Wolfsburg looked exactly the same, and that was the strange part. The city had not changed at all. My reason for going there had.

Wolfsburg without my parents

We spent a weekend at the Autostadt, amongst the glass towers, the cars and the families with strollers, with the canal running past as it always has. For most of my adult life, Wolfsburg meant one sentence: we are driving to see my parents. That sentence came with a whole routine attached to it, the bags in the trunk, the coffee and cake waiting, the familiar streets on the way in.

That sentence does not exist anymore. My parents are gone, and the city stands there as if nothing has changed. I walked through the Autostadt like any other visitor, and somewhere between the car towers and the café a quiet question showed up: what connects me to this place now? I did not have an answer that weekend, and I am not sure I have one today.

I was always the American girl here

This is where I went to school in Germany, and for most of that time I was the American girl. It was rarely anything dramatic. It was the teacher who corrected my English into British spelling and pronunciation, and the classmates who asked me to say something in American, as if it were a party trick that I had to perfom in order to fit in. It was the Schublade, the drawer people put you in before they know your name, and mine said American, a not so intelligent species. Once you are in it, you tend to stay in it. You can speak perfect German and still be the one who is from somewhere else.

I had no words for it back then. I only knew that I was here, and also slightly next to here.

Maybe home became a person before it became a place

Later in my life came Frankfurt, nine months of work, speed and a life that looked good on paper. I moved backed to Braunschweig. Here is where I met my husband. Later a terraced house in Wolfenbüttel: weekends, ordinary evenings, long walks that did not need to go anywhere.

I think that is when home quietly changed shape. It stopped being a city and became a person, because wherever he was, I could breathe out. I did not plan that, and I only noticed it much later.

The decision that made complete sense at the time

Then my husband got a job in Hamburg. We had a baby and no family nearby, and on one income a house in the countryside made more sense than an apartment in the city. Someone had to be home with our son, and I was the one who took on the job.

I want to be clear here, because it would be easy to tell this story backwards. It was not a mistake. We sat at the kitchen table, looked at what we had and made a sensible decision. Many of you have sat at that same table, weighing his secondment, the school question, the visa and the one career that had to come first. It made sense. It made complete sense.

Twenty years later

Here is what I did not see coming. Some decisions are perfectly reasonable when you make them and still have consequences you could never have calculated twenty years later.

Living rural meant commuting for every job that came after. It meant looking for flexible work and then freelance work, because that was what fit around a child and a long drive. Each of those choices was reasonable too, and each one added up quietly: fewer years paying into a pension, a career path with gaps that a German HR department reads very differently from how you lived them, and professional doors that once felt open and no longer seem as easy to walk through. Nobody hands you that bill when you make the decision. It arrives later, in installments.

And now I am starting again

I am about to turn 59, and I am officially arbeitsuchend. I left my job this year, and I am building my coaching practice up again, in English, for women whose story looks a lot like mine.

Some days that feels like the most honest work I have ever done. Other days I open a job offer for 20 to 25 euros an hour and sit with it for a while, with my education, my experience and everything I know. The doubt arrives right on time and asks whether I have been fooling myself.

I am not telling you this for sympathy. I am telling you because starting over at 59 is not so different from starting over at 39 in a new country. The questions are the same: who am I here, what do I bring, and does any of it count?

The question I keep asking

I do not have a tidy answer to where home is. My parents are gone, and with them a version of Wolfsburg I can only visit in memory now. Places change their meaning without asking your permission. Frankfurt was nine months, a chapter rather than a home. Hamburg is a commute. The village where I raised my son is where my house stands, and I still would not call it the place I belong.

What I do know is that time alone did not make me feel at home. Twenty years did not do it, and decades in this country did not do it either. Belonging is not something time hands you for staying long enough. Wolfsburg was home for a long time, not because I ever fully belonged there, but because the people I belonged to lived there.

Maybe home is not completely geographic. Maybe it lives in a few people, a few rooms and a language you can be fully yourself in. For me, it lives partly in English, partly in German, and partly in the Denglish we speak at our own dinner table.

For anyone who thought she should have arrived by now

Arriving is not a deadline you missed. Maybe you came here for his job, and it has been two years, or five, or fifteen. Your life is set up. The kids are in school, the Anmeldung is done, and you know where to buy decent bread. And still a part of you is waiting to feel arrived. Nothing is wrong with you for that.

If you want one thing to try, stop asking where home is and write down where you feel like yourself. It might be a person, a room, a walk, a language or a time of day. Keep the list where you can see it. That list is a map of your home, and it is allowed to be scattered.