When Holidays Stop Being Obligations

Since we left France in 2007, our life has been built elsewhere. First came Japan, where Gaby was born. Then the Netherlands, Taiwan where M-Chan was born, New Zealand where Jaja was born in turn, and finally England, where we live today. Looking at this journey, I realize that it has been almost twenty years since we began building our daily life far from our country of origin. Twenty years of discoveries, adaptations, and moves, but also twenty years spent maintaining ties with those who stayed in France.

For a very long time, our holidays were not really holidays. Our time off, our savings, and our free time were devoted to one thing: going back to France to see family. It felt normal to us. When you live far away, you often feel a sense of responsibility toward those you left behind. You are the ones who left, the ones who are no longer there for birthdays, family meals, or everyday events. So we saved money to buy plane tickets and spent a few weeks rushing from one visit to the next. Looking back, I realize those stays were important, but they were rarely restful. We tried to see everyone, to make everyone happy, and to meet the sometimes unspoken expectations that come with returning home.

Over the years, one question eventually became impossible to ignore: when would we start living for ourselves? Because going back to see family is not necessarily the same as going on holiday. It is not the same as discovering a place you have dreamed of for a long time, resting, or simply creating memories with your own family without any particular obligation. For a large part of our adult lives, we organized our time off around other people, without really asking ourselves what we wanted.

Little by little, we started making different choices. There was Turkey, then Crete. Last summer, we went back to Okinawa, a place we deeply love. This time, we were not going there to visit someone or to fulfill a family duty. We were going because we wanted to. Because the trip made us happy. Because it matched our dreams and those of our children. That may seem obvious to many people, but it took us years to allow ourselves that choice without guilt.

Of course, these decisions are not always understood. When you live abroad, some people think holidays should automatically be spent going back home. As if living far away meant losing the right to travel elsewhere. The comments are sometimes direct, sometimes much more subtle, but they often express the same idea: if you are going on holiday, why are you not coming to see us? And yet the answer is simple. Because we did that for years. Because we devoted a large part of our holidays and our resources to maintaining those ties. And because today, we also want to build memories that belong to us.

There is also another aspect of our life abroad that is often misunderstood. We are regularly referred to as expatriates. Yet I do not really identify with that term. In the collective imagination, an expatriate is often sent abroad by a company from their home country, with an attractive salary and sometimes many benefits. That is not our story. We were hired locally in each of the countries where we lived. Our salaries were local salaries. In Taiwan, we lived on a Taiwanese salary. In New Zealand, on a New Zealand salary. We built our life like many other immigrants: working there, adapting to the local system, enrolling our children in the country’s schools, and fully taking part in the society that welcomed us.

That is why I feel more like an immigrant than an expatriate. Our journey has much more in common with people who chose to build their lives elsewhere than with employees temporarily sent abroad. And perhaps this reality also explains our current need to reclaim our free time. After almost twenty years spent far from France, we have understood that it is possible to love one’s family deeply without spending every holiday visiting them. It is possible to maintain ties without losing ourselves. Choosing today to travel for ourselves does not mean we love those who stayed in France any less. It simply means that after years of putting other people’s needs before our own, we are finally allowing ourselves to make room for our own wishes.