On going ‘home’ for the summer, and finding it isn’t quite home anymore

Nobody warns you that going home as an expat mother is its own quiet grief. Not the big dramatic kind of grief, but the small kind, that catches you in your mum’s kitchen at the wrong moment.

There’s a weird feeling that arrives somewhere around day four of being back, and I’ve never found the right word for it. You’re at your mum’s (or mother-in-law’s). The kettle’s the same kettle and the mugs are the mugs you grew up with. There’s a baby on the monitor who has, finally, just gone down for a nap, and you’re standing in the kitchen you’ve stood in ten thousand times, and instead of the relief you were promised — finally, home — there’s a low, strange ache you can’t quite place. Everything is familiar, yet nothing is yours. You’re a guest in the house you grew up in. And the feeling between how home is supposed to feel and how it actually feels is the thing nobody ever told you about when you got on the plane to Dubai all those years ago, full of plans, with no idea that one of the costs of an expat life is that ‘home’ slowly stops being a place you can return to and becomes a place you visit. Once you’ve lived in more than one country, nowhere will ever feel quite like home again.

I think a lot of you feel this every summer and assume it’s just you being ungrateful or odd. It isn’t. It’s one of the realest, never spoken honestly parts of being an expat, and having a baby shows it up in a way that being a child-free, responsibility free not a mother yet never quite did.

Your old life carried on without you, and that’s how it should be, but it still hurts

When you were a child-free expat coming home, you could slot back into your old life for a fortnight and it mostly still fit. The friends were in the pub, you went to the pub, had lunch and a glass of wine in the beer garden…brilliant. But come home with a baby and you realise quickly, that that life has closed. Your friends without children make plans at times that don’t work, in places you can’t bring a pram, with a spontaneity that your life just doesn’t have anymore. They’re not being unkind — they genuinely forget, because your reality is invisible to them, the same way theirs was once invisible to you. But as you sit there doing the maths on whether you can make a 9pm dinner work around a bedtime, knowing the answer is no, you feel the distance open up. Not a falling-out, just… a drift. The friendships are real and the love is real, you are just living in different worlds for a while.

And then there’s the other part — the friends who did have babies, who stayed, and who have built the village you don’t have. The WhatsApp group with 5 friends instead of 505 women that you don’t really know but feel like you do, the regular park meet-ups, the easy drop-round-for-a-cuppa feel of people who live ten minutes apart and see each other every week. You get a beautiful, but painful window into the life you’d have had if you’d stayed, and it’s lovely, and you’re welcomed into it warmly for two weeks, and then you fly back to a city where you’ve had to build your village from scratch out of other people who also left. There’s no resentment in this, or jealousy, it’s just a strange ache, watching a version of your life that you didn’t choose, being glad you didn’t choose it and grieving it slightly all at once, wondering ‘what if?’. You can feel both of these things at the same time and still wonder but feel perfectly happy where you are in life.

Your mum and the grandchild she only gets in fortnights

This is the one that hurts the most for so many, so I’ll just say it. The thing that’s hardest about going home isn’t about you, in the end. It’s watching Granny with your baby, watching the total joy of a grandparent who has been counting down to this, who holds your child like they’re made of something precious, who knows — because you both know, though neither of you says it — that you’ll be gone again in a few weeks and back to seeing each other through a phone screen and a five-hour time difference. There’s a generosity to how grandparents do this, the way they pour everything into the time they get and don’t make you feel the guilt of it, even though the guilt is sitting right there in your chest the whole time, as the tears sit in your throat. You chose a life that put a continent between your child and the people who’d have loved being down the road. It’s a good life, it was the right choice, but it costs this, and the cost is most visible in Granny and Grandpa’s face at the airport, and you carry that home with you every single summer. Holding your baby that little bit tighter, trying to make up for all the cuddles they won’t get from Granny.

And then you go back to Dubai, and Dubai is home too, and that’s the strangest part

The strange feeling isn’t only about home not fitting anymore. It’s that somewhere along the way, without realising it, you made another home and you feel it the moment you land back. The familiar road from the airport. Your own bed. Your own kitchen, your own routines, your friends who are also far from their families and therefore just ‘get’ this exact ache without you having to explain it. You step back into your Dubai life and there’s relief, real relief, and then immediately a flicker of guilt for feeling relieved to leave ‘home.’ Because what does it mean that going home felt like visiting and coming back to Dubai felt like coming home? It means you’ve become the thing every long-term expat becomes: a person with two homes and the permanent, strange sense of not quite belonging anywhere anymore.

I don’t have an answer for you, because there isn’t one, and I’ve stopped looking for it. The ache isn’t something to be solved., it’s just how a life lived across two places is. Your child will grow up with two homes and an odd accent that confuses people, a relationship with their grandparents made mainly over video calls, and that’s a loss, but it’s also a gift. The gift of a showing them the wider world and a childhood most people never get.

So if you’re reading this in your mum’s spare room, baby finally asleep, feeling that strange flat ache and wondering why being ‘home’ doesn’t feel the way it’s meant to — it’s not just you, and you’re not ungrateful, and there’s nothing wrong with you. It’s the cost of the life you chose, and you’re allowed to feel this and still know you’d choose it all over again. Go and find your mum. Let her have the baby for an hour (she’ll love it). Sit in the garden and feel all of it for a while, because it’s worth letting yourself feel it.