The Concept of Home
The Concept of Home
“So where are you from? “
“Um”
I was sitting across from someone I just met when the inevitable question sprung up. Given the circumstances, it was a perfectly reasonable enquiry, we were on a nine-hour train ride, expected to share a cabin until we arrived at our destination. This was part of a normal conversation one might exchange while travelling, questions of “where are you going?” and “where are you from?” were almost mandatory when meeting other people embarking on a similar adventure.
But for some reason, this question always stumped me. What was the correct answer anyway? I was Lithuanian by nationality, my name alone belying Baltic heritage. I had spent summers in the Baltic Sea and winters trudging through meter high snow to get to school in the mornings. But saying I am Lithuanian never felt one hundred percent accurate. It didn’t seem to fully capture my experience. I had grown up in Ireland, worn a hideous Scottish skirt as part of my school uniform for five years and talked so fast and with such urgency, you’d think my house was on fire. The truth is I never felt like I could claim either place as my own. Sometimes I wanted to tell people I grew up on a plane. It often felt like the most accurate description.
My family moved to Ireland when I was just five years old. Instead of taking a plane, we drove for three days across Europe, my parents taking turns at the wheel, me restless and talkative on the back seat. I remember how my aunt cried saying goodbye to me, packing me packets of sugar cubes that I had taken a liking to at the time. Even then I was more excited than scared, looking forward to my very first road trip, dutifully waving goodbye to teary-eyed family members as we pulled out of the driveway.
My first memory of Ireland is waking up in the car to a blur of stonewalls, the ancient rocks held together by the vines and hedges that clung to them. Those country lanes were something that would grow familiar to me, passageways so narrow that you’d have to drive into the ditch to pass another car. And yet I could never understand why they terrified my cousins when they came to visit. On weekends we’d take the family hiking, thick bushes blanketing the roadside, blocking the view. My cousins would sit, wide-eyed and amazed as the driver navigated the sharp turns and tight spaces, squealing if a particularly big tractor got too close. I rarely looked up from whatever I was doing to keep myself occupied during the journey, those lanes seemed ordinary to me, I was used to that well-practised dance of squeezing through to get to your destination.
I started school and learned the language, expanding my vocabulary from “I love you”, “hello” and “toilet” into a plethora of sentences. I made friends and shared in all the typical Irish primary school experiences, sat on those hard wooden benches during assembly and ate different vegetables to earn a ruler in the Food Dudes programme ( for those who aren’t from Ireland let me explain. Food Dudes is a healthy eating programme in schools that encourages kids to try different fruits and vegetables in order to earn rewards). We’d play “Flush” and “Bullrush” in the playground, until we got the latter one banned and had to resort to plain “Tag”. I traded my sandwiches for wafers and hated it when we weren’t allowed outside because of the rain.
But I never seemed to quite fit- I was living the Irish experience with a Baltic twist. At home, we ate koldūnai and žemaičių blynai and I’d wake my parents every Sunday to watch “Gustavo Enciklopedija” (a children’s show about this uncle that goes on adventures). Things got further muddled when at age 7 I started attending Lithuanian school simultaneously with my studies in Ireland. I’d get home from school, finish my Irish homework, then Skype my Lithuanian teacher and complete a different set of work. It was important to my parents that I could speak and write in my native language, that I wouldn’t lose essential parts of my culture.
I’d fly back to Lithuania every few months and attend school with my cousin for a few weeks, sitting exams in the subjects I studied over Skype in Ireland. I loved getting up on those dark winter mornings, pulling my jeans over a pair of tights and slipping my way to school through the snow that I never got to see in Ireland. At school in Lithuania, I was shiny, the “cousin who lives in Ireland” and I was often called to help out in the English lessons. I loved my classmates, they were funny and loud, in a way that my classmates in Ireland weren’t. It was fun to prank teachers or wrestle with the boys in the hallways until someone came to tell us off. I finished five classes like this, drifting in between two curriculums until I started secondary school in Ireland and everything became too much to handle.
Every time I got back to Ireland my friends would gleefully welcome me “home” and I’d slip back into the flow of life with absolute ease. When I returned to Lithuania my aunts and uncles would be glad that I was “home for the summer”, spoiling me with ice cream to beat the unbearable heat. It left me confused and questioning where did I really belong? Or if I belonged anywhere at all for the matter. It was only when I grew older that I began to feel like both statements were right. I was home, regardless of the flag or the language each country sported. Neither country could lay sole claim to that word - home wasn’t a place, it was an experience.
It was that feeling of having your mother bandage a scraped knee or your father read you a story before he kisses you goodnight. For me home was running barefoot, catching butterflies on my grandparent’s farm and being chided for climbing the apple tree with my cousins. It’s complaining about the horrible weather and being overly apologetic when you accidentally bump into someone in the supermarket. It’s the smell of fake tan lingering in school before a night out and rolling up bleary-eyed for taco chips at three a.m. in the morning. It’s my godmothers cooking, potato pancakes sizzling on the pan and wrestling the incredibly fat dog for some room on the bed. It’s singing “I Want It That Way” in the bus on school trips and chanting “Trys Milijonai” at basketball matches.
For those of us who grew up upholding two cultures, who lived fleeting lifetimes in a myriad of places, who spent their life questioning if they truly fit in a place -home is anything we want it to be. Sure we might not always look like others living in our “home”, we might have different accents and not participate in all of the same customs. We mightn’t always be the most obvious piece that completes the puzzle, but it’s not our differences that connect us, it’s our similarities.
Those shared experiences are what bind us, they shape our identities and allow us to relate to others. It’s what causes us to bond with people and accept them as our own - not nationalities. Just because you aren’t anchored to one country doesn’t mean that you don’t get to call a place home. Only you can validate your own experience. Only you get to decide where and if you belong. Only you can define your meaning of home.
I used to envy the people who were completely sure of their identity, who knew exactly where they belonged. But now I feel incredibly grateful for my imperfect experience. I’m glad that I got to grow up at an intersection between two cultures, that I got to learn from two value systems.
My Lithuanian heritage taught me to be more assertive, to speak up for myself when needed. It taught me love and loyalty and how to respect your family. It instilled in me the value of working hard and pushed me to be more independent. Ireland let me be creative, it nurtured an openmindedness that helps me be more empathetic and accepting of people. It taught me not to take myself so seriously, to go with the flow of things with a shrug of the shoulders and an “ah sure we’ll give it a go, it’ll be grand”. It showed me that friendliness will get you farther in life than animosity and that there’s nothing that can’t be solved with a cup of tea.
So when that stranger on the train asked me where I was from, I smiled when I gave my answer.
“I’m from Lithuania and Ireland. What about you?”