On Heimweh
By Jenna Brack
@jennabrackwriting
I stand at the edge of a gravel parking lot and stare across an open field of green grass, sparsely dotted with clover. The flat earth stretches out, unhindered, until it meets a small farm: wooden barns with low rooflines, a cluster of cows moving their heads up and down, a tractor connected to a red plow. To my right, a line of wind turbines slowly rotates against a gray sky, the clouds heavy with rain. The scene feels strangely familiar—it has an almost, but not quite quality—as though if I squint and pull myself back in time, this seamlessly flat earth and open sky could be central Kansas, the land that raised me.
But, as they say, I am not in landlocked Kansas. I am in the Netherlands, a country whose largely flat terrain is created by silty deposits from the North Sea and an impressive system of water-controlling dikes, a coastal area where several of Europe’s rivers find the open waters of the ocean.
Next to me, my kids scrape their mud-caked shoes across the grass, following their mother’s orders—those shoes are not entering the car like that. They laugh and breathe hard, rejoicing over the freedom I have just given them to run in the rain.
Eight months into living abroad in Germany, we have crossed the border for a short, late-summer excursion. We have just eaten Dutch-style pancakes in a fairytale-themed house, surrounded by large wooden climbing structures and colorful trampolines—the stuff of childhood dreams.
Although it’s raining and the playground is a mess of puddles, I released the kids after breakfast to play, blessing them to ruin their clean clothes and shoes.
Now, half-regretting my decision over the sight of all that mud, I pause before unlocking the car and turn toward the horizon. Before fully considering it, I let my internal thoughts slip out.
“It’s flat here, just like Kansas,” I say.
The kids stop their shoe-scraping and look up. Then, nearly in unison, they both sigh.
“We miss Kansas,” they say. Their tone shifts from high-pitched squeals of jumping on muddy air pillows and arguments about who was able to climb highest and jump farthest, to the somber realization of those who have realized just how far they are from familiar ground. Although they have technically never lived in Kansas, I know what they mean. Both sets of their beloved grandparents are there, one on a farm that looks much like the one we can see now. For them, as for me, Kansas represents a place where you are known and loved.
Home.
***
Heimweh: the German word for homesickness. Anyone who has traveled beyond any border—a new house, new job, sometimes even a simple walk down the street— knows this feeling of longing for somewhere else, for a place more familiar than where you are standing.
Make no mistake, our expat life has been full of adventure—cross-cultural experiences, new friends, muddy romps through playgrounds, stunning horizons. But even exciting change never comes without some loss. Grief is also woven throughout our lives, right alongside the adventure, slipping into the quiet cracks of our days. One moment, we are all celebrating that it is not one hundred degrees here in summertime, or marveling over a castle five minutes from our house. The next, I am innocently preparing to drive to the grocery store when a child slides into the backseat and suddenly declares, “I miss Nana.” Then, for a few minutes, we are all hijacked, transported to another world where grandparents exist.
The expat experience, as it turns out, is always an act of holding two things together: where you came from and where you are. You find reminders of home mysteriously tucked into low-hanging clouds, pancake platters, even the flat line of the horizon.
For my husband and me, the moments of homesickness are tempered by the knowledge that we are here temporarily, merely passing through. But for the kids, as a wise mentor reminded me recently, “This is their one big life.” Childhood is formative, as are the places where we spend those years. Anyone who has been a third-culture kid knows the tension: you belong and don’t belong, you would rather be eating food you recognize and can pronounce, and you do not always understand why your parents are so wildly enthusiastic about touring medieval castles and cathedrals, especially when you could be playing video games.
At least, this is what I gather from observation. I can’t fully understand, as someone who spent her formative years sleeping over the same patch of dirt.
Still, I know something of heimweh. I remember one particularly homesick summer myself, as a teenager who left home many times for camps and other trips. In each case, I agonized over whether to go—then, once away, immediately wished I could turn around and go back home. One of the trips was for “future teacher camp,” where I was stuck in a dorm room on a college campus making fake lesson plans instead of hanging out with my friends at the mall. It seems so small to me now—funny, even—but it mattered then. Anytime I called my mom while away that summer, I poured out my complaints and regrets as though we were having an altar call.
At the end of the summer, my mom wrote me a letter. I was a teenager, so I felt awkward about it—My mom wrote me a letter? Weird—but all these years later, I can still feel myself holding it, sitting on my bed surrounded by yellow-painted walls and a messy bookcase and my poster of the Eiffel Tower, with my mom’s loopy cursive open across my lap. She wrote that she had been watching me that summer, struggling and wrestling while away, especially when I had ended up in places I did not want to be. She delivered some unwelcome truth—this won’t be the last time you feel that way—but she also told me that if I let them, walking out these seasons could teach me something about acceptance and trust. In her own handwriting, she told me she loved me, and that I would be okay.
Of course, I already knew everything back then, so I’m pretty sure I tucked the letter away with no more than a mumbled thanks.
But I wonder, now: was she writing for teenage me, or for this much older version of me, navigating the unknown and unfamiliar as a mother myself?
We never know as mothers, do we? We do the best we can, navigating both the adventure and struggle alongside our children, offering stories of hope, trust, and security while our kids are with us, knowing they will also experience the range of being human—that they will be joyful and afraid and scared and homesick, like every traveler who has set out on an unknown road.
***
After our collective sigh of heimweh, we carry on with our adventure in the Netherlands, then promptly return to a messy house and spend the rest of the summer in a swell of neighbor friends, late nights, endless frozen pizza dinners, and dirty socks on the floor. The doors stay open from all the coming in and going out, and the breeze of a new place wafts in and out of our house—which feels increasingly like home.
Whenever the sighs of homesickness come, we try to talk about them and give them space, until they emerge back into laughter and exploration. Some of parenting in a new place feels different, but so much of it is the same: guiding, answering questions, fielding complaints, saying prayers, wondering what the next chapter will bring. We don’t know—can’t know—the end of the story.
But letters from my mom, the kids’ Nana, still arrive at regular intervals, her loopy cursive crossing the ocean from Kansas and finding us here. The kids rip into the envelopes addressed to them, pillaging for stickers or comic strips from the local newspaper, and I discover the remains of these letters discarded all over the house, fully read or half-read or unread, I’m not always sure. I tuck them into memory boxes and desk drawers, saving her words for my kids, adding them to the words I am collecting for them, too—all the stories I am recording about this season in our family’s life.
Maybe they need them now, or maybe they will someday find themselves standing on another unfamiliar horizon, feeling that sense of almost, but not quite. I hope they find some reminders of home, even there. I hope they sound something like, I love you, and you’re going to be okay.
Guest essay written by Jenna Brack. Jenna is a writer, teacher, and celebrator of the arts. Her creative work has appeared in Fathom, Every Day Poems, The Sunlight Press, Mothers Always Write, and others. You can connect with her on Instagram and read her occasional musings on Substack.