The Belonging You Keep Almost Touching
This June has been a lot. Performances stacked on top of performances in a country that was simply not built for 35C/90F in a concert hall. My husband and I have been fantasizing about a quiet cave somewhere as the end-of-year school events pile on top of each other with a logic that no parent understands.
Today, I went alone to my daughter's theater performance. The children presented in four languages, and it was genuinely impressive. I sat there proud and a little overstimulated and when it was done, we all moved upstairs for the shared goodbye snack.
Honestly, I do not gel easily with most of the parents in my daughter's class. There are very few of them I have never felt truly at ease with. We are all foreigners here, every single one of us, and yet somehow that shared displacement does not automatically create closeness (as you would think it would).
I had a small conversation about age with a few of the moms, as my birthday is coming up. I asked, in my non-dominant language, whether they say "age is just a feeling" too. It was a real conversation, the kind that feels alive for a moment. Then the gifts were being presented to the teacher, and the moment dissolved.
If I’m being honest, I have always found my daughter's teacher a little too formal. Her emails present a project management energy, if I am being precise. To me, my daughter sometimes feels less like a child learning and growing and more like a deliverable being tracked. I had made my quiet judgment and moved on.
Then the teacher received her goodbye gifts and she started to cry. It was there that I understood, in an instant, that the formality was a container. She probably knew she was only here for a year. The distance was not coldness. It was protection. She had grown deeply attached to these children anyway, despite everything she did to prevent it.
I got emotional watching her. Which surprised me, as I had not expected to feel anything in that room other than awkwardness. I said thank you to the teacher for all she’s done, wished her well in her move and new position, and left.
I was walking toward the tram when I saw three of the parents riding past on their bicycles together.
That was the moment, where a wave came up so fast I did not have time to brace for it.
I'm the outsider. How do I fit in here? Will I ever fit in here?
Still walking, I was still a little stunned by my own feelings.
I have been reading Beneath a Borrowed Sky by Sam Frearson-Tubito, and there is a passage I keep returning to. She writes about attending a fundraising meeting, looking around the table, and realizing she knows everyone there... and everyone knows her. She writes:
"My name began to sound less foreign. For the first time, I didn't feel like I was passing through. I lingered after coffee. I stopped hurrying home. And somewhere in the quiet rhythm of being seen, I began to imagine what it may be like to stay."
I have read that passage more than once now, each time with the same feeling: an ache and a longing and something that is not quite grief but is adjacent to it.
I know what she means. I know the feeling of hurrying home. I know what it is to be somewhere and already be partly somewhere else.
Belonging, for those of us living this international life, is rarely a clean arrival. It is a push and a pull. You put yourself out there and then you retreat. You feel received and then you feel invisible. You have a real conversation about age and idioms... and then the moment is over and you are standing alone again with a paper plate.
This is not failure. It is the rhythm.
The teacher who built a wall and cried anyway. The book passage that cracked something open on an ordinary Tuesday. The parents on bicycles who reminded me, without meaning to, that community builds slowly and sometimes it builds around other people first.
Real belonging, I think, is not the moment you stop feeling like an outsider. It is the moment you stop hurrying home from the feeling.It is lingering in the discomfort long enough to let something new take root.
June has been overfull and emotionally loud and I have felt myself oscillating between being completely present and wanting to disappear entirely. I am not going to pretend I have resolved any of this. I am closing out the month with more questions than answers.
…and I am also not hurrying home from them anymore.
This summer, I am creating space for the answers to find me.
...and if you have ever stood on a pavement watching someone else's easy belonging and wondered when will that be me, I want you to know: you are not behind. You are not broken. You are building something that takes longer than a school year to grow.
Here’s to building a life that finally feels like yours,
Angela
Happy Summer everyone!
Enjoy and see you in September!