Today, I can define home as the place I identify with, and I identify with more than one. Each one of these homes completes my identity and makes it so rich. I am homeful and I feel so blessed.

There is a powerful force at work in children. They can adjust to a change of culture, country and language faster than adults can. Children have the power to play. Daily all the children went to school in the centre.

For at least three years prior, we had been having what I call the ‘expat talk.’ Similar in discomfort to any deep ‘where are we going in our relationship’ talk yet unique to multilingual, multicultural and multi-confused families.

Once you move overseas, you slowly, without noticing at first, start to develop a new struggle around your identity that you didn’t know existed before. Before your move, you had simple answers to questions such as “Where are you from?” and “Where’s home for you?”

I so very much want to be wanted, to belong, to say, “Yes, me too!” to all the lucky ones who can identify their forever home. So I will park my expatriate history in a suitcase and store it on the far corner of the topmost shelf of my heart, take a deep breath, and dive into my present.

I sit up with a start. That’s it! I feel comfortable when I am in the unfamiliar. Now that I have returned to the familiar I feel uncomfortable. I feel totally displaced being here in Melbourne. And it occurs to me that this is the first time ever that I have returned to the same place, the same house even. I am so out of my comfort zone.

think about the countries where I felt a sense of belonging and see that where it lay was the expat scenario of the unfamiliar. The strangeness of things calms me and makes me feel at home, makes me belong.

I look around and feel at home among the Asian, European and South American faces. And I wonder why I always gravitate towards foreign faces, languages, foods. That sense of being with kindred-foreign-spirits touches my heart.

There I can talk to my hearts content with expatriate friends who are in the same boat, repatriated home and feeling lost.