My 12-year-old daughter and I set off from Singapore to Brisbane, Australia, on July 7, excited to surprise my parents with a visit, as they are unable to leave Australia due to local laws.

We had prepared ourselves for the required 14 days of quarantine and had a positive attitude going in, knowing it was a small price to pay to see them.

Changi Airport showed small signs of opening up again, and all the staff were helpful and genuinely happy to see people flying. The Singapore Airlines crew were even more amazing than I remembered from days when we all flew regularly, and I did not feel unsafe or worried about anything.

Landing in Australia, the mood changed immediately. There were no "welcome home" greetings, instead we were moved through a strict immigration process that took more than three hours to clear.

I will not go into details of our time in quarantine but what I will say is that we have never felt so unwelcome in a country; a country that I was born in and am still a citizen of.

Sadly, this did not change once we were "free" after the 14 days of quarantine.

Daily, I would hear comments to "close the borders and lock everyone out" and "don't let Australians who are overseas back, they'll just bring in the virus". It ripped my heart out to think that the country I grew up in did not welcome me any more.

We spent more than a year in Singapore enviously watching Australians on the beach, at football matches, playing team sports, not wearing masks or having huge parties with friends, wishing that were us, and wondering if that would ever happen in Singapore again.

I longed to go there and experience some form of having my normal life back again without tight restrictions, checking in and out of every place I go, or worrying that I had forgotten my mask when I walked out the door.

But as it turned out, I missed Singapore. Even with the restrictions, the fatigue of mask-wearing and the limited group sizes, I missed the community spirit of everyone trying to do the right thing to keep others safe.

I missed the taxi uncles asking if I had taken my lunch and vaccination in the same sentence.

And I missed the calmness of knowing that there was leadership with a plan to get the country out of the pandemic and back to what we all know and love.

Getting to hug my parents and see close childhood friends was worth every day of quarantine and dollar we spent to get there, and family is everything to me, so yes, I would do it again to see them.

But I now know that the grass is not always greener on the other side, and I am lucky to be able to call Singapore my home, as I have done so for the past 17 years.

I wrote this as my stay-home notice ended on National Day - so timely and amazing to be back in Singapore.

Natalie Dau