I had the ocean as my front yard, the rainforest as my backyard, and it was literally paradise. The

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.

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.

an expat you’re given grace to be a foreigner and total strangers move mountains to help you acclimatize to your new location. An instant support network is born of non-judgmental people whose only commonality is that they’ve been there, they know what it’s like. “Yes, me too!” they sympathize. We’re all in this together, as the song goes.

It’s a blessing of youth to have so much optimism and faith in oneself. I just knew that was where I was supposed to be and in fact when I did arrive and settle in, I felt like I had come home. It was odd to feel so in tune with such a vast, strange place, but in LA I wasn’t strange or out of place. LA embraced uniqueness, strangeness, oddities. It

Although we were used to seeing women carrying things on their heads, Tamale was the only place we ever saw a woman riding a bicycle while balancing a head pan of oranges.

him of any control over his life when we packed up and left. Without opportunities to make decisions that matter, he held on to any decision he could make. By finally riding the subway alone in our new world, Alex regained some of the commands of his own starship. Surely, this is a well-known and quite typical milestone in parenting, but it took ex

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.

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