Belonging

I am an only child. I grew up in New York and my parents divorced when I was 11. Growing up my closest extended family members were on my mother's side; my Grandmother and then a cousin close to my age who lived in Minneapolis. Her parents were divorced as well but her father remarried a woman who I was fond of. Holiday gatherings were small, a hodgepodge of those who didn't belong anywhere else. Our family, the maternal one I considered to be mine, was defined by being fractured and mostly unfamiliar, none of us really seeing where we fit or how we were connected.

My father's family was a stranger to me. Snapshot memories of a dark house that smelled of cigarettes and the plastic that covered the couches in the nice room. Black and white tile, a black fuzzy bean bag chair, a bathroom vanity mirror that was surrounded in Hollywood lights and smelled of talcum powder. Green salad made of iceberg lettuce and peeled cucumbers. The people; my paternal grandmother and grandfather, were tertiary.

As I aged and my mother and I moved to Mill Valley, a small and scenic town in California about as opposite as you could get from New York City, family became even more of an idea than a practice.

I longed for something different. I wanted something warm and contained, something that helped me understand my place and a way to know I was part of something bigger, something that was self sustaining in its insular support. I wanted ease and laughter and the comfort of knowing that even if I strayed or messed up, I'd have a place to come back to. I understood that families argue. But I believed still then in the idea that they were resilient. I wanted, most of all, a sibling that I could co-create meaning and understanding of life experiences both shared and individually.

Throughout my life I moved around a lot. My mother had a habit of rarely living in one home for more than a few years that exists even now as she is nearing 80. I inherited a slightly less dominant mutation of that gene and only started staying in one place for more than 5 years once I'd reached my 40's. After California I moved to Washington. Then to Oregon, where I stayed for the longest I had been anywhere; around 30 years. Not in the same home. But at least the same state. It's hard for me to grow attached, to deepen roots anywhere. To believe that one particular set of walls can grow with me as my life marches on. But I always wanted it. The feeling of a home that held my stories in its scratches and dings. The places I lived that I loved the most were always older and the physical markings of occupants past were a comfort to me. I wanted a home where the seedlings I planted became flowers and trees I could see outside my window. When my husband and I bought our home in Hillsboro I thought that was it. I had never loved a house so much. No place had ever felt like it had been waiting for me like this one did. But the country the home had been built in, had weathered over a century in, was collapsing around me. And I was collapsing within it. It seemed the place I finally felt at home, could imagine building my own family memories and traditions, was no longer a place I could tolerate.

We all know what happened next. I moved across the world to a place I knew no one. Here there is no family and no family heirlooms. No sticky and unresolved feelings. No attachments to anything. No personal history at all. My all time biggest and most dramatic leap away from the very thing I had always wanted. Belonging. The thing was though, I really had no choice. So I had to hope that despite it seeming counter to my dreams and not at all likely that maybe, somehow I'd find my place in these most unlikely circumstances. I've always been adaptable so I wasn't worried about making a life here. What I was worried about was what would happen to the one I left behind. Would I still take that person, those memories with me? Did I want to? I suspect my mom and I have something in common, this need to move again once all the messy and unresolved starts to pile up in clusters and in corners. It's a relief. But the consequence is that I lose the thread. My human timeline is more like a cluster than anything linear or cohesive. Sometimes in that jumble I can't locate myself.

I was talking to my husband yesterday about how now 7 months into life here I have transitioned from observation to integration. It's been very good for me in many important ways. The physical distance from the US and my parents has offered me perspective and insight and allowed me to find shapes in the discordant and blurry sensations of past. To see more clearly what is mine and not mine, to make informed choices about what I want to bring with me and what I want to get rid of. We still have our home in Hillsboro. It's where my husband and my pets and my bees and the garden I started and everything I have collected or had passed down to me reside. It's comforting to remind myself that all of that is still there, waiting for me. Not gone. Just resting.

There are ways in which I feel like just another object in a home full of them. That if I search through enough disorganized boxes I'll find the thing I am looking for. Me. Maybe I was in the box that had an assortment of journals and knick knacks. Maybe the one with albums and cloth napkins. Or the one with kitchen supplies and yarn. One of the many bags of clothing and tarnished silver. Certainly in one of the boxes of unsheathed unalbumed photos. There I am. There I am again. If I line them all up together can I piece together my story? What parts have I missed? When you don't have many places or people who have known you through all of it, some of you gets left behind, lost to time and the fickle whims of imperfect recall.

My cousin, who I thankfully have grown closer to over the years in heart if not in physical presence shares many of my feelings. And we can offer each other bits of forgotten past. She reminded me today of an epic battle of the stubborn between my probably 13 year old self and the 80-something 5 foot tall Italian Catholic boyfriend of my radically feminist and socialist grandmother about God at what everyone had hoped would be a pleasant gathering on White Bear Lake in Minnesota. We have laughed about our MTV inspired outdoor choreographed performance of Def Leopard's Pour Some Sugar On Me for our no doubt very uncomfortable parents and Grandmother on Long Island over another humid summer.

My oldest friend, a boy named Jesse who I reconnect with once every 5 years or so shared a story recently about my 4th Birthday party. The one where my mother played her guitar and sang Old MacDonald, causing him terrible embarrassment because he couldn't replicate whatever sound or body movement of a rabbit, the request of some wayward child who clearly did not understand the assignment of keeping it basic. He also reminded me that he knew then as he knows now the correct way to stir yogurt lest my preferred childhood method of circular rather than bottom up was still wreaking havoc on an even dispersement of berries.

I asked my mom recently about her Aunt Anne, an imposing figure that I only know bits and pieces about. I went to her home in Connecticut once, maybe twice as a child. Lost Acres it was called. Something out of a fairy tale. The house was large and cold and cabin like and my most definitive memory of it is the dead (I think?) bat hanging from the tall rafters. Apparently this Aunt had a "friend", no doubt to all of us now her partner, named Rose that she lived with who was an accomplished writer. They both spoke fluent French and Anne had her pilots license, an exceptionally rare accomplishment for a women of that time. Mom tells me they drove a little Volvo convertible and I can imagine them driving, hair contained in scarves, sunglasses large and winged. I wish I knew more about these women. I see myself in them.

God, do I love these stories. What profound validation that I exist. That I have have existed for some time now. They are so precious to me in part because there are so few of them. So few memory keepers. So few places that I spent enough time in to see them change and myself change within them. I trust those memories, too. Trust them more than the ones I sometimes hear from my parents that have been tampered with, when they are remembered at all. This happens I think particularly with divorced parents whose attention gets pulled away from their kids as they try to make their own ways alone. And more so for only children without a proximal participant to fact check and help maintain the log.

Maybe someday I'll attempt to organize and order myself into a story with a beginning, middle and end. Dig into the research and produce something clever and wise with anecdotes and symbolism and if I'm lucky, a moral. Probably not. Probably whenever my story ends it will be in a scattering of poems and imprints and flashes that capture me at one moment in time. I'd like to think though that in those words and pictures regular appearances will be made by people and places that keep showing up in this next half. A little continuity sounds really nice to me still. I know it's too late to have the family or home I've inhabited for decades or lifelong friendships that I have always wanted. I know a childhood with familiar faces and traditions and a wider, deeper vessel to hold me within its warm and curving walls wasn't mine, wasn't meant for me. Which must mean that something else was. Or still is. I don't think it's too late for me to draw up a blueprint of a future but knowing myself, I'll probably spend all my energy buying paper and colored pencils and lose interest before I sit down to design. It will happen whether it's recorded or not though. My life that is. The one I'm living now. I'm having experiences that will some day be stored as visible memory or might just become a thread woven into the tapestry of me. There, slightly altering the pattern but invisible on its own, impossible to isolate from those around it.

I know I have found my person in my husband. The person who will navigate the rest of my life with me. The person who will be part of most of my memories. And maybe there is a still a best friend out there waiting for me. The kind that I'm so comfortable with we can pop over for visits unannounced. Maybe there is a future where I can see my cousin more and we can help remind one another of who we were and are. Others that can fill in the many gaps and holes. Others that I can offer the same to. Little morsels of memory to be savored.

I guess time doesn't change the things you want most and not much can deter you from endlessly seeking them. Belonging is my compass even when the direction I am going is west. Or east. I know what I am looking for and I have a person to travel with me. Retracing our steps at times will only deepen the connection and offer new meaning to a place, an experience. I'm still glad I'm here. I'm still excited about what's next. But I'm making more room for what came before.

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