Going Home for a Visit Can Feel Like Work

The visit shows us how long we have been away.

By Neil Solomon · 3 min read

Picture a couple named Gloria and Walt. They have lived abroad for two years and are flying home for a week. They have a list. Lunch with Walt's sister. Coffee with three old friends. A visit to the doctor. A dinner with Gloria's cousins. A stop at the house they used to own, just to look.

By day four, they are tired. By day six, they would like a rest. By the flight back, they realise they have not once sat still.

The trip as a duty

Several accounts I have read use words like duty, obligation and guilt. A person in Greece wrote about flying home twice a year for five days. Five days is short, and the list of people is long. A writer in Luxembourg described visits home that feel like an obligation, and the dilemma of where to spend a holiday when everyone expects you in the old place.

I find this honest. We imagine that moving away frees our calendar. For many, it fills it in a new way. Every person who loves us now has one chance to see us, and they all want the same week.

One account from Cyprus told of a journey of more than a day to reach a village at home. That is a long way to travel for a short visit. When the road is that long, I think the trip can only be done well if it is planned well.

The week after

What interests me more is what happens when people come back. One writer in Italy described the days after a visit as ghostly. The new house felt empty and the old one still felt close. Neither place had quite let go.

A person in France said they felt not fully American and not fully French. That in-between feeling seems to grow with each trip. At home, things have changed a little. Abroad, things are still unfamiliar. The visit shows us how long we have been away.

How it differs by place

• In Greece, Cyprus and Italy, the stories are about travel and the family waiting at the end of it.
• In Luxembourg, the dilemma is about where to take a holiday at all.
• In Slovakia, an American woman eventually left and wrote with a wistful tone, saying life there had become too comfortable. For her, the question of home had no easy answer.
• In Latvia, a woman who returned to her birth country felt a stranger there. She missed things she had never expected to miss.
• In Lithuania, one writer described a home she could not visit, only three hours away by distance, and the grief of that was heavy. I mention it because not every trip home is possible, and that is a loss of its own.

A short moment

Gloria and Walt sat in the airport.

"I need a holiday from our holiday," Walt said.

"Next time, three days with family and three days alone," Gloria said.

"Will they mind?"

"They might. I think they would mind less than we do now."

What I make of it

I think the visit home carries two jobs at once. One is love. The other is checking that we still belong. Both are real, and both are tiring. If we ask a single week to do both, it may fail at each.

It may help to see the trip not as a holiday but as a part of the life we chose, with its own cost in time and energy. Counting that cost before a move seems fair to me.