There is a moment in the life of every emigrant when you realise that an emigrant is what you’ve become.
For some emigrants, I imagine, it must happen in a rush; maybe it’s when the airline tickets land in their inbox, or when they get their US green card or their Australian citizenship, or when they press their damp face against another in the departures hall of Dublin Airport. It might be a little moment, or a culmination of them: the first time that they don’t have to remind themselves to say “dollars” or “pounds” or when they realise they have stopped converting Fahrenheit into Celsius.
In my case, it has taken a bit longer. It has been 19 months since we left Ireland. At first it was for nine months in Australia, and then those nine months stretched to a year, and then the year in Sydney became a permanent job for my husband in California and a move with no particular expiry date, and no conversation in which either of us spoke the E-word aloud. Instead, it felt like a gap year that had stretched into two and possibly three.
Even having a baby daughter who got her Irish passport the same month as she got her Australian birth cert and her US visa didn’t make our status feel any more real. Nor did the decision to put our home in Dublin on the market, which was a practical rather than an emotional one, mostly based on the fact that we were ridiculously grateful to have escaped negative equity after house prices had risen. Nor did the realisation that we wouldn’t be coming home for Christmas nor the sight of the truck pulling up outside our house carrying the contents of our lives in Ireland. I got very good at being briskly practical about all of those things. I even sat dry-eyed through my daughter’s presentation to her class about Rosa Parks, delivered in a perfect American accent.
My moment finally came a couple of weeks ago, and in the end it was a quiet one. It happened when I opened my mailbox and found a big bundle of post from my old house in Dublin, sent on by the lovely new owner. Most of it was junk: the kind of mail that, if it had arrived in Dublin, would have gone directly from the postbox to the green bin. I sat it on my kitchen counter and realised that these were souvenirs from a life that is no longer mine. I never would have guessed it was possible to feel sentimental about Tesco Clubcard vouchers and eye-exam reminders. But they still haven’t made it to the recycling bin.
It feels strange no longer having a place to think of as home. We live in a rented house in a spectacularly beautiful place, in the Santa Cruz mountains, nestled among redwood trees. But it's not our beautiful place, not yet.
Home isn’t our Dublin house, which we bought in 2007; although we loved it, had become a source of financial stress rather than a place of refuge. It’s not my parents’ home, which I haven’t lived in since I was 17. It’s not – as much as I miss it – our lovely, light-filled rented house surrounded by ancient eucalyptus trees near Balmoral Beach in Sydney.
My notion of what home means roams around and fixates on disparate things. The pier in Dún Laoghaire harbour under a heavy grey sky. The Morning Ireland jingle and Cathal MacCoille's implacable voice cutting through the morning rush. A brown scone with raspberry jam and a mug of warm tea in Simon's Place on South Great George's Street. The sense of anticipation on Grafton Street before the shops open. The lights from the Quay on the river coming across the bridge into Waterford. The cries of the gannets in Dunmore East. 99s from Dingley's. Nativity plays. The easy shorthand Irish people adopt with one another. The "howeryes" and "mighty craics" and "sure you wouldn't be up to its" and the "sorry for your troubles". Friends. Family.
Home, I’m discovering, isn’t determined by an address or what it says on your passport. It may not be a physical place. It’s where your family is, of course, but it’s also the sum of your experiences and memories; the fragments of sounds and smells and feelings that you carry with you. I may have emigrated – I’m ready to say that now – but I haven’t left home.
What will Obama do next? Go back to student life, apparently
Just over six months into our new lives in California, I ticked off a significant item on my US bucket list last week: I saw Barack Obama speak live. The occasion was the White House summit on cybersecurity at Stanford University, but honestly, I’d have turned up to see him read aloud from a washing machine manual. I wasn’t disappointed: he is still capable of electrifying a room. Although the main thrust of his speech was on the threat from hackers and the need for a consumer bill of rights, the subtext was that he is thinking about the next chapter.
“Shortly after I took office, before I had grey hair . . . ” he joked at one point. At another, he referred to himself as “somebody who deeply values his privacy and his family’s privacy” and mentioned that he “will be a private citizen again”. He also joked about wanting to go back to being a student himself. Of all the things the future might hold, I doubt baked-bean dinners and three-bar heaters will be part of it.
