The doorbell rang while I was prepping the dining room table to get started with homeschool. When I opened the door, I found a Hello Fresh box sitting on my doorstep. I wasn’t a subscriber to Hello Fresh, but this was the second time someone’s box had accidentally been delivered to me. I picked up the box and carried it into the kitchen, contemplating what to do with it.

I could open it and enjoy it myself. After all, it wasn’t my fault it showed up here. But before I cut the box open, I decided to look up the address. The blue GPS line meandered its way to the destination and calculated the distance. The house was just one street over.

I sighed as I looked at the box of ingredients, knowing what needed to be done. I slipped my shoes on, scooped the box into my arms, and made my way to the neighbor’s house.

We started around the corner of West and Hortense. There’s a eucalyptus tree I've walked past hundreds of times. As if by instinct, I looked up at it as we passed. It danced with the wind against the bright blue sky the way it always does on afternoons in Southern California. The air smelled like fall, like back-to-school mornings, and trick-or-treat nights. The setting sun beat through the magnolia trees, the freshly mowed lawns smelled only the way freshly mowed lawns can, and school bells rang their afternoon song. Suddenly, I was back—walking to school with friends, coming too fast down the street corners on my razor scooter, getting nervous when we passed the cute boy’s house on family walks after dinner. 

My husband and I celebrated our wedding ceremony in the Dominican Republic, where I am from. Several hours later, we jumped on an airplane that would take us to Florida. 

Wait, what? Isn’t the DR the perfect place to honeymoon? It is, it is. But, we were getting married through the fiancé visa, and the marriage license had to be signed in the States for us to be legally married. So, we arrived in Florida and spent our wedding night in separate bedrooms because my dad had been clear we couldn’t live together until the license was signed. (Don’t say it—I know what you are thinking). 

I’m six years into living overseas, and I can already  see so many distinct seasons that have shaped our time here. How we’re spending our daily lives and who we’re doing it alongside now looks completely different than even just three years ago, despite having lived in the same neighborhood and worked at the same school our entire time here.

I sat on my couch, sipping coffee, looking at a photograph of our recent trip to Colorado displayed on our smart TV. The Indie folk I started listening to while living abroad was humming along in the background. 

It had been a year and a half since we stepped back on American soil. I still remember the mugginess I felt as we walked off the plane and into the jetway. It was quite different from the crisp, fall, morning air that greeted us in 2018 when we landed in Munich, Germany. 

Our time abroad was officially over and the heartache of leaving a place that quickly became home began to set in.

I really wanted to hate it. And in an embarrassing admission of my own pride, I wanted my kids to hate it too.

When we finished the tour of the school that day, I didn’t hate it, and neither did my kids. In fact, we loved it.  We all agreed it was our next right choice. 

Sending my kids to international school was not on my radar. We started out our expat adventure in a corner of the world where homeschooling was our only viable option, and because we loved it, I assumed we would never entertain another route. Then, as people like us do, we moved. We found ourselves in a place with more options and in a season of our kids having different needs.

It was barely dawn when my eyes opened, yet I was fully awake. My long week—intensified by the mounting heat and humidity of the rainy season—had left me completely exhausted, and I hadn’t slept well. It wasn’t yet 6:30 a.m., and the air around me was already sticky and hot. Realizing the likelihood of falling back asleep was low, I rolled my eyes and flopped out of bed. 

“Is he ok? Are you ok?”

My friend’s message surprised me. She had innocently asked how my day was going and I told her how our neighbor was attacked with a bush knife while coming home by public bus. Was I ok? Not really—and yet, somehow I was. 

I think at times my abnormal life becomes so “normal” I no longer take time to process traumatic events. Being woken up by the cries of my sister-in-law telling the story of how thugs stopped the bus our neighbor was on and how he was attacked in the process was, of course, an unsettling way to start the day.

One of the expat influencers I follow on Instagram, Cecilia, lives on Svalbard—an island close to the North Pole. As you can imagine, it’s cold there. The extremely low daily temperature features heavily in this influencer’s stories. On Svalbard, there are no trees. The land is frozen tundra—permafrost—so there are no gardens. The sun shines twenty-four hours a day through the summer, but the high is only six degrees celsius. They call that the Polar Day. And in the winter, Svalbard experiences four months of complete darkness, called the Polar Night, and even longer without actually seeing the sun. It’s fun that Svalbard claims to be Santa Claus’ home, but it is literally the last place on earth I even want to visit, much less live.

I awoke with a heavy sadness clinging to me like the humid, tropical air around me. I’ve had vivid dreams before, but this one had felt so real. In the dream I was forced to say a final goodbye to my dad over the phone from 10,000 miles away. In real life, my dad had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer eight months previously, and we had just found out it was inoperable, making his diagnosis terminal. We already had plans to return to the States to visit, but that was still three weeks away. Not only that, we were currently visiting friends on a remote island an overnight ferry ride away from our home.

During the years we were preparing to move abroad, I was a stay-at-home-mom with a full time job fundraising support, and my husband continued to work at his job. Raising our salary for living abroad took a long time, for various reasons, so my daughter was already six when we left for language school. Her little years were spent in suburban paradise: we lived in an affluent, exclusive neighborhood with trails, pools, parks, and neighborly friends and acquaintances. Our home was a three-bedroom condo on the second floor, so I often felt like a fraud among the homeowners maintaining expansive HGTV-level homes with private yards. Yet, smallest home on the block aside, I belonged. I went to mom groups, coffee dates with friends, and had neighbors on whom I could pop in. We attended church with my husband’s family, spent every weekend playing with cousins, and deepened roots in our hometown that had been growing since we were babies.

In February 2004, I arrived in Beijing, China for a study-abroad year, excited about all the interesting things ahead of me. What I never saw coming was that it would change my entire life’s direction, and that this city would eventually feel like home more than any other city in the world.

In March 2020, I left Beijing for a three week business trip, excited about all the interesting things ahead of me. What I never saw coming was that my work permit would be canceled without warning, barring me from returning to my home and my husband. I didn’t know I would never return to China, and that my husband and I would still be living on separate continents nearly three years later. 

When I moved to Germany with my husband and one year old child, we figured we’d have two years to live here, three if we were lucky. We packed six large suitcases, bought three one-way plane tickets, and moved into a very tiny apartment we furnished on a tight budget from the IKEA discount section. I stocked my home with what we needed to get by. Why settle in when we only had a couple years here?

I stocked my heart in a similar fashion.

In the expat community, we are familiar with Sarah Turnball’s quote, “It is a bitter-sweet thing, knowing two cultures. Once you leave your birthplace nothing is ever the same.'' After moving to another culture, there is no returning to the former self. You become a different person than you were before stepping on the plane. 

But for our loved ones who have never lived outside their passport country, there is another popular saying: You don’t know what you don’t know. There is zero possible way for our friends and families to understand the complexities of how we changed, and who we are becoming as we grow into our new life as an expat without clear communication. We must be willing to share with them honestly.  

A little over a year ago, I hopped on a plane with my husband and our young daughter and moved across the ocean. For years, we had been praying and planning for this day. We participated in trainings about living overseas, received our undergraduate degrees in ESL education so we could teach in a different country, and completed courses on what felt like every element of what it means to live as an expat. However,I soon learned some elements of expat life can’t be taught via a training—they have to be experienced.