Looking out over the fields into total freedom …

“How many coffees are you drinking? That’s your third one today. You’re going to have a heart attack!”

-- photo taken by my sister Barča --

I’m back home for the holidays … and that means one thing: parental supervision. My first evening here was a peaceful family idyll: we all sat down in the living room and laughed over a box of photographs from my childhood. For once, I was happily drinking tea from my mother's cups; without the bitterness that creeps into every meal and every drink I prepare – the taste of being tired of looking after myself.

Second, third day … I started to crave the solitude of my apartment in London.

“What are you reading? What page are you on?”

“Do you have a boyfriend yet?”

“What are those pictures?” (Peeking over my shoulder when I log on to Facebook.)

“What time did you wake up today?”

“How much did your plane ticket cost?”

“Do you have any clothes that need washing?” (Rummaging through my suitcase full of dirty socks and knickers without asking permission.)

“You’re not eating enough fruit.”

Arrrrgh. The questions! The life advice! The intrusions into my privacy! How on Earth has an incompetent child like me managed to survive on her own in foreign countries for nearly eight years?

There is no book that better describes the feeling of an expat returning home than Kundera’s Ignorance. I first read it back in boarding school, but even now, the passages that I had underlined as a teenager still seem just as relevant.

“Irena had always felt less pretty and less intelligent in her mother’s presence. How often had she run to the mirror for reassurance that she wasn’t ugly, didn’t look like an idiot …? Oh, all that was so far away, almost forgotten. But during her mother’s five-day stay in Paris, that feeling of inferiority, of weakness, of dependency came over her once again.” (page 21)

“She left here as a naïve young woman, and she has come back mature, with a life behind her, a difficult life that she’s proud of. She means to do all she can to get them to accept her with her experiences of the past twenty years, with her convictions, her ideas; it’ll be double or nothing: either she succeeds in being among them as the person she has become, or else she won’t stay.” (page 37)

-- photo taken by Dad --

“And then too: everybody thinks we left to get ourselves an easy life. They don’t know how hard it is to carve out a little place for yourself in a foreign world.” (page 40)

“By their total uninterest in her experience abroad, they amputated twenty years from her life. Now, with this interrogation, they are trying to stitch her old past onto her present life. As if they were amputating her forearm and attaching the hand directly to the elbow; as if they were amputating her calves and joining her feet to her knees.” (page 43)