When an emigrant thinks of home (if they’re lucky), the picture that arises will be a fixed one. A solid image that reliably comes to mind. The house where they were brought up, a particular collection of people seated around a particular dinner table, or a vivid feeling of deeply ingrained recognition and familiarity.
It is that sameness we shrink from in boredom and horror when we’re young, but often learn to appreciate later, once first-hand experience of an unreliable world has taught us to value things that feel solid, rather than escape them. When you have no experience of how suddenly things can change, you can feel entombed by predictability.
The image of home might be that brother you can call when you lose your passport in Bolivia (even though he gently warned you of his suspicion that you might be too much of an idiot to travel alone with competence). The sister who will always tell you when your outfit is too ambitious for an Irish wedding (“You look a Russian oligarch”), or remember the names of random people you both went to school with 20 years later when someone says, “What was such and such’s name? You know. With the huge forehead?” “Sandra,” she’ll reply sagely, nodding. “Her dad sold tractors.”
That blend of feeling, place and people that amounts to our idea of home feels concrete when you think of it – again, if you’re lucky. A specific brand of marmalade in the same spot in the cupboard. The feeling and sound of the front door clicking shut as you close it. The smell of the hallway in your parents’ house. Panicked, gesticulating disputes about who turned on, and/or off, the immersion, or who failed to. This feeling of concreteness helps us to maintain our connection to home when we leave, whether we’re moving to a new house, a new town or a new country, but it is just a feeling.
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Things change, as do people. They relocate, marry, divorce, get sick and die. We’re all carried along on the momentum, and sometimes it carries us further from one another.
Further from home in every sense.
The longer you’re away from home as an emigrant, the more this changing reality imposes upon your fixed vision of home. The less it is the case that what you return to – even when you visit – will look like what you left. This is one of the tougher realities of the choice to go. My mother died nine years ago at the age of 58, after raising my brother and me alone. I was in my mid-20s, and suddenly without any concrete conception of home at all. The house I grew up in was sold when my mother became too sick to work and pay the mortgage, and shortly after, she was gone too.
[ Laura Kennedy: The nurse rings and suddenly I realise my mother is deadOpens in new window ]
Suddenly, there was nothing concrete and I realised at precisely the wrong moment that she had been home all along. For me, home became a series of images of a person and place that no longer existed, and so I left Ireland for Britain a few months later, believing that it was better to feel suddenly alien in an entirely new place than one I had been in all my life.
In the years that followed, my image of home shifted. As the grip of grief became something I learned to manage rather than be consumed by, thinking of home ceased to be wholly painful and left room for reconnection. For change. Over time, it became images of my friends’ livingroom in Dublin, where we would have tea and talk in a way that felt as though I’d never left. It became my brother’s family. The children he and his wife would bring into the world and raise in a house a short walk from where he and I grew up. Time shifts so that places around the table are left empty, but sometimes new ones appear too. Our conception of home can expand to make room for new images, new people, new ideas.
Since moving to Australia, I have only become more conscious of distance of time, and the things I cannot be part of in the way I would most like to be.
It is the cost of the life I have chosen.
But then I go home to visit and occasionally, my five-year-old niece will turn into the light in a particular way – during some quiet moment of total focus while she draws something or is listening intently – and there in the stillness of her little face shimmers forth the grandmother she never knew. My mother, a component part of this tiny, discrete and unique person, here in this room in this moment. A testament to legacy, and change, and the idea that home is there – or rather here – in us all.
There is loss in emigration. Loss of control as you leave to others and to fate the things you can’t control from so far away. Loss of a particular version of your life as you swap one set of potential future experiences for another. You yourself leave an empty seat at the dinner table for others to cope with. It is not cost-free, but then, nothing is. There are no perfect choices, just better and worse ones, given the context in which you have the luxury to choose one option over another.
Leaving home taught me ultimately to appreciate it.
First, when I ran from what felt at the time like the stasis of my life in Limerick – and my mother’s house – to go to Dublin for university, and again when I ran from the terrifying absence of home after her death.
From a distance, I have relearned how to be Irish, and how to value the places I didn’t appreciate when I took them – and belonging to them – for granted.
I’ve learned that home is not always a fixed idea you inherit, but one you must participate in creating.
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