home

We’ve been back from the Netherlands for a few days now, and updating here has started to feel like bit of a daunting task. It was a complicated trip, emotionally speaking, and there are just way too many unformed threads floating around in my head to write coherently about, at least yet. There were wonderful times –seeing the boys connect with people and enjoy close to every waking minute of the trip immensely (and they were so good, overall, even on the plane), me catching up with cousins and old friends, an all-too-short family reunion on a gorgeous summer solstice evening. I feel compelled to add that I am aware how very lucky we were to be able to take such a trip.

But going back to one’s homeland, to a culture and landscape that is always a part of you but that, upon returning to, you cannot help but feel removed from, is overwhelming. When in the states, I almost always feel invisibly Dutch. I speak perfect Midwestern English, and other than my name, (which, incidentally, is not really Emmie, which is a nickname) no-one that doesn’t know me well ever suspects I wasn’t born here. But I was almost 7 when we moved; I could read, I can remember much of the several years before we left. Leaving was devastating, and the beginning of a lot of very isolated nuclear-family pain that reached its peak just before I left home at 17. Yet, when I go back home I feel ever American, like a bumbling foreigner who just happens to know the language. And what is that word, home, anyway? It has too many meanings to me to really mean anything at all anymore. In either direction across the ocean, I am supposedly going home. In either direction, I feel alienated from where I’ve come and where I’m going. Add to that many layers of complicated and often painful family history, differing interpretations of that history, and lots and lots of seeing people I see once every 5-10 years for all-too-short periods while chasing 2 active preschoolers through antiques-filled houses, and well, I’m shot. I am SO tired, and I don’t think it’s just the jetlag. I feel, well, almost kind of sedated, in a fog of unrealized emotion. I find myself weeping, in the shower, onto my pillow, but feeling close to nothing. I think I am perhaps the only ¼ of my nuclear family who can feel this numb without the benefit of large and consistent amounts of alcohol, a fact that hit me again and again, like a silent box to the ear, as last week I watched my brother knock back beer after beer after beer and grow only increasingly quiet. I confess that I truly didn’t want to know this fact that I can do nothing about. My little brother, the one who I left behind, the brilliant one, the artist, drinking himself into a still-respectable haze every night. We are so good at this, my family, no falling down drunks, we, no, just a whole lot of dollars spent on alcohol every week, shopping carts and recycling boxes overfilling with clinking bottles and rattling cans, a tendency to spend evenings sitting perfectly still and staring off into space while listening to music or watching television, maybe sometimes an unfortunately loose tongue or a hint of a liquor-fueled mean streak.

I, rarely drinking at all and religious to boot, am a foreigner within my own nuclear family. And maybe that’s OK. Maybe it ends here, in Minnea*polis, in our little house full of people who wouldn’t rather be anywhere else. Maybe it will end with two little boys growing into men who want to feel the lives they are leading. It would kill me to entertain any other possibility.

This, my grandmother’s home, feels as much like home as any place ever has. It’s been almost completely unchanged for my 34 years, bantam chickens running around the grounds, dark antiques filling the interior, the same dishes, glasses, bedspreads, everything my WW2-occupation survivor grandmother set up right the first time, well worn, but of quality. The same scents of wood oil, cut grass, and roses, the same tiny cookies served in a tiny chipped bowl with strong tea, her same hearty laugh, looking past us, like a private joke was almost shared but then not. She’s lived there 50 years this month, and may not live there another. She’s 88, and our embrace by her kitchen door last weekend may well have been our last. I suspect that while the logistics of the next trip will be easier, the rest of it will be much harder. Not coming home to my grandmother, or even just not to her home, is impossible to imagine.

 

Comments

[Emmie (Better Make It A Double)]

Mirre - that's exactly where it is! I was born in Blaricum, and it's one town over.

[Mirre]

Wow, quite an emotional journey for you...
Your grandmother's house looks like it could be close to where I live ('t Gooi); it's lovely!

[Jody]

That's a beautiful house to call home -- complications and all.

I don't know if it's any comfort, but I have complicated emotions about going "home" myself, and I was there my entire childhood, and it's only a different state in this country. Being an adult who left, among a family who didn't, is ... hard. Strange.

In my particular case, lucky.

I'm glad you have your husband, and your boys. It's a great comfort, to build a family of one's own, isn't it. (Scary as all get-out, but good.)

[juniper]

You are such a gifted writer, and so honest with emotions.

That home thing is tricky. One doesn't have to have an ocean between their birthplace and their current residence to feel as if home is nowhere. I feel as if I'm going to spend my adult life trying to find that feeling of home I took for granted as a child.

[Eva]

I'm so glad you had a successful trip. I'm glad the children were good. There's nothing like being an expat/immigrant.

What great pictures.

[snickollet]

Welcome home.

[cat]

Why do families always have to be so complicated? I know what you feel like re. you grandmother - it is so hard to see them growing older and every time wondering if you will ever see them again.

[Fern]

What a beautiful post.

I can relate to your feeling of not belonging, not quite, not anywhere. Only recently it struck me that this feeling could continue -- maybe I will always feel apart, for the rest of this life and even into the next -- and I was filled with despair. I won't think about that anymore. Mostly I'm not bothered by feeling slightly outside of things, but when I reflect on it I realize it makes me tired. Trying to understand things that are just beyond me, it's exhausting.

Beautiful post, beautiful pictures.

[Meika]

Your grandmother's house is even more beautiful than I had imagined. It's wonderful that your boys were able to experience it - and her - and yet such a sad, sad goodbye (again, to both).

You know, Emmie, I think that you may have a unique insight into what the Bible says about believers being strangers in a foreign land, just never quite fitting anywhere. We're just not supposed to feel all that perfectly comfortable in this world. Do you think feeling slightly out-of-place gives you the freedom to be more true to who God made you to be than you would otherwise? Or not so much? I think of Abraham a lot in this context, who really never knew where he was going, much less had a true home he was headed toward.

And as painful as it must have been to see your brother's slide into quiet alcoholism - just imagining the same about my brother brings tears to my eyes - you *have* learned to cope differently, and more honestly, with your emotions. And *that* is what you and J are passing on to your boys. In creating our own nuclear families, we can almost rewrite our histories by choosing which treasures we'll keep, and talk about, and celebrate; and which bits of dross we'll - well, not forget, exactly, but not pass along as something that is part of our family's identity.

I do selfishly hope you'll write more about your trip as you process it - this post gave me a lot to chew on, and I appreciate your sharing all of this with us.

[cloudscome]

Oh, Emmie. Families are so hard to live with, and live away from. This is such a poignant post. My brother is an alcoholic, not drinking now Thank God. I feel you. God Bless you and your family.

[Courtney]

Your grandmother's house is beautiful, and I'm glad you got to see it one more time before she moves.