It happened again last night. My second night back from almost seven weeks
in the US, I woke up not knowing if I was in the US or in France. Was this physical structure around me my
French home or my American home?
Ideally, I would be able to take our lovely home with all its memories
and its four members (five, if we include the cat) and transport it all to
America.
But this is not what my mind was capable of thinking yet as
I lay in bed realizing I had done this before, not knowing who I was somehow,
what life choices had led me there and which consequences I had been forced to
suffer. It is pure torment when this
happens.
Surely jetlag has a large part to play in my confusion. Plus fatigue.
I am completely drugged by it all.
I tried to come to terms with my surroundings – the wall-to-wall,
ceiling-to-floor closet in my bedroom that my husband and I had put in a few
years back. OK, so I am married (one
time I could not even remember that, so deep was I in my cross-continental
stupor) but where was my home? It is
actually a kind of relief to be in no-man’s land, to know that all things are
possible and I can hope for the best.
I then thought back to the night before and the fact that we
had had dinner on the terrace out back. That
clinched it and I knew I was in my house in France. The outside world had brought my reality back
to me. The cocoon of the inside was now connected
to the outside foreign world of France.
The funny thing is, this never happens to me going to
America. It is only in that dichotomy of
my HOME being in a foreign land that I experience this. My most intimate world – my home with my
husband and children – being inserted into a place where I somehow still feel
foreign after more than 20 years of living here must seem misplaced to me, somewhere
in my psyche. It must be this opposition
of logic that brings me to this state of physical ‘unbelonging’. Of not understanding where my place is
exactly in the larger scheme of things.
Two definitions of amnesia are 'psychological disturbance or shock'. I guess this is what I am experiencing: culture shock upon returning to my foreign home, after leaving what I have recently understood will always be my true home. No matter the downfalls of America, it will still be my home. It is where I feel the most myself.
Have any of you experienced something similar? If so, tell me about it!
Living between cultures is excruciatingly difficult. It took me almost 5 years to adapt to US living after we moved back, and even then, I still feel like I live a fairly schizophrenic life. I do wonder, however, how much of the feeling of living in limbo is due to city/suburb living differences, what part is due to children and family needs... I think that Thomas Wolfe nailed part of the problem with "You Can't Go Home Again," even though his story was about leaving one's hometown to live in another part of the country. How to find an environment in which to thrive? Ultimately, does a change in knowledge, a stretching of self drive a need to find kindred spirits no matter what the geography? And when those people are found, does it make it easier to live in one area than another? This is one of the questions that I'm trying to answer this fall. Nice post.
ReplyDeleteHi Kate,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment. I definitely feel that finding 'kindred spirits' helps make the place you live in your 'home'. Life would be very bleak without that! I also know that a lot of the difficulties I have had living in France has been due to the fact that we live 15 miles outside of Paris. Although I do appreciate all Paris has to offer and take advantage of that frequently, I also miss the space and especially the smells of nature that I love when I get back out into the country, be it further out in the French countryside, back in Massachusetts or wherever. So, yes, our 'home' has to ring true with our deeper, more sensorial yearnings, too. Lastly, I would like to add that having kids here and seeing them happy in their environment makes life easier as a 'foreigner' of 20 years. We just did a sabbatical back in the states and when we came back, I saw how they really fit in here - not because they are not American enough - but because of friendships and activities they have developed during their whole lives. This made me feel grateful they have this and that we'd really made it back 'home' after the year away. However, this carries its own feelings of frustrations when I feel like wanting to go 'home' to the US and knowing they are already there (which of course, means here)!