At the Airport on the Way ‘Home’

Another gratuitous post about the inherent conflict of the expatriate’s condition.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve gone across the Tasman in the 9 years I’ve lived in Sydney (it might just about have got to double figures) and even in having done it so many times I still find myself scoping out the atmosphere when I arrive as if to test the waters before leaping in.
It has been hard to define how to describe the nature of that inquiry. Is it just a scan for a homing signal that’s starting to ping a lot louder saying, please come back?
I hadn’t been able to qualify it until a friend neatly summed it up last week at lunch.
She said that after 6 years of living in the UK she only moved back to New Zealand when she stopped feeling like a visitor on Kiwi soil; it wasn’t until then that she knew that it was time to move home.
Here’s me, 9 years later and I still feel like a visitor. Not, I’m quick to point out in the midst of my family, we’re still as connected as ever we were, even more so now with video conferencing and the like… but in terms of having a life here… there’s a part of me that wonders if, having lived in Oz now for so long, I haven’t passed the point of no return.
Is that wrong? I was born here, did the best part of my growing up here, I identify so strongly with the Kiwi identity, my blood still runs black for my rugby heroes. Kiwi is the greatest part of my national identity, even though I have a cast iron association with Australia in the form of a naturalization certificate… It really does feel as though you can take the girl out of New Zealand but you can’t take New Zealand out of the girl.
I’ve never ruled out the possibility of moving back some time. Truth to tell I wish I could feel a definite ease on the state of play in Australia, a winding down, a tailing off that would release me to come back to NZ feeling as though my time there was done. Skeet has got it. Her feeling is moving her on to the UK, but me?
I’m resolutely still in Sydney even though right now I’m physically in New Zealand; and on Tuesday, as I was driving away from Sis’ place watching one of her little tackers cry as I was leaving (more because he wasn’t getting to come too than because I was on my way) I wished it was an easy decision to drop everything and come back to NZ.
Because bloody hell, the constant leaving is really (really, really) hard.