Family

I'm sure every emigre finds the same thing... It's very special the first time you have your family visit you in your new country of residence.  I was very lucky and my first visit spanned the whole Christmas, New Year and January summer holiday period... an entire 5 weeks, most of which I managed to get off work too!

It was my Mum who came to visit, someone who could have had the opportunity of being a '£10 Pom' many years ago, but who never had any inclination to live in, or even visit, Australia.  When I'd left the UK she'd promised me she'd make one visit to my new country and this was it!  We'd deliberated about whether mid-summer was the best time to visit (very hot, expensive to travel and everyone on summer holidays) but in the end she'd said she wanted to see the worst Australia could throw at her, so we'd gone ahead!

So in her 5 weeks here, she got a wet Christmas Day (which she could have had back home!), struggled with Sydney's humidity (despite relatively low temperatures, mostly under 30 degrees), experienced 44 degrees of dry heat in Melbourne with no issues and fell in love with Adelaide - more specifically the Adelaide Hills and McLaren Vale wine regions!  She also got to see the awesome light show on St Mary's Cathedral, experienced a deserted Circular Quay at 2am on Christmas Morning, saw La Boheme in the Opera House, had a prime view of the fireworks on Sydney Harbour New Years Eve and got to experience Sydney's Australia Day celebrations.  She went home talking about "next time I visit I'd like to do...." which I can only assume means this won't be just a single visit to my new country!! 

Lovely though it is to see your family in your new country and know that when you talk about things, people, places they've been there or met them, I think sending them off at the airport is even worse than them sending you off when you emigrated.  Luckily I'd anticipated this and made sure that I had plans to not be at home and to be around people on the evening she went so everything didn't feel empty and bereft.  Despite that initial reaction, I've actually found life has been easier and I've felt much more grounded since the visit.  I think when you emigrate, you focus on the fact that you need to "fit in" to your new country, meet lots of people, make lots of friends and in the process can lose some of the essence of what is you.  I certainly feel like I've regained some integral parts of me that seemed to get lost or buried in the process of the emigration upheaval and for that I am truly thankful.