Expat Support

Within twelve hours of landing I had developed a cold which quickly moved to my chest. I haven’t been sure if I’m just coughing up the years of air pollution in a cleanse brought on by the crisp cool air here. Sometimes as I have coughed up infection though, it has felt like I am coughing up words suppressed, for fear of causing hurt and upset. My body trying to make me speak but my heart is too afraid, is too fragile right now.

‘Are you happy to be home?’ The stranger asks me, just another in the line which comes after…’excuse me…’

‘Would you mind helping me…’

‘…I can’t quite remember how this works…’

‘We’ve been out of the country a number of years and things have changed, will you just explain to me…’

‘I seem to have forgotten…’

I answer them with ‘that is a complicated question just for right now…’ and I get looked at with confusion.

And so it goes.

That I think, is what repatriation is like. In the early days at least when your head is in that foggy chaos and it is day by day as you get unpacked, sort business and try to remember how to pay for a carpark ticket (they take card now, and I had to know my registration number). All while processing the emotional turmoil of what has just happened.

When I am near people I feel as though there is an invisible membrane keeping me apart from all that is going on around me. I sit in cafes in shopping centres watching people go past, feeling invisible, feeling separate and I don’t really know why. And I know it is up to me, the way I feel, how I respond, how I process. I believe in being authentic – what you see is what you get with me and I don’t want to just brush over it all and say ‘yes of course, what’s not to love’.

I am lucky though, luckier than a lot of others because I have my friends here who have stayed the course, whose lives have kept moving forwards but they haven’t left me behind. So I sit at kitchen benches, on my bed in our sparsely furnished house or across tables with cups of tea and we talk, and we laugh and it is those moments that keep me grounded here, that start to dissolve that membrane and help me feel safe again. It will be okay.

I met a dear friend for lunch, she is from another world but calls Perth home now and has done for many years, and she says to me ‘I don’t know if I should say, but I will, that now you are back you will start to see all that is wrong with this place…and it is really hard. But then it will get better. It does’.

When we first arrived, we drove to Albany for a weekend. I stared out of the window at the blue sky and greenish-brown fields. Sheep grazed and Paul Kelly played over the speakers. I had an image come into my mind of roots sprouting from my fingers and toes, spreading out and burying into the earth. I felt I was starting to reconnect, and it felt good. 

Driving at dusk, the sun casts a golden glow over the trees and it feels as though I am driving through an Arthur Streeton painting. Nobody captures this golden moment of the day quite like he did. There is a field next to the freeway, and at this time of day it is filled with the silhouettes of kangaroos grazing. You need to know where to look for that glimpse of beauty as you zoom past. I’d forgotten, or maybe just thought the horrible urban sprawl had made them lost to me. My heart skipped a beat when I found them again.

When we returned to our markets to buy our fresh produce it felt satisfying. ‘It’s healing for the soul, isn’t it…going there?’ SB said as we unpacked the treasure trove of goods. But I couldn’t answer because although I really meant ‘yes’, and it was true, the words forming were ‘but I don’t want this…not yet’.

I just don’t know what to do with these incongruent thought patterns I have.

The frenzy of moving countries reaches fever pitch in the last month, with packing, saying goodbye, finalising services and dealing with any fallout. It is exhausting, yet it is for some of us completely addictive. The upside-down time I call it and I wonder if maybe I’m just messed up. But when emotions are heightened I feel more alive. When life is creating experiences for me I feel my cells buzzing with energy. Even when I am in the depths of despair and feeling like I need to run so fast out of this world to escape, and I just cannot even speak of what is in my head – that is part of the thrill. I get emotional highs, better than Adrenalin highs I think – I’m not one to jump out of a real plane, but a metaphoric one – sure bring it on. I’m feeling I am on a knife edge and tears hide just behind my eyes, ready at a moment’s notice to leak at the smallest thing – the sunrise over Armadale hills making the sky bright pink, showing the children how to rub Eucalyptus leaves between their hands and smell that beautiful fragrance. Thinking about how badly I want to be on the road with Jeepneys rather than driving along these boring mundane roads. When one of my favourite driving songs from Manila comes on…writing the words on this page…

I remembered when we first arrived in Manila and it was time to leave the hotel and move into our condo. I felt so frightened. I felt so vulnerable and alone. I stood in the empty house wondering ‘what next’ and that night I lay in bed smelling home on the bedsheets I’d brought over with us, and I cried. My sister had messaged and I couldn’t take the call because I had no words, only tears and thoughts in my head. Well, this time I did talk about it, and on the eve of moving out of my sister’s house to our own, I felt that familiar feeling of sadness, of fear, of not wanting to leave the warm cocoon of this family home into the unknown. She told me to keep her house keys and that gave me comfort.

Eventually we moved into our house, it is old and run down. A rental that needs love with a big backyard, room for a veggie patch, a corner waiting for a fort to be constructed and natural treats by way of a fig and olive trees. The house is small, and there are rips in the fly screens and holes in the walls, but the winter sun streams through the windows and there is a beautiful serenity within her walls. In the mornings I open the blinds to find mudlarks and doves on the grass of our spacious backyard, and in the evenings the magpies and crows come and hang out in search of food. It is as though someone else used to feed them and they sit on the fences, clothesline, and in the trees staring at the house. Something like a Hitchcock movie. I talk to them and promise to get it together and give them food, one day. Their songs are beautiful to me.

It doesn’t matter that our home is falling down, we are just lucky to have one. Besides, home is who is there with you, isn’t it? There is a feeling of love within the walls. Lives have been lived here, ghosts of past memories inhabit the rooms and I often find myself wondering what stories are here, untold.

I take the kids exploring one morning and we find our way to the beach. A perfect, private strip of beauty. It is a perfect Perth winter day, and as I sit in the warm morning sun, the chill in the air makes my nose red and drippy. BB seeks out abalone shells and cuttlefish while FB sits close to me watching the waves crash. That sound…hypnotic, pure, distinctly ‘home’. And I start to feel okay again.