What once felt like being caught between two worlds can become the ability to bring them closer.

Some days, I carry Finland without noticing its weight. Other days, a familiar melody, a few Finnish words or a photograph of birch trees brings it so close that, for a moment, I almost forget how far away it is.

I was eleven when I stepped off a plane into Australia. The sky felt impossibly wide, the light sharper, the language too fast for me to follow. Everything around me was unfamiliar, and I soon learnt that fitting in would make life easier. I softened my accent, explained my name and grew accustomed to food that tasted nothing like home. Little by little, I learnt what helped me belong and what made me stand apart.

At eleven, you know you are saying goodbye. You do not yet know how many times, over the course of a life, you will have to say it again.

For those of us who leave a homeland, goodbye is rarely something we do only once. It waits at the end of visits, in the last embrace before an airport departure, in the moment we turn away because staying any longer will make leaving harder. We go home to people we have missed, only to miss them again. And as the years pass, we become more aware of all that happens in our absence, and how much may have changed before we return.

You learn to leave, but that does not mean it stops hurting.

I was old enough to remember Finland clearly, yet young enough for Australia to shape the person I would become. While I was learning to find my place beneath these wide southern skies, part of me was still walking through the forests I had left behind.

For years, I felt uprooted. Life was moving forward here, but there was another life I sometimes imagined, the one that might have been mine had we stayed. I wondered about the girl who would have grown up speaking Finnish without having to think about it, surrounded by familiar places and people who needed no explanation of where she came from.

I have grieved that life, even while loving the one I have lived.

The longing finds me in small moments. The scent of damp earth, a familiar song, a glimpse of a lake through the trees. Suddenly, I can almost feel the cool evening air and hear gravel beneath my feet. An ordinary moment opens into a memory, and I am surprised once more by how deeply I can miss a place after so many years.

Yet Finland has remained with me in more than memory. It lives in the stories I tell, the recipes I make and the values I carry. It lives in the sisu of the women before me, whose quiet endurance has helped shape my own. It is there in the comfort of familiar words and the way my heart responds when I hear Finnish spoken around me.

For a long time, I thought belonging would be simpler if I could choose. Perhaps holding Finland a little less closely would help me feel more at home in Australia. But Finland was woven into me, and Australia was becoming the place where my life unfolded, where I loved, raised a family and gathered memories I would never wish away.

I could not choose without setting aside something precious.

I understand this more gently now, especially when I look at my grandchildren. They are growing up beneath Australian skies, yet they speak of their Finnish roots with a pride that moves me. They listen to my stories and carry that part of themselves with an ease I did not have at their age.

What I once tried to make less noticeable is something they are glad to claim.

I think of the eleven-year-old girl who worked so hard to fit in, and I wish she could see them. I wish she could know that the name she explained, the language she spoke and the homeland she missed would one day be part of a story her grandchildren wanted to hear.

Watching them, I have begun to see my own place differently. For so long, I felt the distance between my two homelands as something that separated me from people and places I loved. Now I can see what passes across it, too.

Perhaps I have been a bridge for longer than I knew.

When I tell my grandchildren about Finland, I give them a way to know a place that is already part of their story. When I speak in Finnish about my life here, I bring something of Australia to those who know it only from far away. Through conversations, shared food and memories spoken aloud, each world becomes a little more familiar to the other.

The longing is still there. There will be more visits, more embraces and more goodbyes I wish I did not have to say. Loving two homelands means there will always be someone, somewhere, whom I miss.

But there is love travelling across that distance too.

I see it when my grandchildren ask a question about Finland, when a story makes them laugh, when a familiar recipe becomes part of their own memories. What I carried here as a child is finding a place in the lives of those who came after me.

Sometimes I wish I could sit beside the eleven-year-old girl on that plane and tell her that she will find much to love in the country ahead of her. That she will make a home there, even while missing the one she is leaving.

I would tell her she does not have to make herself smaller to belong. One day, the words, stories and memories she carries will help her grandchildren know a place they might otherwise never understand.

I could not promise her that the goodbyes would become easier.

But I could tell her that even when the distance feels unbearable, she will find ways to bring the people and places she loves closer together.

And one day, she will look at the space between her two homelands and recognise something she has spent a lifetime building.

A bridge, with room for others to cross.