Unexpectedly, I wept this morning as I read a blog of a friend who has returned to her motherland, a return to her childhood homeland. This caught me off guard, unawares. The grief of longing and envy hit me. Deeply, I wished to be in that place of having settled and feeling like I was at home, in my own place, or feeling the sense of breathing out somewhere.

I have no throughline. No sense of unbroken connection from my history, my ancestry, my life: to place or people or family.

The wish of belonging to a sense of place is such that I find I want to put roots down anywhere I live and find that I can’t. The unbelonging in sense of place has a corollary in that I feel more unfixed and randomness in where I end up, which fuels disappointment and restlessness in me. 

There is an untetheredness that permeates my life as I move around from place to place with partners or work. Always searching for that elusive space to feel grounded. 

Looking for this connection in parts of the world, I have had romantic links to a few. At first, my imaginings of visiting Australia were all about finding a place to belong. I wanted to be an Aussie. When I eventually arrived there to spend time with my birth mother and family, I discovered that I was, by accident of birthplace, entirely British. The Australian culture is not mine. There is no sense of coming home to be found there.

In my adoptive family, we had links through my father to Dorset, particularly to Corfe Castle. I have spent 56 years feeling like that was some sort of home and had seemingly a therapeutic throughline that I clung to. I visited often, every important person in my life has been there, I got remarried there – a dream come true. 

And then, this week, I find myself saying I won’t go there again. Not out of any petulance or angry feeling, just some deep knowing. I was shocked and so is J. How is it that a place which held such memories and gathered me in such a way that I longed to return can suddenly be seen so differently?

I felt it shift the last time we visited in 2021, with the sense that I didn’t need it so much. It has been a safe space, a place I held in my heart as a  certainty. This was not my last experience. Still lovely but the magical feeling of it had gone. I don’t have a full understanding of this even now.

As I came to this morning after my surprising reaction to my friend’s news, I began to wonder if I need to be moving on. Where can I lay some roots down? Do I need to move to my childhood home- Yorkshire does have a certain pull to it, it feels familiar and I have a sense of being in a place I understand when I am there. Never mind that my childhood there was not happy, that isn’t the issue, somehow I fit better there…

It is a conundrum. J and I decided to be where we are because it is new for us both. After nearly nine years here do we need to change it? He has a pull to his hometown, where he does have through line and belonging. I have a different pull; to search for my tethering and see where that takes me. 

The page turns and I am faced with a blank sheet …