October 26, 2006

• Home is Where the Cash Flow Is

  Wednesdays mean Spouses Lunch. I never thought of myself as a lady who lunches, but these shared meals are different. Spouses of International Students congregate to share baked goods, information, make friends, practice English, and create a community. I am loving my time here but without these lunches a disconnect would surely seep in.

  There are five of us childless twenty-somethings that sit together. Mara is a Chilean lawyer. Fika is an Indonesian dentist. Nadia is an Afghanistan model. Elnaz is an Iranian student. And I am me. These women are an enormous comfort to me here. Comfort from what, I don’t know. But the first thing I do when I see them is sigh with relief.

  Many of the wives are struggling here. Nadia can’t bear the cold and is heartsick for her family. Fika and Elnaz were homesick during Eid, the feast to celebrate the end of Ramadan. Mara is always outgoing and energized, but this week she spoke about how hard it is for her “as a Latin American” to leave her family behind. Everyone has these ferocious family ties. Except for me.

  I’ve not traveled extensively in my own country. I have not met all the many, many different types of people who live in the states. So it is hard for me to generalize about what Americans are like. I can only speak from my experience, from my Midwestern religion, my Caucasian ethnicity, and from the upper-middle economic class that I was raised in. And although my path was different in many ways from the route those from my demographic are expected to take, I incorporated the idea of moving away from my small town birthplace into my plans very early on.

  In my hometown, it was a right of passage to leave home at 18. After high school graduation, we went away to college. There is a stigma there, as stupid as it is, that going to the local university or community college lessened your chances success. Or at least that is what we pretended. Really it was just a status thing.

  After college, many Americans that I know distance themselves even further from their families in pursuit of job opportunities and wealth. Of course we don’t call it wealth anymore. We call it “lifestyle.” If we are too open about our cash wads, we might be expected to share it with our families.

  After wealth comes, in the places I’ve lived, it is completely normal to live even further away from your parents, make a family of your own, buy a house and build a massive fence around it. Perhaps you’ll see your family over the holidays. And then of course, many people change their minds about the family they created, divorce, and find themselves alone behind that fence, without the physical presence of their parents, siblings, and extended families to comfort them. I am not the only American daughter that I know whose mother has cautioned: “you can never depend on anyone except yourself.”

  And sure, other cultures leave their families to live in far away places. But most do it with the intention to make enough money to bring every aunt, uncle, and cousin along for the ride. In the states, most of us are lucky if we really know anything at all about our extended family.

  I’m not sure exactly what I mean by all this, certainly cultural behaviors are too slippery a subject to ever nail down completely, but the other International Spouses always seem surprised when I tell them that Shaun and I lived in Chicago and no, we had no family there. Even more shocking to them is when I tell them that when it is time for us to go back to the states, we will go wherever either of us have the best job offer. For them, the answer is always obvious: we live where our family lives. When we go back, it is to our families, our home.

  To be certain, I love my family. Being a sister is one of the best things about my life. Meeting my extended family in England was incredible. Most of the time, I see my huge sprawling family, born of divorces and remarriages, as a blessing; I’ve been told that this means I have more people who love me. But I’ve grown so accustomed to distance that I don’t grow homesick; I’m spared the heartache that the other spouses feel. In fact, I don’t truly feel that I have a home in this world. Which is perhaps the biggest source of my wanderlust. I think that if I look hard enough, I will find the place I am supposed to be. And it will be home.

  Sometimes I worry about what I am missing. My brothers are turning into men without me. I wonder what it would be like to see my mom every week, to invite her over for dinner sometimes. But living in my hometown is so against everything I’ve been taught; there are no good jobs for me in my hometown. It’s the Motor City after all, and Shaun and I are many things, but engineers, draftsmen, and line workers we are not. Plus, I just have no desire to live in that place. But does that make me a rancid person to put place over people? Wouldn’t my heart be shattered if my child grew up and moved a million miles away?

  I don’t know the answers to any of these questions. But I like having supportive people here in Glasgow who get me thinking about the subtle “whys” of my cultural upbringing. For the first time in my life, I am thinking about what it means for me to be American. Because that is what I am here.
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  If you are American, what has your experience with family ties been like? What have you observed?

  ::Random Tangent::
  Day to day, I’ve impressed myself with how happy and content and excited I am here. Everyday is filled with hours of exploring the city, walking every place I go, and getting life in order here. In the past 5 weeks, I’ve moved to a new country, set up house, learned to drive a stick on the “wrong” side of the road/car, gotten a job with an office temp service, done lots of bureaucratic-type things like applied for a National Insurance Number and signed up for a National Healthcare doctor, taken up baking (leaned metric conversions), joined a gym, gone to England, revised a script, sent spec work to a travel publication, applied to an opera writing program, and made a few friends. And I’ve truly loved every minute of it. I’ve been energized, productive, and social.

  But today I think things caught up with me. For the first time since we’ve been here, it was a struggle to make an effort. I could not lift my arms to wash my hair. I had planned to have a good morning of errand running followed by a noontime work out and ending with some writing. (For those of you who are wondering why my days are so carefree, I am not eligible to start my new job until my National Insurance number comes on November 8. Not all UK employers require that you have this number before you start, but mine does. So I am in a happy limbo time right now.) Anyhow, so I was scheduled to have a productive morning, but last night, I could not get to sleep.

  I was writing up a storm until 3 am, in the zone, not tired, and unaware of the time. When I tried to sleep, it would not come. I don’t think I got to sleep until 5.30 am. And I woke gritty eyed and acid stomached at 8.30 am after 3 hours of unmemorable nightmares.

  Today, after a brief and very crabby outing to print and mail my opera writing program application, I crawled back to the apartment, wrapped up in a blanket, and napped on the couch. I read the New Yorker. I watched Vanity Fair (don’t rent it, by the way–it was so boring that I nearly died). I snacked on apples and hot chocolate. It was as if everything that should have exhausted me and made me anxious about these last 5 weeks decided to wait for today before knocking the wind out of me.

  It is 9.13 pm now and I still have not made the kale and broccoli stir-fry I planned for dinner. Shaun is at work, so no luck in asking him to feed me. And the wind is howling and the rain is icy so grabbing a bite at a wee curry shop is not what I want to do in my fragile state. I guess I’ll just starve. I’m just so sleepy….

  • 4:22 pm
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