Hi, loves. 🌿

On being a foreigner

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There’s something to living like this, I said to my husband this week. What I meant was: small, compact, with few belongings and nothing of real value. Little in our flat to keep us occupied for more than a few hours (books, chess, a bath) but a world more readily accessible outside. It is exactly the sort of sentiment I railed against over the last few years as I longed to buy a house with a yard. It is what I was sick of in our last year in Vienna and our early years in LA when I was absolutely, insanely desperate for a place of our own, a place where we weren’t on borrowed time, using borrowed stuff, where people walked in and I didn’t have to immediately make excuses for the garish decor and uncomfortable sofas and broken chairs.

Not ours! I always wanted to yell. After almost seven years of subletting, I needed, on some sort of primordial level, to feel rooted, and somehow that rootedness had something to do with Le Creuset pots and Merrimekko art we’d affixed to the walls and a mattress I had spent a long, luxurious time choosing. To rugs and particular paint colours and plants I placed in various rooms (our rooms!) just so.

What we have now is the opposite: nothing is ours. Not the sheets or towels or mattresses or ugly (truly ugly, unusable) loveseat, not the plates and bowls and heinous blue-green carpet. It is often when I am on the toilet, mere feet from everything and everyone, that I think, I’ll be SO ready to go home (as I fantasise about a second bathroom), but the feeling doesn’t last, and somehow it’s actually fine.

Somehow, it turns out, maybe I don’t need all that stuff? Maybe we three, absent our 3,000 books, our dozens of plates and bowls and all my fancy kitchen gear my husband is forever attempting to purge, fit, for now, snuggly in this tiny life. This life that is as much ours as the one in which we can lay claim to every single thing we touch.

My husband’s family has been visiting this week, and watching other adults navigate this new place with some degree of difficulty and awe has, oddly, made me think so much about my own childhood in Montreal. About how my parents, not native Quebecers, always seemed slightly foreign, out of place, a little unsure. My mother is American, my father from Ontario, but even Canadian-ness in 1980s and 90s Quebec didn’t matter all that much, where language politics ruled every aspect of life. My parents spoke French but never terribly well, never as well as my sister and I did, having gone to French school from age five. They outed themselves as Anglos the minute they opened their mouths. Because my sister was born abroad and left in high school, I was, in some ways, the only natural-born Quebecer among us, which meant I experienced my own version of code switching from school (where all my friends were Québécois, where there were words I hadn’t learned in English) to home (where that world was alien to my parents). I was always hoping to fit into both worlds, to seamlessly move from one to the other, undetectable in my own foreign-ness. To be a true Montrealer seemed to be the ability to disappear into both languages.

I’m not sure why these memories have been flooding me lately, but it has something to do with how at ease (or not) we — the collective “we” I mean here — are in new places, how adaptable, how tightly or loosely we cling to what we’ve known, to our old reference points. My husband has always joked that he’s much happier abroad because he loves the feeling of being a foreigner and I can see that in him so clearly: he is undaunted by all kinds of bureaucracy, thrives on learning new languages and is an expert navigator. His attachments are often to the new — the next language, adventure, place, sight, experience.

I might have once thought of myself as the opposite: a total creature of habit. A homebody. A Montrealer, then a New Yorker. I always saw myself as a foreigner in Munich and Vienna (and now often in LA, too), but often laughed at how my own daughter, who was learning English and German simultaneously, was essentially replicating my own experience — of being the child with the foreign mother, the one who needed a translator, who didn’t quite and never would fit in. I still remember overhearing a conversation she (at 2.5) and my husband were having in German, in which she turned to me and said, “hell means light, Mama.”

Already! It begins, I thought! (For the record, I did know that.)

Some smaller version of this is happening here, now: we are learning, through our kid, about netball and cricket and little tea and pants v. underwear and the pain of playing games in the pouring rain in a skort. She is ensconced in a particular kind of British life, and we can already hear it — her inflections are changing, her tolerance for rain and cold, her palette. She’s growing in glorious, unexpected ways.

What I want for her is what I want for myself: the courage to move between worlds. To jump in, to swim, full-bodied, to allow our own edges to soften. To question all we thought was true and right and fixed. To see who else might be in there, to meet and welcome all of our various selves.

Sending love,

Abs xo