Where Do I Belong?

“The judgmental refrain filled my mind: I don’t belong here. And, a moment later: that's ok, I don't actually live here!”

During the years we were preparing to move abroad, I was a stay-at-home-mom with a full time job fundraising support, and my husband continued to work at his job. Raising our salary for living abroad took a long time, for various reasons, so my daughter was already six when we left for language school. Her little years were spent in suburban paradise: we lived in an affluent, exclusive neighborhood with trails, pools, parks, and neighborly friends and acquaintances. Our home was a three-bedroom condo on the second floor, so I often felt like a fraud among the homeowners maintaining expansive HGTV-level homes with private yards. Yet, smallest home on the block aside, I belonged. I went to mom groups, coffee dates with friends, and had neighbors on whom I could pop in. We attended church with my husband’s family, spent every weekend playing with cousins, and deepened roots in our hometown that had been growing since we were babies.

And then, suddenly, the support was raised, the condo was sold, and we left.

A single-family home in that neighborhood with the big monthly dues and the multiple  pools used to be our dream, but it was totally out of reach now. More importantly, it was not part of the plan we chose to follow. We didn’t really belong there anymore, and that was okay.

After we sold our condo, we went to Texas to live on the campus of a Bible college that featured a language school. Simply by parking our car in the carport of one of the cookie cutter apartments built for families, we belonged.

Shared faith, shared desires to serve, shared love for Spanish-speaking people and shared need to learn Spanish made us part of the community before anyone even knew our names. The warmth, hospitality, and care we experienced at language school filled us up for the challenges we knew we would face in the years ahead.

We were unique among our language school colleagues in one major way: our destination was Spain, not a country in Central or South America. We needed to learn a strange conjugation for speaking in plural you, to lisp the c and z sounds in Spanish words, and craft a flair for the dramatic—not to mention cultivate thick skin, if we wanted to fit in in our host country.

After language school, while we applied for visas to move to Spain, we spent six more spurious months in a rental near our former affluent neighborhood. The house was small, but the yard was big. We belonged because we used to live there. We also didn’t belong because we were about to leave again. 

Finally, we packed a lot of bags and bins and set off on our global adventure. Becoming an expat means belonging to yet another exclusive club. But–strange dichotomy–it’s a club full of people who live where they don’t belong. Learning the language, the cultural norms, and the common body language of the local people has enabled me to fit in. But as soon as I open my mouth and say the words, my accent gives me away. I have practiced and adjusted and pushed my tongue into unnatural patterns to master the phonetics of my second language, but there’s no mistaking my foreignness. It seems I don’t even have to speak. Just as I walk down the street, people say “hello” instead of “hola,” knowing immediately that I might be a willing recipient of their English practice. I’m constantly looking around in my host country, asking myself how I can make myself belong.

The timing of our first home assignment worked out so that I could attend my twentieth high school reunion. I dressed up, wore makeup, and had it in my mind that I might gloat, just a little, about my interesting, international life abroad. The route to the brewery in the foothills of the Cascades was an hour on windy back highways, which allowed me to revel in the beauty of the Pacific Northwest, so unlike my host country. As I passed country farms and U-pick fields, crossed bridges over small rivers, I thought of how I enjoyed being “back home” to do something fun and distinctly American, like a twenty-year reunion. Soon I was driving through a town I recognized as one we might have lived in, if we hadn’t moved abroad. That small condo was stifling at times, and we imagined moving a little further from the suburbs to get an actual house. We used to drive around these towns, trying to decide how far away from the city we could tolerate. Today, even these homes are way out of reach, and I had another thought: all this is not even for me. This is for people who live here. The judgmental refrain filled my mind: I don’t belong here. And, a moment later: that's ok, I don't actually live here!

It was a hard truth for me to learn that just because I don’t feel I belong in my host country does not mean that I will feel like I belong in my passport country. That ship has sailed. I've been changed by my time abroad. Yet, reflecting on my experiences before, during, and after my first term abroad, I see now how the yearning to belong has been an advantage. It's not a bad or uncommon thing to give up on fitting in by the way you look or the language you speak. We must redraw the lines of what makes us belong. While "expat" might be a fairly exclusive club, people looking for community exist in every corner of the world. Everywhere I live, I look for those people, and they become the place where I belong.