I grew up in a big, loud and loving family in Passage West, Co Cork, in the 1980s. My parents enjoyed travelling and had an “anything is possible if you try hard enough” attitude. They renovated old houses in Cork and France, despite a meagre budget and speaking no French.

I was a shy kid, more often found behind my mother’s skirt. But the notion that you can change your situation whenever you want resonated, nevertheless.

I decided to go to England for a few months after graduating. Those months turned into six years, during which I qualified as an accountant and made great friends.

As those around us began to marry off and go home, my then-partner and I decided to move to Singapore for 18 months, and on to Sydney.

He was Irish, so the plan was always to go home.

But when we broke up in 2014, I found myself untethered from that expectation.

I enjoyed my job in the finance department of a fashion company. I had good friends and a comfortable life in Sydney. My sister lived two hours north, which helped soothe the homesickness.

So, without ever deciding to stay, I just didn’t go home. But I visited often.

[ ‘I was surprised to discover it is easier to be Irish in Australia than it is in Britain’Opens in new window ]

During one lunch with my mother, she said I must never feel guilty for pursuing my life abroad. She was proud of me and the opportunities I had seized. I felt very liberated by that conversation.

Shortly after that I met a lovely Australian man, and we have two wonderful kids. The idea of ever moving home faded more than anything.

My family in Cork, Australia and the States fly to see each other regularly, close despite the miles.

But mid-Covid, in November 2020, my father was diagnosed with terminal skin cancer. Securing travel-ban exemptions, we all flew home to spend one last Christmas together.

While at home that Christmas, my mother collapsed and was diagnosed with a terminal glioblastoma brain tumour.

She died 16 months later, and last November my father followed her.

‘There’s a thing that happens when you get that call that every foreigner dreads / When your world ends and spins and spins and you’re dizzy…’

The grief was crippling. It must be hard to grieve parents while seeing memories of them round every corner, but it is a different kind of hard to grieve your people in a world that never knew they existed.

The strangeness of this and the challenge I had to process it drove me to write this poem.

Moss
There’s a thing that happens when you wake up and find yourself to be a foreigner.
I don’t come from a land down under,
And I didn’t mean to end up here,
And yet my rolling stone came to a stillness and started to gather moss,
Moss like a sausage sizzle outside a DIY store and mossy friends and my own little mossy family,
There’s a thing that happens when you live between two places
With your heart and your focus split,
And your phone bills long and your evenings mornings and your mornings evenings,
And you kind of belong here and you kind of belong there and kind of nowhere but inside your own skin,
There’s a thing that happens when you get that call that every foreigner dreads,
When your world ends and spins and spins and you’re dizzy,
And you go there and say goodbye and then you come back,
And the world around you looks the same but forever different,
Like you’re looking through a net curtain at the other kids outside playing,
There’s a thing that happens when you want to curl in a ball and cry like a baby,
And the bell of not belonging tolls so loudly,
And then your mossy bedfellow reaches over to spoon you in the morning,
And your mossy kids climb into bed and demand a cartoon and a cuddle,
And your mossy friends smile and hug you and tell stories and make you laugh,
Until you’re almost part of the stonework.

Carol O’Donovan is from Passage West in Cork. She studied Commerce and French at UCC and is a qualified accountant. She lives in Sydney with her partner and two children, a boy (Tadhg) and a girl (Amelie)

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