Your Life Is Not Real Life. What Expat Mums Need to Hear Before They Go Home.
Hong Kong Expat mum
I sat around a table recently with a small group of women and listened to Linda Burgoyne speak.
If you do not know Linda, she is the Chief Executive Officer of Matilda International Hospital here in Hong Kong, a midwife, a Founding Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of Nursing, and a woman who has built an extraordinary life across continents. She has worked with the royal family in the UAE. She has set up safe and healthy midwifery services for the most vulnerable communities in East Asia. She has followed her purpose across borders and oceans and decades, and she sat in that room and described all of it with a lightness and a certainty that I found genuinely moving.
What struck me most was not the impressive career or the remarkable places. It was a theme that ran quietly through everything she said.
A sense of home and belonging wherever her purpose took her. Not waiting for permission to settle. Not living with one foot out of the door. Simply being, fully and without apology, wherever she was.
I drove home thinking about all the expat mums I know who are doing the opposite.
The Comment and What It Really Means
Your life is not real life.
Let us look at what this actually says. It says that a life built elsewhere, a life of chosen adventure and uprooting and rebuilding and finding your people in unexpected places, does not count in the same way as the life that stayed put. It says that the life your friends and family can see and understand and measure against their own is the real one, and yours is something else. Something impressive, maybe. Something a little exotic. But not quite serious.
I understand why people say it. They are not usually being unkind. They are trying to bridge a gap that genuinely exists, the gap between your everyday and theirs, and they do not always have the language to do it gracefully.
But here is what I want to say to you before you get on that plane.
Your life is extraordinarily real. It is just real in a way that takes longer to explain.
The friendships you have built in Hong Kong that became the family you chose when your actual family is twelve time zones away. The children who call multiple cities home and switch languages without thinking. The version of yourself you have had to rebuild from scratch each time you moved, each time you said goodbye, each time you started again in a new school, a new job, a new community.
That is not a less real life. That is one of the most demanding and most expansive versions of a life there is.
The Shifting Friendship and Why It Is Nobody's Fault
Something happens to long friendships when the lives behind them diverge significantly. You sit across from someone you have known for twenty years and you love them completely and there are whole hours of your recent life that you cannot quite convey to them. Not because they do not care. Because the context is missing.
You try to describe the school system and what it costs emotionally to navigate it. The particular loneliness of the summer when half your community leaves. The way Hong Kong feels in July. The MTR at rush hour. The view from a Saturday morning hike above the city. The goodbye that happened last month that you are still quietly grieving.
And it lands a little flat. Not because the story is not interesting. Because the story requires a different frame to fully understand, and that frame only comes from living here.
Lifelong friends are one of the greatest gifts there is. They knew you before any of this. That is irreplaceable. And it is also, sometimes, not quite enough.
What I see in the mums I work with is a kind of loneliness that does not have a clean name. It is not the loneliness of being alone. It is the loneliness of being with people who love you and still feeling like your most recent chapters are untranslatable.
This is worth naming before you go home. Not so you can brace for it, but so you are not blindsided by it. The people at home love you. And the conversation will sometimes skip over the surface of your life like a stone, because they do not have the ground underneath to catch it.
That is not a sign that the friendship has failed. It is a sign that you are living a life that requires two different audiences to fully hold.
On Identity and the Versions of You That Travel
Linda Burgoyne described her life the way someone describes a series of chapters, each one complete in itself, each one adding something to the whole. There was no apology in it. No sense that she had to justify why she had lived so widely rather than so deeply in one place.
Most of us are still working on that.
The identity question for expat mums is genuinely complex. Who are you when you are not defined by the city you live in, the passport you hold, the country you grew up in, or the country your children are growing up in? Who are you in the in-between?
I wrote about this more fully in an earlier post, on roots, home, identity, and the mental health of expat mums in Hong Kong, and I want to come back to it here because the summer season makes it acute in a particular way.
When you go home this summer, you will be asked to be the version of yourself that the people there remember. The one from before Hong Kong, or the one who visits every year and keeps things light and familiar. And there will be moments when that fits beautifully, when the familiarity of being known for a long time is exactly what you needed.
But there will also be moments when the self you have become here, the one who is braver and more capable and perhaps a little more complicated than the person who left, does not quite fit the conversation. When the questions stop just before the interesting part. When the story you want to tell is the one nobody quite asked for.
Before You Pack Your Bags
I want to name the guilt because I think it is in the room for most of us whether we name it or not.
The guilt of having a life that looks like an adventure when the people you love are managing something harder at home. The guilt of the school concert you missed and the sibling's wedding that clashed with something and the parent who is getting older and the friend who went through something difficult and you were not there in the way you would have been if you had stayed.
The guilt is real. And it coexists with the fact that the life you have chosen is also real, also valid, also full of its own kind of love and sacrifice and showing up.
Linda Burgoyne did not describe her life as a series of compromises. She described it as a series of choices, each one made from a clear sense of what she was here to do. That did not mean the costs were not real. It meant she had made peace with the fact that a purposeful life is not a cost-free one.
You are not living a lesser version of a real life. You are living a particular version of one. It has its own weight and its own gifts and it deserves to be spoken about with the same confidence as any other.
Here is what I want to leave you with as the school year closes and the flights home get booked and the summer begins.
Your life is real. The hard parts of it are real. The loneliness of it is real. The extraordinary community you have built in the spaces where community does not come automatically is real. The children you are raising across cultures and time zones and school systems are real. The person you have become in the process of all of this is very, very real.
The comment, when it comes, is not a verdict. It is someone trying to reach you across a gap they do not quite have the language to cross. You can receive it warmly and know, quietly, that it is not the full story.
You are allowed to come home as you are now. Not the version they remember. Not the version that makes the conversation easier. The actual you, with all the chapters, including the Hong Kong ones.
And you are allowed to come back. To Hong Kong. To this city that is also home. Without guilt. Without the sense that you are choosing adventure over belonging. Because you are not choosing between them. You are learning, slowly and sometimes painfully, that you can hold both.
Linda Burgoyne built a life of extraordinary purpose across continents and came back to Hong Kong and made this her home. Not because she had to. Because she chose it. Because home, as she spoke about it, was never really a place. It was a way of being in the world.
I think you know exactly what she means.
With so much love, and safe travels,
Lisel
If you are navigating the identity questions that come with expat life, the summer trip, the goodbyes, or the return, I work with women and families in Hong Kong and would love to hear from you.
www.ourflourishingfamilies.com/services • lisel@ourflourishingfamilies.com
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