Finding the Road Back Home Again

by Helena Antolin Cochrane

for Writers' Block: A contribution from our AWA Writers' Group members

I spent my last few days in Singapore in a hotel, and the weather cried with me, rainy and dreary, but also suffocatingly hot, and then I knew I was ready to move on from my five years there. With our landing in New York’s JFK airport in early September 2023, the rain was equally gray, but the heat did not force itself down upon me so hard, and my heart could decompress. Tired, I still felt sufficiently braced to start the next chapter. My spouse S and I had decided we would take on an experiment in city living back in the US.

When we had moved to Southeast Asia, we undid our ties from our 32 years of suburban living. Moving back to the US, we had pondered whether that great energy we had absorbed by living in Singapore, the most beautiful and orderly of Asian cities, could also be found in Philadelphia, renowned for both its grittiness and a posh upper crust. 

Our landing place on Chestnut Street was an extended-stay hotel just a block from one of the city’s finest parks. In Rittenhouse Square, the wealthiest emerge from elegant brownstone houses to walk gorgeously pedigreed dogs on stately landscaped, sun-dappled lawns under towering Sycamore trees. Years earlier, we had trekked to this park with our young son to play, and it still offered the beautiful landscape, public art, and vibrant community life we had cherished then. 

But in 2023 there was also a waft of marijuana in the air and many people who clearly had no other home to go to. Was this our home now too? We had expected more chaos, grime, and outrageousness than we’d known as young marrieds. S and I had a nervous laugh: We had chosen to come back, not to our sweet little suburb but to our American city, and now the city was showing what it had in store. But this decision to come back from Singapore was one whose time had come. We wanted to be closer to family, and our offspring joined us right away for dinner, a ball game, a bike ride, companionship.

Months into this latest new life, I am consoling one of my daughters, K, as she prepares to move across the country to a job she’s been dreaming of, in a place she has never lived. In the course of five years, this is her third experience reshaping her life around an unknown landscape. She has packed more U-Hauls than I ever would want to, lugged her belongings out of suddenly high-rent zones, and become familiar with the local hardware stores and secondhand networks in three unique cities and time zones. Not I. I never really considered myself a homebody, but the record may dispute that.  

In our five years in Singapore, we absorbed the rent hikes and landlord’s quirks rather than pack up. In our child-rearing years, we stayed with the starter home well past any realtor’s prediction that we’d be upsizing as the kids grew. Moving was daunting enough to me that I avoided it every time there was another solution. For K, each move was equally the last best choice: through the pandemic and all the changes it wrought, survival was contingent upon getting to the next place, not remaining where she was at the time.  

I recall my own sleepless nights and repeated sessions with the calculator on arrival and departure: How will any of this fit into that container? How will I manage without this network I’ve woven? Where to live? What to leave behind? Watching her do all this, I know I have to listen when she needs to ask, exclaim, complain, sigh, and gnaw at her fingernails. Listen when she needs to share, and be ever ready for that moment. 

Transitions like these are monumental and awe-inspiring. My daughter’s stress strikes a chord it could not have five years ago. Taking the leap to try something in a new place can be so exciting when we choose it. My tendency over the years has been to establish a steady routine, and to take little leaps toward adventure and excitement that relied on a firmly placed safety net. My parents were peripatetic refugees from World War II,  arriving in Halifax, Canada in 1956 a month before their fourth child was to be born. Fully considered, their story seems nearly impossible, and though it has always been a part of my background lore, it was never a thing I directly experienced. 

Last October I was up to my eyes in boxes and having to decide as I opened each whether to throw out or keep its contents. Each decision had consequences I could feel in my heart and muscles. I had to lift, move, and collapse boxes, then carry things to be donated or dumped. It was a humbling wave of material goods, accumulated over 36 years of married life. We finally removed the last carton from our rental apartment on the last day of October and could see all the walls and the floor. In November, the shipment from Singapore arrived, and the herculean process began again. K set out for a 3,000 mile drive in mid-February, with a car packed to the roof, including plants and her cat.

Curious, for my daughter and me to be in such similar circumstances at such different ages. There is a great deal still to be discovered in our unfolding stories. S and I have accumulated the benefits of long years of working, and can manage any of these logistical and financial stresses more easily than the next generation. Still, at times, I find myself envying people who remain well settled. There have been many times since 2018 when I wondered what had possessed us to pull away from our reassuring routines and communities. Even though we had chosen the grand adventure, quite a few steps along the way seemed mired in loneliness and uncertainty. But we take the steps we must, we reach for the footholds that may bring either excitement or stability, and we gratefully receive the supporting hand extended in welcome each time it appears.

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	Helena A. Cochrane has been a member of the AWA Writers’ Group since 2018.  Though she left Singapore in September 2023, she is still an alumna member of the AWA, and continues to enjoy the support of the writers.
	The AWA Writers’ Group meets the second and fourth Thursday of each month. For more information, send an email to writers@awasingapore.org "If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it" Toni Morrison