Expatriate Guilt

Alright, so the biggest thing that I have noticed while trolling almost every website and book on American emigration and expatriation is the surprising lack of emotions on moving away and being separated from your hometown (save for the endless comments on missing a good burger or having cell phone reception everywhere). Most books allocate a brief section on how hard it can be and sometimes tears are shed but really, the vast majority seem to glaze over it, like the writers somehow have blocked it out with the feeling of adventure and excitement, mixed with some comical culture shock.

And the biggest aspect of moving abroad that I have noticed is completely absent, the term I have now come declaring copyright status on... Expatriate Guilt!

Fine, people move away from their parents all the time, across the country, to every state in their grand old country, where the idea of a car/train/ferry ride home to visit becomes one of those classic 80s road trip movies. But going the next level, leaving the country, becoming an expatriate, means that a trip home has to be a precisely planned affair of packing, lay-overs and immigration/customs lines where every border agent seems more pissed off than the one before.

Expatriate Guilt becomes even more apparent when you realize what you are leaving behind, more importantly... who.

Your parents, siblings, grandparents... hell that bitchy old spinster aunt you only ever see on certain mandatory religious holidays but try desperately to avoid ... are now in another country, no longer will visiting on weekends or certain one day holidays be a possibility. Your trips home become worse than living in another state, you'll have to coordinate like NASA mission control to get home for just a week or so. And next comes the triage, what time can you visit to see the most of your family and yet avoid being drowned in the torrential floods of Thanksgiving/Christmas or summer vacation travelers.

Now lets take that horrible feeling of separation (I'm sure we have a few readers who aren't totally emotionally dead inside!) and match it with that loving but concerning level of stubbornness and a hint of xenophobia our baby-boomer parents seem to just extrude from every pore. These parental units will most often declare, "We love you honey/baby/creature who claims its my child, but we have no interest in ever visiting you in that country we've never heard of but instantly know is one of those weird, backwards countries, probably with no running water."

Now I am not nay saying on parents all over the world. Most of our parents are now in there fifties and sixties, they are in that weird twilight before retirement but their energy is sapped from thirty-years of a career they may or may not have chosen to use in order to support us when we were little kiddies. Travel to a foreign, exotic country (hell, we can even lump Canada into that) where they may or may not speak the language, where the climate is totally opposite to the one at home and certainly none of the food appears appealing for consumption, is completely, totally, absolutely, a big fat... NO!

And that leaves us back where we began, Expatriate Guilt, the feeling that you can only visit your family on an extensively planned mission that is over so quick, you feel like you never left the airport check-in counter, sprinkled with the gut wrenching knowledge that your loving but resolute parents are not going to visit.

It is something anyone moving abroad will most likely face. Be prepared for homesickness on a level you have never dealt with since your parents dropped you off on the first day of kindergarten.

Maybe this feeling is a passing one, that only appears when one is on the way out and quickly is drowned out by a new culture, language, exploration, discovery and guzzling as much as the local liquor as possible. I think I will attach that to the reasoning behind such little attention being given to this wonderful combination of elation, sadness and being kicked in the nuts - Expatriate Guilt.