“I want to come home to Bay Shore”, says our daughter; our exchange student-daughter to be precise – on video call with me. She is crying as she tells me that although she has been back to her country nearly 2 months, she feels out of place in the very place she had called home all her life, a place she left last year to come to America for one whole year. She expected many things to happen during her exchange year – to make new friends, to visit new places, to have an adventure and to return a more experienced person who had seen the world. She got all that! What she didn’t expect was to have her sense of home expanded and transformed forever.

I want to say something to help her. But words fail me. There is nothing I can say. She is not stupid. Indeed she is wise beyond her years; she knows the logic, the reality and the logistics of her life. She also knows she can’t say this to anyone else but me – her Mummy & my husband – her Dada, she can’t say this to her family or friends or she risks hurting them, and she is not the kind to hurt people.

Instead I just look at her beautiful face that I have come to love so deeply. Tears sting my eyes too. I let her cry. She writes to me later on chat “Thankyou for staying strong for the both of us.” My wise girl, she knows how much I miss her. That I too found home with her. And now she is gone & we are both a little lost.

Home – what a simple word. A four-letter word. A 1-syllable word. A not-so-hard to learn or pronounce word. No matter what language one speaks, home has a translation in every language – well, at least I think it has!

I Google words that begin with the word “home” – Homeland, Hometown, Homemade, Homebody, Homebred, Homespun – Homesick, Homeless – Homework! I stop – IT IS true that we all have to do some work to find home, and especially to find our way back home if somehow we have lost it.

In his brilliant Ted Tak “where is home?” Pico Iyer shares how the meaning of home changes based on the type of question one is asked. For e.g. does it mean “where you were born and raised and educated” or is it “where do you pay your taxes, and see your doctor?” or “where do you try to spend most of your time” or is it “which place goes deepest inside you”. I think for many of us, and I could be bold & venture that for most of us, especially in this country of immigrants, the answer to those questions even though it is technically the same question, is varied.

I think of the refugees in the world who are forced out of their homes & homelands; trauma that lives in their minds and plays out on their bodies, sometimes for the rest of their lives.

I think of the down-on –their-luck who because of an ill-fated hand lose their homes & become homeless. My husband & I once gave shelter to a homeless couple who had been living on the streets, to help them get back on their feet. After we told them they could stay with us, Nicole & Anthony slept for almost 36 hours straight in our home, their bodies decompressing from the fatigue of sleeping in unsafe conditions for months.

I think of the immigrants who willingly leave home, their valiant spirits dreaming immigrant dreams but not yet fully aware of the cost those dreams are likely to exact; the health impacts of being uprooted from the land that is coded in our DNA are only just being studied. An Argentinean friend once told me a saying they have in Argentina. “Once an immigrant, always an immigrant” I have felt the truth of these words my entire life. The words that now apply to my immigrant student-daughter.

And I think of all those who don’t fall into the dictionary definition of homeless – people going through other forms of trauma – ancestral, societal, familial; traumas that lives in our cells and manifests in anxiety, depression and dis-ease, medically called “disease” – the world is brimming with people who don’t feel at home with their own selves, their own bodies, minds and spirits.

So ok – there are way too many forms of homelessness and feeling not at home with where we are and who we are. Surely there has to be a way back home? As my beloved sister used to say and my student-daughter has now learnt by heart – “If there is a way in, there is a way out.”
Or in this case it would be more appropriate to say “If there is a way out, there is a way in!”
I sit with this for a moment.

In several mythologies around the world, there seems to be an emphasis on the importance of labyrinths. In the Indian story of “Mahabharat”, in the great battle of Kurukshetra, the villain clan creates a labyrinth that the Pandav brothers – the heroes of the story have to crack. The objective is to get in, to reach the heart of the maze, to fight the enemy at the core, and then to find a way back out. In the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, the hero Theseus needs to get inside the labyrinth, slay the monster and return safely back. It is a near-impossible task and myriads have died at the hands of the monster and Theseus who is brave & sure he can slay the monster, is still lost at how to come out of the labyrinth, how to find his way home.

One of my favorite quotes says – “Whatever the question is, the answer is LOVE.” And so it is for Theseus as the answer comes to him in the form of love. Wise Ariadne, who has fallen in love with Theseus gives him the “clew”; the Greek word for “Thread” and asks him to unroll the thread on his way into the labyrinth and use it to guide him back out. Theseus follows her advice and rest is history or I should say rest is Mythology!

We make this journey of life looking for a home – which actually appears to me is the place where we are loved – fully, wholeheartedly, just as we are. It doesn’t mean we don’t do the work – because finding home or love requires “home-work”. As Kahlil Gibran said “When love beckons to you follow him, though his ways are hard and steep.” World breaks everyone as almost everyone has to leave the innocence & safety of home someday either willingly or forcibly, but some return strong at the broken places. I think they are those who understand that our cracks are where light shines through. That nothing in this world can be perfect and all homes are fleeting. But the love that we feel remains the true shelter.

So maybe the only right response to my immigrant student-daughter saying “I want to come home” is simply “I love you too.”

Swati is a loved wife & mother – of cats as well as two daughters; her miracle-children.
More than a filmmaker/storyteller, Swati turns ideas into experience. She is also an environmentalist and a first generation immigrant to the United States. She can be reached via Linkedin and swati@TiredAndBeatup.com