Hortus Deliciarum

Je suis triste.

Well, not really. I suppose the French word conjures up something a little more nuanced for me than the approximate English equivalent “I am sad.” La tristesse is a far greyer word than the almost-black “sadness.”

Culture shock is a nasty thing and while I somehow never really remember the details from one move to the next, I think that subconsciously my mind *knows* that it’s coming and dreads that creeping furry greyness that characterizes a new place for me. The shadowy “I don’t fit in…I don’t belong” no matter the country, culture, or language that somehow ends up all-pervasive until, in a moment I didn’t see coming until its arrival, the “ah-ha, this is HOME!” comes like a soundless EUREKA!

Then I move again and it’s gone.

I am waiting for England to be “home.” I want it to sweep over me and engulf me–for all the little strangenesses I mentioned to suddenly become familiar. For the strange street markings to become normal and the rush and bustle of American freeways to become foreign again. For people I have known my whole life to carelessly comment, “Hey, Heidi, you’ve picked up a bit of an English accent.”

I won’t have, of course–it’ll be all about inflection, as the tonalities that I hear become unconsciously assimilated into my own speech.

Graham once said that I really don’t have a very American accent–in other words, it doesn’t leap out at you like a Valley Girl or a Southerner or a New Jersey. It’s neutral, perhaps because I have indeed been in so many places, spoken so many tongues, that my accent is no longer pure anything, but instead the melange of many strange and exotic accents all blended into a neutral tapestry that passes for American. One of my French teachers in Geneva was strangely puzzled by my pronunciation of certain French consonants.

“I’ve never heard an American speak that way,” she said, but when I explained that I’d grown up in Africa, she nodded her head and said that those long-forgotten resonances might indeed still be affecting the way that I spoke. Unconscious reminders of a language I once spoke as well as I did English but can no longer conjure up, except for a few lonely words and phrases.

I love that chameleon-like blending…but hate it too. Somehow the “me” that I am now will have to change, adapt, become someone different in experience if not in personality and character. I hear my language adapting: loo instead of bathroom, tea instead of supper, boot instead of trunk and part of me resents the changes. My mother will comment, “I never heard you say that before…it must be a New England thing” or an “English thing” and so on. Surprised tones, as if I am someone she did not expect or want me to be–and I must defend my new words, the new “me” that I never realized I was becoming.

That’s the real love-hate part of being a TCK for me. I love the experiences but am afraid of the blurring lines of reality. I’m always restless, always wanting to travel, but detest the frightening loss of center that always characterizes new journeys. And when I return, places I have been are never the same as they once were–they, like Heidi, have changed irretrievably.