Guest Post: Puppy Love – Saying Goodbye To Home

Note: I guest posted for Lindsey over at Lost in Cheeseland last week about my life abroad. In return, I asked her to write about living abroad, being an ex-pat and the struggles she faces. She shared a personal story that I think many of us can relate to. Enjoy!

Bio: Lindsey is the creator of Lost In Cheeseland: Musings on food, love, life and struggles in Paris. She is a Paris transplant from Philadelphia, married to a Frenchman and on a permanent quest to understand the idiosyncrasies of the French. Lindsey lives with her hubby and cat in Paris where she wistfully longs for accessible commodities like peanut-butter and Kashi products.  In real life, she is in charge of Marketing & Communications for an online multi-brand boutique. Check her out!

The last solid tie to my childhood has died. His arthritis no longer allowed him to maintain his once sprite stride, his ear and nose infections were endless and he was having more and more trouble getting comfortable. What’s worse, his sister died in September, before I got a chance to say goodbye.

Polly (front) and Buster (back)

Buster and Polly weren’t just dogs. They represented some of the happiest moments of my life, growing and maturing as I did. They symbolized a much less complicated existence where home was where family was, where it was associated with one location; an existence before France.

Three years ago I moved to Paris and began a new chapter in my life; one that, whether I wanted it to or not, pulled me from this comforting and familiar sense of home. It took me from my dogs which, in turn, drew me once and for all away from childhood. I may have been out of childhood for a long time but those fluffy love hounds were ingrained in my sense of self and fundamental to my identity.

They were there – as stable constants in a series of unhealthy and tumultuous relationships, providing support in the ways they knew how, via unwavering love and affection. Through the headaches of settling in Paris, the nights spent crying wondering if following a fantasy wasn’t, in reality, a royal lapse in judgment, and the struggle to find a strategy to foster effective flows of communication between me and my French husband, they weren’t there. I was forced to grow up and confront my pains head-on without the consolation of a furry hug at the end of a bad day.

They will forever be a part of me just as Paris has become instilled in my identity but it nonetheless breaks my heart to have been too far away to return the love and affection that they showed me, through their last days. That I was too far away to pay a formal goodbye to childhood and to my former understanding of “home”.

I’ve often talked about how the life of an expat inherently complicates one’s notion of home and this becomes particularly evident with each trip back to my hometown. One reader called this a mid-Atlantic feeling – feeling adrift out in the middle of the Atlantic, without a real sense of belonging to either country.  But I fear this feeling of homelessness and lostness that occurs living abroad, though in cycles, will only become more acute the next time I return to visit the States to a house without the dogs that made it a home. It is not just a question of accepting the loss of loved ones but accepting that the present eventually becomes the past, no matter how much we wish it wouldn’t.