The Repatriated Expat: Life On The Other Side

By: Lucille Abendanon

My husband thinks it’s hilarious to tease me. And because he knows me so well, he knows exactly which buttons to press to detonate the entertaining reaction he’s after. He descends into fits of laughter imitating me, and to his credit it’s usually an Oscar winning performance. One of his favorite teases used to be about moving back to Durban, South Africa.

It would go something like this:

Him: “There’s a really great job opening, I think I’ll apply”

Me: “Oooh where is it?”

Him: “Durban” Huge grin.

Me, in a panicked voice: “No! Nope. Absolutely not. Not in a million years. I told you I’m NEVER moving back!”

I’d fall for it Every. Single. Time. Repatriating was, you see, quite simply my worst nightmare.

To be fair, my opinion of Durban was entirely subjective and not really based in reality. It derived instead from an emotionally turbulent past, which began with me moving there from England as a teenager, and ended with a dramatic and tearful farewell as I left for University all the way across the country near Cape Town. Yes, there was a boy involved. I eventually moved on from both, the boy and Durban, and I began to nurture a precocious desire to ‘blow this joint’, and so when my studies were over I hightailed it back to the UK. My husband to be, in the meantime, who I’d met in the final year of my M.A had landed a job with a global multi-national with it’s head quarters in…you guessed it: Durban.

Not even love could make me stay.

Fast forward nine years and the boy I’d met at University was now my husband, we had a two year old son and another on the way. Our shared love of adventure had reunited us and we’d embarked upon expat life. First Saigon, then Bangkok, then Istanbul. I loved the lifestyle, the travel, the challenges and I hoped it would continue forever. But as usual, life had other plans, and after almost a decade of hearing me say, ‘I’ll never move back to Durban,’ it decided to teach me a lesson.

We were nearing the end of our four years in Istanbul, and new job opportunities were being bounced around within my husband’s company. India was an option, and then this:

Him: “There’s a really great job opening, They’ve actually asked for me”

Me: “Oooh where is it?”

Him: “Durban” Deadpan.

Me, in a panicked voice: “No! Nope. Absolutely not. Not in a million years. I told you I’m NEVER moving back!”

And then: “Wait, why aren’t you smiling? Oh my God you’re SERIOUS?”

He was. Dead serious. We poured over the offer and I reluctantly conceded that it was too good to pass up. We had a toddler, another baby on the way, Durban was a good choice for the family right now, although the intrepid explorer in us desperately wanted to choose India and making a ‘sensible’ decision felt extremely foreign to both of us (we would have been totally fine in India, of course I know that!) But, Durban it was and from the second the decision was made I felt it, deep in the pit of my stomach, insipid and persistent: dread.

They say that repatriation is tougher than expatriation, and now I understand why.

I was afraid that repatriating made me a failure, that somehow we were copping out because expat life had become too much for us. I was definitely afraid of bumping into my teenage self, you know, the one who you’d give a good talking to if you ever met again. When I left Durban as an ambitious eighteen year old. I was entitled, bored and impatient to start my life; I suspected that I had grown up (of course I had), but I was genuinely worried that like Pavlov’s Dog I was conditioned to the old Durban stimuli and as a result I’d end up barricaded in my room, Radiohead blaring, moodily plotting my escape.

The thrill of negotiating a new culture was gone and everything was drearily the same. Yes, I could now read the labels at the supermarket and never had to worry about accidently pouring fermented milk over my cereal in the morning (it’s as disgusting as it sounds), but where is the fun in life without those steep expat learning curves and faux pas? I’d grown accustomed to standing out like a sore thumb, to getting by on patchy language skills and detailed hand gestures, to feeling overwhelmed a lot of the time, but here in Durban I looked the same, sounded the same and spoke the same language as everyone else and honestly my identity took more of a knock than it did when I first began my expat life.

My stories were obviously weird too. They’d often begin with, ‘when we lived in…’ and included references to far off places and experiences we’d had. I felt so self conscious even opening my mouth because invariably peoples’ eyes would glaze over and I could see them thinking, ‘oh grief, here she goes again.’ As a ‘repat’, how do you share your experiences with people you meet back home without sounding like a spoiled expat? I never figured it out, and so I just stopped talking about my life abroad, which was really difficult considering it constituted almost my entire adult life!

One thing that living abroad taught me is that you have to work hard to find your tribe. Relocating is about saying ‘yes’ to every social opportunity and eventually you’ll meet the kind of people who become like family. I’ve been fortunate enough to find people like this in each country we have called home, and back home in Durban I took the same approach. It took a good few months, but just before the birth of my second son I started to meet some really amazing people whose eyes neither rolled nor glazed over. Interesting, confident, humble people know other interesting, confident, humble people, and from that time on things began to fall into place. My husband and I joined a trail running group, and would be up before the sun three or four times a week running along the numerous trails, sugarcane fields and beaches that surround Durban.

Over time my days grew full with kids, school runs, running, starting my own business and my new friends, and that momentum created a new story for my life, a Durban story full of shared places and experiences. I missed expat life though. I regretted all those times I’d felt ungrateful or resentful over my situation, all the time I’d wasted feeling overwhelmed, the times when I’d wished I could just pack it all in and go home. Well here I was, at home, and I suddenly realized how incredibly fortunate I had been as an expat, what a gift expatriation is. I swore to myself then that if we ever moved abroad again I would not take one single day for granted, even the bad ones.

Life heard my plaintive cries once again, and three years later we were leaving Durban behind for a new life in The Netherlands. I had grown to love Durban again and it was a real wrench to leave, more so than when we had left other countries. My children adored the outdoor lifestyle and endless sunny days and they miss Durban still. But returning home did two things for me: it showed me how much I value and want my expat life (and all the challenges that it brings), and that home will always be home, even if it takes me a while to reacclimatize.

So these days I’m focusing on loving where I am, because who knows what Life has in store for us next.

Lucille Abendanon is a freelance writer and blogger whose interests include history and travel. She has three nationalities and if you ask her where she’s from, you’ll never get a straightforward answer, because there isn’t one. 

Lucille gets to reinvent her life every three years as she moves around the world with her husband, their two tri-national bilingual boys and the family cat. 

She has lived in England, Vietnam, Thailand, Turkey, South Africa and currently calls The Netherlands home, where she is hoping that her memories of the African sun will see her through the winter months. Lucille writes stories about her travels and expat experiences on her blog www.expitterpattica.com