It was a random post on social media, but it unexpectedly moved me: a woman asking, for research purposes, what is something your mother can do that you cannot? There are many in my case, but my instant response was: I can’t cook like my mother. Soon followed a deeper realisation: I wish I could cook like my mother.

I am a Third Culture Kid, belonging everywhere and nowhere, proficient in Arab-lish (that odd combination of Arabic and English that forms a new word). As an adult, I take some strange pleasure in this lack of belonging, and yet the moment I return to my parents’ house and smell the aroma of Arabic food, I feel like I am home. Not in the contained space of the kitchen or the living room, but in the scent of ingredients that are familiar, warming and aromatic. The nostalgia it creates; it aches. No matter how far I have departed from what I once was, no matter how thin the cultural strings, how stretched out and at risk of breaking, I land with a thud into who I was in my parents’ house during all those formative years.