Growing up in different countries has deeply influenced my identity and how my husband and I are raising our family. I have met wonderful people from all over the world, and I have the best of friends that I may not have seen for years yet can chat to as if I had only gone out with them the day before. I have had the chance to learn so much about so many different cultures and I love languages. But I will never have the chance to feel at home in any country, which in turns might be why my family and close friends whether they live nearby or on the other side of the world matter so much to me.
Every time I meet someone I know I will be asked where I am from, I will be asked this question all my life, and I have heard it since I was 7 and moved away from my birth country. Being old enough to remember differences between both my home and my new country means that I did struggle a lot when it came to make friends, Primary kids tend to single you out when you have a different accent, words you use don't have the same meaning, some just don't plain exist or the cartoons you enjoyed only a week ago have never aired in this country. It took me over two years to lose my accent and by then any hope and will of fitting in had long left. So it did sting a little when years later I had the opportunity to move back only to be asked once more about where I was from and know that while I will always be Canadian at heart, I will never be able to buy my groceries in Canada without the till assistant asking where I'm from or what brought me there. I have been mistaken for Russian, French, Polish, Swedish, Irish, Lithuanian, Australian.... (and anyone from these countries who know me will be thinking "What? She doesn't sound like....") because my accent is hard to place but I can also change it if required and sometimes I adapt it without knowing but never enough for it to sound just right to whomever I am speaking with.
As Fate would have it I now live in Scotland which I never ever thought I would, and my husband and both my daughters were born here. My immediate family of course doesn't live near, and I can go for over a year without seeing them, but I have no desire to move where they live. I crave little things like maple cream cookies or V8 or Mountain Dew, coming in more than one edited flavour, but we will not move to Canada either. I have had dreamt for a long time of living in Ireland but we will not do that either. We will visit, because I do want my children to experience as much world culture as possible, but no matter how much I miss my family or my beautiful birth country, Scotland is where my children have made friends, this is where we have experienced the most love and hurt and despite some part of me feels at time like turning a new page, I have also learnt that providing shared cultural roots might be one of the best gifts I can give my children and so Scotland is where we will stay and come back to from all our future holidays.
I am lucky or maybe it simply is that foreigners living abroad somehow almost always end up making friends with other expatriates because we tacitly understand each other as I have made great friends who do come from many different countries and all somehow married, met someone and/or started a family in Scotland and settled there. Some have children the age of mine and they will grow, speaking different languages but English with a Scottish accent, other friends at school will be secretly jealous of their multilingual ability when they let it out but having grown in the same culture they will fit in and probably never have to answer the question "where are you from?" in their home country. They will get the best of both worlds.
I will always be countrysick but thanks to my family I will never be homesick because now, my husband and children are my home.
