Homesickness Versus Regret After Emigrating
You’re standing in a Canadian grocery store seven months in, and something as small as the wrong brand of rusks on the shelf puts a lump in your throat that has no business being there over rusks. Nothing is wrong. Nobody is hurt. And yet for the rest of the afternoon you can’t shake the question: did we make a mistake? Homesickness versus regret after emigrating is the hardest distinction to make from the inside, and it’s the one this piece is about.
That question is normal. What isn’t accurate is treating the feeling itself as the answer. Here’s where people commonly get it wrong.
Mistaking a wave of missing home for a verdict on the decision
A single hard afternoon carries no more information than a single easy one did. If a good day in month two didn’t prove Canada was right, a bad day in month seven doesn’t prove it was wrong. Homesickness comes in waves that are only loosely connected to how the actual decision is holding up — a phone call with news from home, a smell, a public holiday nobody else around you is marking. Treating each wave as new evidence is exhausting and it isn’t fair to yourself.
Grieving a place and grieving the people in it, as if they’re the same loss
They’re not. You can miss the mountain, the light, the particular way a Joburg thunderstorm arrives in the afternoon, and feel almost nothing when you think about going back to live there — because the people you actually miss are specific individuals, not the geography. Sorting out which one you’re grieving in a given moment helps. Missing your mother is a different problem from missing Cape Town, and it has a different, more direct solution: a call, a visit, eventually maybe her coming to you.
Carrying it alone because saying it out loud feels like betrayal
Couples who moved together sometimes protect each other from the truth — each one privately homesick, neither saying so, because admitting it feels like undermining a decision you both signed up for. That’s backwards. Not talking to your partner about missing home doesn’t make the feeling smaller; it just makes you feel it by yourself. The couples who do best tend to be the ones who let both people say “I miss it” without either treating that as a request to reverse course.
Assuming the feeling is permanent
It generally isn’t fixed. For most people it’s heaviest in the first year and softens, unevenly, after — not because South Africa mattered less, but because Canada slowly stops being entirely foreign. That doesn’t mean push through blindly regardless of what you’re feeling. It means a bad six months is not reliable evidence about what the next six will be like.
Deciding that wanting to go back means you failed
Some people emigrate, try honestly, and go home. That’s not evidence anyone did anything wrong. Staying in South Africa was always a legitimate choice, and so is returning to it after giving Canada a genuine shot — neither one is a lesser outcome than gritting it out somewhere that isn’t working for your family.
What actually separates homesickness from regret is usually simple to check: are the parts of your life you can evaluate — the job, the kids’ school, the day-to-day — going reasonably well, separate from how much you miss people? If yes, what you’re feeling is probably homesickness. If the actual, concrete parts of the life aren’t working either, that’s a different and more urgent conversation, and it deserves an honest one rather than another wave written off as “just” missing home.
Cape2Canada’s blog has more on the settling-in period if this is where you are right now.