[281/365] "a part of yourself that is no longer accessible"

[cosmolinguist]

Big immigrant moods here:

The book has me thinking about what it means to have a history somewhere, not just to be known by the people around you, but to know that they know your parents and grandparents too. To have a relationship with a place that goes back not years or decades but generations. When I take my kids to the playground, we are surrounded by people who, like me, have followed various currents of migration, people who are far away from the places or cultures that birthed them. One dad is Turkish, his wife is Ukrainian. They moved here to escape the war and now they worry constantly about her family. Their son, who is two, cycles through three or four languages in a single sentence. Another dad is from Nigeria; he has twins the same age as mine and he told me, laughing, that their last flight home was so miserable they’ve decided not to go again for at least a few years. (I so get this laugh, and also the heartache behind it.)

The flight can be so miserable for me on my own. I remember once watching a young woman try to wrangle a toddler on a flight and I thought If I had kids that'd be me. Ugh. And as sad as I am that my parents aren't grandparents because they'd be excellent at it, I also realized that they'd see the babies for two weeks a year just like they saw me two weeks a year, and it would feel like so much to me and hardly anything to them. I couldn't imagine getting to decide not to make that trip for a few more years because the flight had been so miserable; I'd never hear the end of it.

I never planned to stay in Appalachia. When I was seventeen, I worked as a cashier at the local K-Mart and customers would come through my line with their gallon of milk and their bag of potting soil and their box of ammunition and their Martha Stewart brand bed sheets and I’d ask how their day was going and they’d look at me and say, “Now, where are you from?” I was so pleased by this question. “Here,” I would answer, and smile at their surprise. I learned early to tone down my accent. Because even in our very homogenous part of the world, I knew that how I spoke conveyed something about who I was—or who I wanted to be. And I wanted a life that was bigger than Appalachia.

I once got accused of being from Wisconsin when I was in college -- a small school in western Minnesota, it was almost all Minnesotans: either people from within a hundred-mile radius of it, or people from the Twin Cities (my favorites of whom hated that the rest of us called it all "the Cities" and really wanted us to care whether they were from Plymouth or Wayzata or whatever, good luck with that!) -- because I'd taught myself to say "soda" instead of "pop." I too wanted to run from how my speaking portrayed me. Joke's on me: now it hurts when people don't believe I'm from there, I can't do the accent well enough even if I try! Now I know the source of linguistic discrimination isn't inherent in us but is socially determined like so many other things, I am fierce in my speech and longing for my native accent never goes away entirely. But when I was a teenager, it was also for me a sign that I had my sights on things I thought "bigger" and "better."

What I’ve been feeling lately is not quite homesickness but it is a kind of loneliness, a kind of longing. Or maybe it is a very specific version of homesickness. The version where, even though you really like your life, you sometimes long for a part of yourself that is no longer accessible, that is, in fact, invisible to everyone around you.

My brother is invisible to everyone around me. I think a lot about that specific version of homesickness...just sickness, maybe. The kind of farm I grew up on is invisible to everyone around me. My upbringing did not share the cultural references of cartoons or toys. School was completely different -- and little or nothing like the movies and TV shows have told British people to expect school to be like in America.

Yet they elide it all together, so the fact that I'm from the rural Midwest doesn't matter, it's just "America." Someone was once disappointed that I don't say "sneakers" and she would've been even less happy if she'd known that I never did: I grew up calling them tennis shoes or tennies. And every time someone Britsplains "Now, we call this jam but you call it jelly," I want to shove the jam jar up their butt. Because I have always called that jam, I did grow up calling it jam, people in the Midwest say jam! Those making it at home might distinguish between jam, jelly, preserves, and all that, but the average person just calls it all jam same as they do here.

I don't really have a point to end on here, I just wanted to share this link and how it resonated with me.

Comments

[packbat]

...we actually never had that connection, I'm realizing - our parents both moved to our area as adults, many states away from their families, and we grew up homeschooled until we went to university ... we didn't ever have a sense of history, just a couple family stories. That's kind of unsettling to think about.

[otter]

I left my home state for a decade and then moved back. Those eras of my life are different from one another in quite a few ways.

[house_wren]

Being accused of being from Wisconsin by Minnesotans - I laughed when i read that and it keeps amusing me. Accused is the perfect word there.

My family moved constantly when I was growing up, so I have no home town. My parents were not close to their siblings so I had no family connections. My rootlessness is a sadness; I belong nowhere. So I very much enjoyed your post & also the article that you quoted.

One good thing that came of all that moving was I was good at geography and I had a more realistic understanding of what life was like. I knew that not everyone in California lived at the beach and were pals with movie stars. I knew that midwesterners actually did have indoor plumbing. I knew that it isn't snowing every single day in MN. All these things were misconceptions that kids at my schools shared with me.

Your jam and jelly thing: Yes yes!

Now I am reminded of the old joke about how St Paul people wouldn't go to Mpls because it was too scary and Mpls people wouldn't go to St Paul because they forgot it was there. haha . Uff da humor.

[radiantfracture]

Thank you for the link and for the thoughts.

My brother is invisible to everyone around me.

That is a beautiful way to put it.

I often feel so compartmentalized within myself that it's painful to think about what I might be able to offer if I could get it all working at once. But maybe that's just brains.

[ewt]

I am also on team jam. Though my mum's crabapple jelly was always jelly, but as you say -- homemade is different.

I wonder if it's because of the "peanut butter and jelly" thing? Only I grew up with peanut butter and jam, and never knew the stereo sandwich was made with grape jelly.

No point, just commiserating

[annofowlshire]

I always called it "jam" unless I was saying "peanut butter and jelly" which in itself is an American thing. (My husband, who is British but was in Chicago from 4-8, was teased a lot about having PB&J sandwiches and an American accent when he turned to the UK). I never liked the stuff, anyway.

I had a dream the other night that basically came down to "you will never belong" and left me feeling a bit sad. It's true: in 80-90s suburban America I didn't belong because I was mixed raced in a very white area. The closest I came to belonging was in university, but in every group I've been in, I felt like I was always one foot out for some reason or another: nationality, race, economical and cultural background. So of course I moved to another country entirely that I had no prior association with (besides my husband). I guess if you're going to never fit in, go all out.

At the food festival this weekend, the sellers kept asking about my accent. Immigrants, let alone Americans, let alone mixed-race ones, are not common in the rural British countryside. When I'm asked where I come from, I first say London (true), but they wait patiently until I add Seattle. It feels similar to when people would ask me where I'm from when I was a child, and I'd say "here" and they'd wait until I added "but my mother is from Korea."

Much of my life in America is invisible to the people around me. Mr has some cross over, but sometimes I think about my childhood, my 20s, and it just all feels like an alien dimension that I imagined because there's no touch stone except a handful of artifacts I brought along with me.

[cosmicjellyfish]

♥

Thank you for sharing this. It resonated with me too, albeit for different reasons. I'm also sorry people make assumptions about your dialect - that must feel extra-alienating. (Sports shoes are "takkies" to me! I've edited my own childhood dialect a lot to fit in with British English[es], but that one is forever.)

[silveradept]

Thank you for sharing that. I think I've managed some of the same things, even though I haven't actually left the country, just gone from Great Lakes to Dragon Conspiracy Territory. I still feel that tug, though, about wanting to go back and say hi to all the relatives and catch up on everything in person, in the pavillion where the reunion happens, because that's the place where it happens, even if we could probably do some of that virtually.

And how much I just won't be able to do it, because of the way the situation is now, and how much I might, upon going back, realize how different I have become by not having been there for as long as I have.

[jesse_the_k]

Perhaps because I moved from the east coast directly to the Badger State, I've always thought the cities was typical Minnesota vocabulary.

Language can be so fascinating and so frustrating.