my home hurts

Start packing, we’re leaving next week. 

I was fourteen when I watched my home shrink and disappear from the round window of a cramped plane. Friends, music band, teachers, family, home, fields, mountains, grandmother, streets, language, dog – all left behind, becoming smaller, and disappearing as I trudged with a heavy suitcase. My face was moistened by tears that I kept wiping so that my mother could not see I am crying. My mother did it all by herself: learning a new language in one year, bartered with her breath and hands to give us a chance for a better life. A life with less corruption, with cleaner streets, a civilised bourgeoisie existence where we could not die hungry, a home of safety. 

My first breath when I landed was a rebirth. Like an infant breathing for the first time, the cold air of a Scottish September made my skin rise up. I decided that moment that I will never return, and I will never look back. 

I refused to speak my mother tongue for years to come as my throat would close and tighten even if I tried.
 

I rooted out all signs that I was foreign, that I was different than them. I was ashamed.

My words would come out bent, sounding strange. I was ashamed. “Where’s THAT from?” they would ask. Not where I was from, but “that”. I was an accent, a skill, a form to fill in for the government, a number.
 

I was hiding for I was ashamed of who I was. Ashamed that the streets of my home town were dusty and primitive. I did not want them to know that I left because staying meant poverty, injustice, disease.
 

So I dressed like them, talked like them, I laughed like them. Surrounded myself with girls, wearing pink and braiding my hair like them. Longing to belong. 

Within I was grieving the land where I grew up.
 

I was remembering when I was three I would go down to the forests and dig with my plump fingers into the raw earth to find ants. I would gather them into a small square box, a row of ants, well aligned and conforming. I would feed them sweet crumbs and water droplets and watch them flounder. I remember the damp earth under my fingernails, my knees red and raw covered with forest. That smell of soil. 

Within me, I have been grieving that earth, the forest in which the moss is different – perhaps softer, greener. 

• * * *  

As years passed I refused to learn any history, to speak with any of my people, to hear the stories of my elders, to know news of my home country. I pretended it did not exist.
 

Yet something in me sparked a pain so deep, a pain in my bones, as I began understanding that my craving for connection and belonging stems from the rejection of my home land. 

I have been searching for home in all these other places – except the place that was home for me first, the place that mothered and fathered me. Despite its inadequacies, that soil fed me and moulded me until I was old enough to leave. 

I remember my grandmother’s hands, how they were roughened by the earth that she tended her whole life, planting and growing, harvesting. Her back arched under the heaviness of her life. 

I want to go and hold her, to hold and feel the skin of her hands melt into mine, I want to see her face of purity and beg her to tell me stories of her past, of her mother’s past, and her grandmother’s past. I want to hear the stories of the women that came before me, of the stories that their bones hold, perhaps hear the stories that they never told. I want her to teach me how to know when seeds are to be planted. I want her to teach me about dying and seasons. I want her to teach me about loving and about god. I want to hear her pray and see her kneeling into the morning and talk to god. 

I feel no more shame of where I come from. I am grateful for this land that allowed me to make a home for myself, to find safety and to grow like a plant from a foreign land adapting and flourishing in a different climate. I now no longer want to hide and when they ask where that is from, I answer and my heart opens. 

I am a stranger to my own home and I know nothing about where I am from, but I want to learn, I want to listen with my whole body to the stories of my home country, to understand and find deep resonance within my chest, to understand that I hold home within me, that I am home, that I release shame; that I am hiding no more.