We always set our bedroom clock radio for 5 AM when the BBC news program comes on. I love the reporters' questions - they are so much blunter than the American reporters who often dance around an issue, trying to pretend they are impartial even when their questions drip with innuendo. The Brits just say what they are really thinking.
I never plan to actually get up before 6:30 so I catch about half that's said on the news and doze through the rest, often incorporating it into my waking dreams. Some mornings I have to ask my husband over my first cup of coffee, "Did such and such really happen in Iraq or was it just part of my dream?" Which of course gives him the opportunity to feed me all kinds of bizarre misinformation if he wants to.
Lately I have been waking up to anxious thoughts about all that I need to do in the next month, and then the next three months (they are two separate timetables in my mind.) As soon as I come out of sleep I feel the weight of all the unfinished tasks. This morning I actually found myself puzzling over the situation in the Middle East which dominated the fuzzy news reports floating around in my sleepy brain. It was such a relief to gradually realize that the situation in Lebanon, at least, was not my responsibility!
My relief was short-lived, however. While savoring the last few minutes in bed I heard a feature story that woke me up completely. It was about "trailing families" - a term that calls to mind either something lovely like wisteria or something pathetic like stragglers at the end of a race. In the news story it referred to families of diplomats who follow them overseas. The feature was about the challenges of living in a completely foreign place as an appendage to a gainfully employed individual.
The most frightening thing to me was the comment made by one wife, "When my husband gets up in the morning he goes to the office to work. No matter where we live he goes to the office to work. Just like he does in Washington. I, however, have to figure out where to get food, how to find the Western style market if there is one or the local market, how to cook, how to get around the city, how to take my children where they need to go. When we lived in Korea I got lost every day the first year we lived there."
All of a sudden I didn''t even want to get out of bed. I didn't want to leave my house. I wanted to stay right here, with the straggling, weedy perennial beds I could see out the bedroom window. I wanted to never leave the old apple tree I could glimpse on the north edge of our property. I wanted to wake every morning to the big maple out front and the sound of the brook and the sight of the sagging clothesline in the backyard. I didn't want to become part of a trailing family; I wanted to be firmly rooted in the rocky New England soil. I wanted to be from somewhere, not in transit; a patriot, not an expatriate.
Even though we never lived outside the US (unless you count Canada, which Americans never do), I have always struggled with the question , "Where are you from?" - meaning, where did you grow up, where are your roots. My husband has the same problem, but he can always preface his remarks with, "My father was in the military," which everyone immediately understands. Then he just lists the several bases where they lived - Omaha, North Carolina, Germany, Okinawa, and finally Dayton, Ohio. People understand a military family.
I, on the other hand, have no such familiar rubric into which to fit my family's nomadic history. I have condensed my saga to , "Well, I grew up on the East Coast." It's easier than saying, I was born in New Brunswick, Canada, but I only lived there for six months, so I'm not really Canadian. Then we lived two different places in New Hampshire, I went to elementary school in Massachusetss (two different school districts), then two different places in Pennsylvania and then high school in South Carolina. After that I became completely rootless through college and graduate school as my parents moved to Pennsylvania, (three different houses while I was in college), Michigan (two different communities), and finally Canada , (three different places), before settling in Nova Scotia. By that time I had been married for several years and established my own household. "So, " I always conclude when asked, "I'm not really from anywhere in particular. . . "
Maybe that nomadic upbringing is what caused the temporary lapse of judgment, which allowed me to say "yes" to moving to Southeast Asia as a trailing spouse for two years as I approach my 50th birthday, even though I have brought my own children up in only two different houses - both of which we have owned for ten years. They have not been just houses but homes which have given my children a strong sense of place and continuity, which I am about to disrupt, though I hope not destroy. I am scared by what we are about to do.
I know that our real core as a family is not a place, but our relationships. I know that in a very real sense we carry our home with us; that we may be even more closely knit in a bungalow in Petaling Jaya than we are in our comfy old Colonial, but I also know that culture and place are important to human beings - that we all want to have a place that feels like ours, people we fit with, customs that are predictable. I know that physical locations can in some mysterious way house memories, or at least unlock them. I know that in middle age I still long for that place to come home to; that I envy intensely my friends who have either always lived in the same area, or come "back home" after many years away. I have never felt like I really knew where Home was.
So now I hold my children's memories in my hands. I don't want them to grow up feeling rootless; I want them to know where they are from. I'd like them to feel they have a place to go home to. At the same time I know they will grow immeasurably from this experience and will probably be better, wiser adults because of it. I also know that 90% of employees who take overseas assignments do not come back to the same company when they return home, and I wonder if we will ever live here again, even though we are only renting our house, not selling it.
I know, too, that the real home I long for is probably a heavenly one, that I only mistake it for an earthly home because I don't know any better. One day all of our dreams of Home will come true.
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