C.S. Lewis once wrote:
“If we find in ourselves desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that we were made for another world.”“HOME” defined by, events, people, memories, and a myriad of places.
I spent a significant period of my developmental years in a culture outside of my parents.
There were times that I felt somewhat strange around people and I am sure they may have felt the same way.
The mountains of Cuautempan gave me some sense of security each day while on vacations when I woke up to see them looming over the village below, keeping watch as they had for centuries to the indigenous villagers dotting the mountain side.
One after another the images of memories gone by flash through my mind as I read through journals and look at old photos, pausing to take in each detail.
There is something about growing up in and among the culture that I happened to find myself in by being born in our host country.
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| Me and my au pair, Piedad |
I long left this relaxed home where church meetings did not begin and end as scheduled and traded it for a more time-oriented culture, a culture that I was expected to blend in, the culture where friends drop in without calling ahead had ended. Where was I suppose to fit in?
I had to begin to accept that my past was gone. Up until I was thirteen my times moved back and forth from one culture to another, my American culture, my parents culture, and Mexican culture, and more specific, Indian culture, and Boarding School culture.
Those were times when I had no sense of my own personal or cultural identity.
I was a child with dual citizenship, dual because of my parents identity yet toddling first steps on my parents foreign soil, speaking my first words in Spanish and toilet training, with a nanny, simply responding to what was happening at the moment.
This was the framework from which I later interpreted life and tried to make sense of life.
Being fair skinned, blue eyed, and blonde, I looked different. Most everybody treated me as if I did not not belong from this place.
When I transitioned back into the American culture to live, I did not feel like I fit in either.
Each transition in life before that changed something in my life.
Like a nomad, I, or we,my brother, and sister, or whole family moved with the current season we were in.
I packed and moved to or back from boarding school, to or back from furlough.
Sometimes, I knew this transition was coming and could prepare for them, other times changes were devastating.
This nomadic lifestyle lasted well into the years prior to marriage.
When I was six years old my life dramatically changed.
Forms of self protection surfaced. I denied my feelings and focused on anticipated moves.
I lost the comfort I had from my parents and had not formed new ones.
The grief was unbearable at times as I sought comfort and not finding it. It was at this early age that my Bible became that comfort. I learned at an early age to go to Jesus first. He is my comforter.
Living involves responsibilities and I was still trying to figure out how it was all suppose to work.
Even during teen transition stage, looking adult, I emotionally felt like a child again.
How could I blame my parents when they were focusing on their survival as well.
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| 8th gr. graduation, last of schooling in Mexico |
I felt keenly disappointed in life and the loneliness increased as time went on. All connection and continuity with the past had faded away and the present was not all I had hoped for.
My brother and I show up at my paternal grandparents to live. Life changed for us and life changed for them. They had to adjust to us. We had to adjust to them.
No matter how much we anticipated this move, we lost “our world”. We lost what was familiar, and this loss occurred over and over for me.
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| My on & off Home in Cuautempan |
We lost our lifestyle. We lost many possessions that connect us with our past. Only what fit in our bags and suitcases came with us.
The separations cost me my siblings. I grew up when schooling created major patterns of separation from parents, from my sister and brothers.
Although, we visited, not so often, I grieve the loss of knowing the closeness of my family as well as extended family as well and the feeling of belonging, being understood.
With my parents teaching and reaching the lost, how could I admit with selfish, wrong, and not spiritual feelings as to how much it hurt to be left or leave those multiple times.
These early separations have left me with the struggles I have had through out life to bond with my husband, my children, and my siblings
. This high mobility, a source of painfull separations appear to have affected my relationships with them. We were given no choice at the time.
There was little regard for some of our needs beyond the physical.
Sadly, I admit that I have not been around the family chit chat that keeps families connected. To this day, I dislike, family reunions as they are a big reminder of just not quite fitting in and the childhood that wasn’t.
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| With my best friend, Jovita |
Because life was so transitory in those earlier years, I developed the perspective that life is to be lived now.
One of the hardest questions to answer in my earlier days was; “Where is your home?” I lived in so many places that it was hard to call any place home and never got attached to any one place, except for my present home of which I have lived in for some 40+ years. It was a place to call my own, and never,never move again.
So as someone else described home as “That place I am currently am.”
Well not quite, because currently will be eventually in the past and my new future home will be in Heaven.
