Peace in being home

I feel a different kind of peace right now in my new life in Seattle.

Today I successfully put together the bike trailer/ stroller by myself and walked the girls down a few blocks to Trader Joes. There were a few hours of sunlight today in which we enjoyed the fall temperature of 60 degrees, a huge box of organic white pumpkins, and gorgeous fall bouquets not wrapped in ugly crepe paper!

Here's the difference; I'm not lonely.

It's so ironic because I've recently left a community, a group of friends and a place of belonging where I felt known. I had play dates and coffee dates and babysitting swaps and phone calls at 10pm. But I was always lonely. Whenever I went to the park, took the kids for a walk or went to the grocery store I felt this huge sense of isolation. I was always a stranger. My foreignness never left me. Ever. In 6 years of living in Istanbul.

And now, though I'm getting to know people, I still don't feel known. There's a huge desire to befriend someone who wants to embrace my story. Yet despite that hole, I don't feel lonely. I go to the park and first of all, I'm not the only Mom who has wandered out to the park alone with her children. But secondly, if there are women conversing I don't have to wonder if they're discussing me, my children, or my parenting style. There's an aspect of belonging that comes with being fluent, native.

So for that reason, I can honestly say I feel like I've come home. I'll always be American after all.

Chris has met a Turk at his job. She is new to the city, recently divorced from an American, and desperate for community. Though fluent in English, she will only speak Turkish with him. Once she called me just to talk, all in Turkish. I guess we're as close to home as she has found. But she's leaving. It's been too hard to make ends meet and do life by herself.

I'm kind of sad about the whole thing. If there's anything I understand about her life, it's the feeling of being foreign. And while I'm kind of relishing in the newness of being native again, I want to embrace her and her pain as a tangible healing of my own. I feel like I missed out on something. (I hadn't even met her yet.)Is it ironic that her name means "last rose?"

I'm on a journey. And now it's as if I'm I've come to a hairpin in the road. I can look back and see ground I've covered. As I experience life anew in the States I'm realizing all sorts of realities to life in Turkey that I wasn't aware of then.

So now the processing has begun.

What's this peace? Oh, it's the lack of loneliness. Wow! I lived for 6 years feeling the darkness of being lonely, a stranger in a foreign land. There's so much to said for homeland...