I awoke American and I will go to sleep Canadian. I will belong to another country. I am like a bride on her wedding morning, if that bride is 43-years-old and tired from nine years of bureaucratic hoops culminating in transporting two children 12 hours to get from our remote little rock-in-the-ocean to the big city where this commitment ceremony will occur. In this ceremony, I am asked to commit myself in word to the Queen of Canada, and in heart, to a new home.
After a couple of years, I realized I had to say to people, “I am from America,” and that would help them understand why I laughed at the wrong moments, expressed my opinions (when asked or not). #Immigration #citizenship @CitImmCanada
Belonging is a powerful notion and I know it best in its lack, in the years of longing that filled my being. I want, I want, I want — the feeling would rain down upon me until I was soggy with it. It came up in conversations on the playground with other parents, at the school while dropping off our kids, and in my head as I sat at my computer, listening to the rainfall.It rains so much in this new land which I now call home.
In American Sign Language, the sign for ‘home’ is composed of two parts: the one for eat and the one for sleep. Home is where we eat and sleep. While simple, those two words conjure much more. Home is where we are able to eat the foods that nurture our bodies and our spirits. Sleep is what we do when we are deeply and fully at ease. We are home when we are at ease, nourished, andtransformed from onewho seeks to one who has found. At home, we inhabit agency, we become more than bodies, we become homes to our minds, will and spirit. At home we become ourselves. At home, we belong.
Welcome to the home that is yours
At the end of the citizenship ceremony the judge says: “Welcome Home” and then “Bienvenue chez vous.” In my educated-in-America French, I roughly translated that to “Welcome to the home that is yours.” The translation spoke more to me, perhaps because of what I could read into it. As if in French I could see that Canada was always here, a home ready for me, though I had just arrived at the feeling of “home.” And despite that “arriving” wasn’t so easy.
