Living Abroad: What Does Home Mean to You?

I just booked a flight to Jakarta. Since then, I’ve been noticing something strange. Not the logistics of a long journey with two children, but what unsettles me is something much smaller: it's the words I use: Am I going home? Am I visiting? Am I travelling? None of them feel quite right.

If I say I am going home, does that mean that here in Italy, in the apartment we carefully built, where I raise my children, where our routines live, is not my home?

But if I say I am visiting Jakarta, the city where I was born and raised, the place where my parents and my friends live... does that make me a guest in my own country?

And if I say I am just travelling, it sounds too neutral, too distant, as if it carries no emotional gravity at all.

So when I start to tell people about this, I find myself hesitating, pausing mid-sentence, rephrasing. Because the truth is: I no longer know which place the word “home” belongs to.

There was a time when home felt simple. It was Jakarta, always Jakarta. Until I left. The first time I stayed away for three years was during my studies in the Netherlands. The small city I lived in, Leiden, felt so much like home to me. I felt like I belong there, and I could very well imagine that I wouldn't mind at all if I were to spend the rest of my life there.

When I returned after almost three years, I felt like a stranger in my own country. I had to readjust to speaking Indonesian every day. To conversations that revolved around local news instead of european, or international events. To colleagues who stayed after work to have dinner together, while I instinctively left at five, still carrying the rhythm of a different culture. For months, Jakarta did not feel like home. And yet, slowly, without me noticing exactly when, it did again. I had adapted well enough to find my place in it again.

Another time, I returned for my honeymoon, when I was living in Switzerland. That time, it felt less like returning, and more like saying goodbye. Like quietly acknowledging that my life was moving somewhere else.

Another time, I returned because one of my family member was very ill. That visit was filled with love, but also with guilt. I was there physically, but I knew I would leave again that I would continue my life elsewhere.

And then I returned again, after the pandemic, and also 18 months after that. Holding my son in my arms, I found myself asking new questions. Not about myself anymore, but about him: How much of this place is his home? How much of this culture will live in him? And what does it mean to pass on a home that I no longer fully inhabit?

Now, I am preparing to return again, this time with my husband and our two children: a family that exists independently of the place where I was born. Because we built another home, here, in Monza.

At first, it didn’t feel like it. We lived in temporary spaces, surrounded by borrowed walls. But when we moved into our own apartment, something shifted. We filled it with fragments of our past: furnitures from previous countries, photographs from different versions of our lives, souvenirs from our travelling together. And slowly, it became ours, it feels like us, it feels like home. It holds the sounds of our children’s laughter and crying. Our routines, our ordinary days, our simple life. It holds us.

As I am writing this note, I am understanding something I had resisted for a long time: Home is no longer a single place.

The last time I was in Jakarta, I noticed something new. I was happy there, being surrounded by family and friends, by familiar smells, by food and humour and memories that exist nowhere else. At the same time, I also missed my apartment in Italy. I missed the life we built there, the routines, the version of myself that exists in that space. For the first time, I felt it clearly: I was leaving home to go home.

For a long time, this felt like a conflict, I felt like I needed to choose. As if belonging to one place meant betraying another. But now, I am beginning to see it differently: It is not a loss, it is an expansion. Home is no longer the place where I was born, nor only the place where I live now. Home is the collection of places that have shaped me. The places where different versions of myself still exist. The places where I am someone’s daughter. Someone’s partner. Someone’s mother. It is Indonesia, it is Italy.

So, perhaps, the hardest part of living abroad is not leaving home; it is accepting that you will have more than one, and learning to belong to all of them.