In the last few
weeks, I've had the uncomfortable feeling of not fitting in.
There's a lot about
my present life that I wasn't expecting. If you had asked me five
years ago to predict what I'd be doing now, I would have guessed we'd
be living in Pittsburgh and I'd be working on my master's in library
science. Terms like “stay-at-home mom,” “Mennonite,” “doula”
were either not in my vocabulary or so foreign as to be laughable. As
for living in the town where I went to college? What on earth would
bring me back (and keep me) there?
Ah, the irony.
The problem is,
inhabiting a role is not the same as feeling at home in it. Sometimes
my life feels a bit like our old apartment: a temporary stop on the
way to something more long-term, more comfortable. The apartment was
so impermanent in our minds that we didn't even bother to paint it
(which badly needed doing); we hardly decorated at all. In the same
way, being a mother at home with a toddler often feels like a stop on
the way to... well, to something, even if I don't know what.
This is partly
true: toddlers don't stay toddlers forever. Ask any empty-nester (or
just hang around one long enough) and they'll tell you just how
impermanent this stage of life really is. Over in a blink of an eye,
they say.
It's also true that
our family doesn't plan to stay where we live (rural western New
York) forever. I use that word “plan” more self-consciously and
more cautiously with each passing year, given all the unplanned life
events we've experienced. Still, it's hard to imagine settling in a
place that isn't close to either side of the family, but rather
situated awkwardly halfway in between – a worst-of-both-worlds,
because we're close enough to make the drives easily, but not close
enough to go and not stay the night. Community and work are two
excellent reasons to stay here, but it doesn't feel like a
forever-home – at least not right now – and we feel deeply that
we are renters, the kind of residents who could pull up stakes and
take off without too much to hold us back.
So here I reside,
in a particular town and a particular season of parenthood and a
particular Anabaptist denomination, having had no prior plans to find
myself in any of these locations at this point in my life. I am not a
local. Anyone who talks to me for long can figure that out, at least
in regards to the town we call home: I don't have the personal
history, the connections, or the dialect markers. I get one small
town confused with another because all these little farm town main
streets still look the same to me. And I can't keep straight in my
mind which two-lane highway is 19 and which is 19A. I've never eaten
beef on weck; I'm not one hundred percent sure what it is.
As for parenthood,
it in many ways did not come naturally for me. I had trouble
distinguishing my newborn's cries – Is she hungry? Over-tired?
Wet? – and engaged in constant second-guessing throughout her
first year. There are a handful of parenting practices that I am
confident in, and everything else is improvisation with mixed
results. An innocuous comment from a friend or family member can
throw me into agonizing self-doubt about whether I'm too strict, too
lenient, too disengaged, too much of a worrywart. Even those things
that I do that I am sure of came not from my own experience
babysitting or spending time with other families, but from books! How
telling, that I should have to read my way into parenthood, rather
than glean wisdom from experience. My life as a mother (while short –
she's not yet three, after all) has been one long reminder that I am
not a native in Parentland. I am an awkward foreigner, too afraid to
take my nose out of the phrase book and just take a look around.
Because if I did –
or rather, when I take a break from the fantasy that everyone else
knows what they're doing – I realize that very few of the people I
know are locals, in hardly any sense of the word. It's something
special to grow up in a place and choose it as a place to settle
down. If everyone were doing that, it wouldn't be remarkable, but we
remark on it with a certain weight of feeling – admiration,
longing, disparagement (when the point of the remark is that
so-and-so never left due to some personal failing). The rest of us
moved at some point, either as children or adults, and some of us
moved many times, and in many ways, away from our points of origin.
We move in and out
of roles and occupations, inhabiting one for a while until, like our
old apartment, it no longer suits or is no longer available. I grew
up with such a strong sense of belonging: I lived in the same town
for all my remembered life, a town where older residents had been
patients of my grandmother, a medical doctor, when she had practiced
at the county hospital. Our family had a long history in our church's
denomination, and even in my parent's workplace, the college where
they had met as students. I attended a Christian school where some of
my teachers had been colleagues (or even students) of my parents,
during their years as secondary educators.
My husband could
tell a similar story of his hometown. In a neighboring town's
cemetery can be found the graves of ancestors who first settled in
that region of upstate New York in the eighteenth century. The
Smithers clan goes way back, around there.
It is not lost on
me that my current discomfort with no longer being a local has much
to do with my personal history of enjoying that “local” status
for so long. I didn't really appreciate how at-home I felt growing
up; I was more concerned with how I wasn't quite fitting, either as a
point of distress or pride (because truthfully, being a local can be
something of a burden – sometimes I made quite a point of fitting
the local mold).
Still, it's hard to
feel like I'm always exposing my ignorance about how things are done
around here, wherever and whatever “here” might be. A newcomer to
the area, to parenting, to the denomination that my family has chosen
to call home – all of it can make me feel like a permanent novice,
forever destined to make faux pas that brand me as the ignorant
outsider that I am.
Yet when I tear my
gaze away from my phrase book and look at everyone else in these
strange new lands, literal and figurative, that I now call home, I
realize that for the most part, I'm surrounded by fellow emigrants
moving from one home to the next, and hoping to speak in a passable
dialect. It's humbling and inspiring to see some of these same people
putting down roots where there were none before, and building a home
where there was none to inherit. Inhabiting a place, a role, a season
of life, is not the same as feeling at home in it, but resolving to
make oneself at home is not the exclusive privilege of the locals.
Perhaps one day
I'll be mistaken as a local. Perhaps I'll remember, in the meantime,
that even locals have to work at homemaking.
