end of last week, it finally hit. That empty feeling in the pit of your stomach. The feeling that you're hovering, suspended, in limbo. You can't go back, and forward doesn't seem to have a clearly visible path.

Now you have to remember that I grew up in a migrant community in Australia. My parents arrived in Australia in their 40s and it was their fourth "permanent home". They'd spent the majority of their early years in India (yes, my mother was born in Burma and spent her early childhood there, but for the most part, she was in India and it's the place she still holds in her heart as home). They'd married in India, then set up house and had children in Singapore. Then there was the big move to Brunei, where they'd stayed for 15 years, where I was born, where they'd seen my siblings off to boarding school. That really had been the place, I think, that they'd settled in. I've never asked them, but I suspect that Brunei had been the place they had come to believe they would always stay. They had spent so many years making a home and a community there, they had become involved in community life and had strong friendships. So the move to Australia, after being so well established, to start home, hearth and community again in their 40s, was not easy. I lived that life in full Technicolour, Dolby Digital surround sound. Their sense of never fully settling permeating everything. Their longing for "home" but never really knowing where that might be, seeping into every aspect of our daily lives. I still maintain that's what gave me the itchy feet, the longing to travel that I have to this day.

The only time I ever saw them completely relaxed, completely "at home" was when they were in their own mothers' homes or their siblings' homes. There, when everyone reverted to the roles they had established in childhood, my parents became themselves. My father was the eldest brother, waited on by his sisters, teasing and laughing with his brothers. My mother, the respected sister-in-law in my father's family, was quickly dragged into the kitchen or asked for advice. In my maternal grandmother's home, the roles were similar. My mother reverted to the child she had been and I caught glimpses of her as a teenage girl, giggling and sharing secrets with her sister, adoring her mother. My father in that house, became the man of the house. He was the one my grandmother insisted be consulted over every decision, usually to the exasperation of my Aunt, who was the primary bread-winner of the household and was used to making all the decisions during the remainder of the year. Her nose would get regularly out of joint when my father arrived on holidays. It must have been so frustrating and demeaning for her. She earned the money to keep the house running, she made all the decisions when we weren't there, she had to deal with all the things that went wrong on a daily basis, yet my father would sweep in and my grandmother would turn to him for advice. He didn't do it purposefully or to slight her. It was just the way those relationships worked. They could all have been more graceful and gracious in hindsight. But hindsight is blindingly clear and free of emotions that plague the moment being lived.

So having experienced a childhood in a migrant community, where all around me were adults coming to terms with their feelings of displacement, their changing worlds, you'd think it would be easier for me as I go through a similar transition. I suppose the one advantage I have is that I know with unwavering certainty that the "home" I long for no longer exists. It has changed. Even in this short time, it has become a different landscape. I saw it with my parents. They would travel annually to India, expecting the idealised place of their childhoods, expecting that people would be the same, have the same reactions, speak in the same ways, offer the same respect. They would be annually disappointed, and strangely, a little surprised. They would return to Australia, griping about the changes, the way people spoke, the way the young dressed, the changes they couldn't reconcile, but still feeling out-of-place in Perth.

They became a cornerstone of their migrant community in Perth, more displaced people looking for a sense of belonging, a sense of family and community. This community I grew up in left me confused about identity. I didn't feel the same sense of displacement as they did. I didn't feel the same loyalties to India or an idealised life there, as they did (I suspect no-one of my generation felt that either). But equally, I didn't feel truly Australian either. I just felt different. Different to the first generation migrants I was surrounded by, and different to my Australian friends. I believe that nobody feels that sense of national identity in the core of their being until they have left the country. I know that the times when I have felt most Australian, most like I belonged, are the times when I have been away from Australia, on holidays, or now in establishing a new home. Those are the times when I have reverted to familiar stereotypes of Australian-ness, my accent growing stronger, my use of idioms growing more frequent.

But knowing that everything has changed in the place I once called home, doesn't make it easier to separate myself from it. It does spur me on to create a new sense of home here and that's a promising start. In the interim, however, it's still a matter of dealing with feelings of being adrift, harbourless and a little tossed about on unfamiliar waters, no land in sight yet, forging forward, heart in mouth and resolve firmly in hand.