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.
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