Tuesday, December 31, 2013

An end of it



So I promised myself I’d finish this blog by the end of the year, so here it is.  It’s been harder than you might think.  I’d planned to write a lovely little post about how amazing Paris was, how lucky I am to have been able to visit that gorgeous city a second time in my life, and this time accompanied by my most favorite person in the world; and then I’d write about the beauty of Ireland, which really is every bit as lovely, and the people just as friendly and welcoming, as every song or tourism commercial has ever promised; or maybe I’d go all out and write first about the great history of Dublin and the juxtaposition of a fully modern sense of place alongside the history of an ancient and proud people, and the surrounding marks of their fight to retain (and sometimes reclaim) their freedom and identity and the right to simply be, and be peacefully, then follow that up with Cork!  Hurling!  Cousins!  Green that even HD can’t reproduce!  I thought I’d end with something cute about homecomings and landing on our feet again and looking for the next adventure.
But here you go instead, and like I said, harder than you might think.  Because our trip home was amazing, and our friends and family have been wonderfully warm and generous and welcoming; yet once the dust settled off our backpacks, more than just our breath has caught up to us.  No, it’s not all bad, but how to assess and evaluate and put in place not just a year this December 31st, not even two years, but rather what has come to feel like an entire lifetime of joy and laughter and beauty and grief and regret and struggle and what-have-we-accomplished and where-to-go-from-here…  They weren’t kidding about that roller coaster we’d be on with Peace Corps.
It’s been interesting to come home, yes, because of the “reverse culture shock” (I sometimes still get stuck gazing at the sheer variety of options of everyday things – it’s best to have a list, know what brands you like, or just get what’s on sale), because of the things that have changed (is everybody a hipster now?), and things that haven’t.  Because of the knowing looks when I mention that my pagne has shrunk in the wash (it did!), and questioning whether what I’ve put on is actually appropriate to leave the house in (I often find I’m a tad overdressed, but sometimes there are colors and patterns that just don’t get put together in America).  I watch what I say - if I mention Cameroon am I going to be thought of as one of those horrid people who starts every sentence with, “When I was in Peace Corps…”?  When someone says they like my dress, sometimes I smile and say, “Thank you, I had it made in Africa,” (no one knows where Cameroon is anyway) even though they don’t know, couldn’t possibly know, that my dress is one of the few things I feel is unequivocally lovely from my time over there right now, and sometimes people will smile back with more admiration than they should and say, “Really?  I bet that was great!” and other times they will smile in a less nice way and make a mock of it, “Well, lah-di-dah!”
It’s made difficult because people who love you want to get it, and think they do, and maybe they do understand in pieces – military members who’ve been deployed knows what it is to be far away from the people they love – but it’s a different story.  We weren’t actively being shot at; we didn’t have any logistical support.  And I don’t want to go back, but I am proud of my service to my country – which I nevertheless hesitate to say, never having entered an active combat zone (though, in entirely unrelated incidents, there were guns, and I was otherwise injured, as I'm reminded anytime the weather changes), because some might say, for being less a uniform, mine was a lesser service.  And while people may be ready to accept either that it was awful (and it was, and wasn’t), or that it was great (and it wasn’t… but it was), it’s very hard for someone who wasn’t there to understand that it was both, in spades, in conjunction.  Then there are those well-meaning (?) individuals who smile and nod and say it sounds like life, sounds like anywhere in the world.  And those whose eyes glaze over if they think to ask what it was like, and those who don’t ask at all, because everyone has plenty of stress and their own hardships and tragedies, and you feel like a bit of a boor for thinking that the worst time of their lives still includes access to American grocery stores and hot showers, and where you’ve just been was at times so cheap, dirty and ugly, with grasping and hateful and fearful moments (but not only that) – but of course, your non-Third-World-living American friends don’t know, and it isn’t fair to expect them to.  All suffering is suffering, as the man says.
We have been so grateful for those friends, though, who have asked, and who do really want to know, and so keep asking and listening to our often contradictory answers as we try to sort out for ourselves what it was like, and what that means, and how to reconcile it with the lives we had before, and our lives moving forward, and what does that mean for us, and what do we think about it.  How could we even hope for someone else to understand what we don’t yet ourselves?
And maybe four and a half months back in the country is a bit soon to try and have it all neatly wrapped up and packed away - and only three of mostly not living out of backpacks, looking for work (which is just never fun for anyone), not getting work, and deciding we’ll move to where we want to live anyway – but it’s the end of the year, and time to put away things past so we can take up the new.
So be gentle and kind to yourself if you’re going home; be patient with your friends who are coming back.  Yes, it’s America.  Yes, it’s familiar.  Yes, it’s home.  And yes, it’s good and it’s amazing and it’s also hard.  And that’s okay.

Happy New Year, goodbye, and good luck from your

Wandering Gaines’