The last few weeks – months even – have been insane.
Everyone tells you that repatriation is hard but it isn’t easy to explain the impact of a physical move WITHOUT ANY SUPPORT AT ALL combined with the emotions of leaving somewhere you love and returning to a life where you don’t really feel you belong any more.
I am surrounded by boxes. Most of them are empty now. Well, when I say empty, many of them are still filled with packing paper. That wretched paper is the bane of my life. It is taking over. I have thrown piles of it into our downstairs toilet, ostensibly to get it out of the way but in reality it insists on spilling out the door, into our hallway. I should just close the door and pretend it’s not there but then I panic about the fire hazard of having a downstairs loo filled with paper…
That’s what repatriation does to you. It makes you wake up in the middle of the night and worry about the most ridiculous things. Packing paper is one, but I seem to spend half my life fretting over the silliest of things. It certainly doesn’t help that I am on my own for a few months while my husband finishes his job in Pretoria and that my children have chosen to join the local swim team so I now have to drive them to training up to nine times a week. Including at least twice a week at 6am…
But I suspect that whatever your personal circumstances, this period is hard. Even if you wanted to come home, even if you longed for it. You still have to get used to the fact that you have been away and that others haven’t and now you have to find your new place in your old world.
One of my favourite pieces of advice picked up over the years I have written about expat issues is to treat moving back to your home as if it is a new assignment. Of course it isn’t as easy as all that when you already have friends and the children are going back to their old school and you are moving back into your old house. Everyone sort of expects you just to pick up where you left off (and as I already said in my previous post about repatriation, I have changed). But even if you just pick one of two things that are new or different to how you lived before, you can build on the fact that you HAVE been away and that you are not the same person as you were.
In my case I have already joined a Meet Up group for dog walkers. This is a small thing – I only meet with them once a fortnight or so and it’s more for the dog to socialise than me. But it is important because this is something I never would have done before we moved to South Africa. It marks the fact that I am now someone who can meet with a group of strangers that I contacted over the internet.
It’s obviously early days yet and my priority is still unpacking those flipping boxes as well as my freelance writing, working, running the household, making sure the kids are fed and clean, walking the dog etc. But I am starting to think about a project. Something I can do that is new, that marks this new stage in my life. I am someone who always needs to have something to look forward to, to work on. And I think when you repatriate – especially if you are not sure you will move again – this is especially important. Otherwise it can feel a little like you have moved home just to wait to die.
I don’t know what this project will be yet – I am hopeful that something will present itself. It may be that I won’t know for months or even years to come. It could be that it’s already there, staring me in the face.
But for now, I will carry on as before with my work and looking after the kids and dog and basically, well, surviving.
And I WILL finish unpacking those boxes…
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