One of the hardest things about immigration, and one of the things we overlook, ignore, or try our hardest not to think about…
Is the day you wake up and for no reason whatsoever, just… miss… home.
It is not that you don’t love your life here.
It is not that you aren’t grateful for the opportunities this new life brings.
It is not even that you don’t feel at home.
Because you do.
You are excited about the places you can visit and the castles you can explore. But every now and again someone sends a sound clip of Highveld thunder. Or you see a new Netflix movie filmed in Cape Town. Or the kids lose their minds over hail and you say, without thinking, “You should see South African hail…”
And in that instant, it is like your body time-travels.
You can smell the rain coming. You can feel the air change.
And you miss home.
The invisible things we miss most
It is even harder in the beginning. We forget that when we arrived, missing people and missing familiar things all mixed together with the complete unknown. You don’t just miss your family. You miss your systems. Your shortcuts. Your certainty. The boring little comforts you never thought were important.
In South Africa, you know that if you need a specific size spanner at 2pm on a Sunday, you can head to Builder’s Warehouse. You know Game might not have it, but Builder’s probably will.
If you feel like a crazy big breakfast with endless coffee, Mugg ‘n Bean is just there.
If you have a party coming up, you know exactly which shop will have the perfect dress.
Here? You don’t even recognise the taste of mayonnaise, and you cannot find viennas.
You wander around like a lost lamb, pretending you are fine, but inside you are thinking… why is everything so unfamiliar and why is a small jar of something suddenly €8?
You try to roll with it. And you end up paying way more than you should, because you don’t know where else to get the thing other than right there, staring at you on the shelf.
When family visits
And then… family visits.
The best thing ever.
You count down for months. You save up. You want them spoilt to no end. You want them to experience everything in your new world in those two or three weeks. You need them to love it as much as you do, because secretly you are trying to convince them to follow you. But at the very least, you want them not to worry when they leave.
And then they leave again.
And that goodbye can be worse than the first one.
Because now you know exactly how long it feels until the next time. You know the distance. You know the stretch of months. You know the ache.
Throw a pandemic into the mix and it becomes a whole different kind of pain.
But we carry on
Because that is what immigrants do.
We put the sad feeling aside and we carry on. We focus on what lies ahead. We remind ourselves why we left. We focus on stopping at a traffic light with the window closed because it is raining. Not because it is dangerous.
And then you see a rainbow.
And there is no smog to look through to see it.
And the person next to you is a cyclist. Who greets you.
And it dawns on you that yes, you now remember that hadida outside your bedroom window at an unspeakable hour with weird fondness.
The slow realisation
You take a left to get to Halfords to buy that spanner.
You get greeted by the umpteenth person in the shop.
You get back into your car without doing that automatic “lock-lock-check” routine.
You go home and braai some homemade wors.
And you realise that while you were missing “home”…
You suddenly find that you are now, in fact, home.
