Germany is a very lovely place. It has so much to offer: rolling hills, climbing mountains, interesting culture, fattening cuisine, excellent scenery, and fascinating cities. so why is it I'm so desperate to return to my flat, unexciting corner of the American Midwest, where urban sprawl plagues even our dusty rural cornfield communities? They say home is where the heart is, but I never managed to drag my heart away from home, to make a new one in this foreign country, where people are quite the same, but just different enough to make you aware of it.
I can't really put my finger on exactly what it is about the German culture that makes me uncomfortable. There is an aggressive mentality that has been hard for this passive creative type to get used to. I'm not alone in this observation--other American residents of Germany feel very much the same. There is also a frank abruptness in speech that often corsses the line into rudeness.
Also, the language is horribly complex, and I'm convince, now, that 30 years old was too old to have started learning this particular tongue. There are linguistic details I simply cannot grasp and reatin, so I've stopped trying. Not out of faith of my own communication skills and the hope that someone will nicely correct me, but rather out of hopelessness and frustration. There is little logic to the rules, and my duplicitously ordered-yet-dreamy brain just can't keep it all straight without firm logic to grasp onto. I find myself inventing creativemnemonic devices to remember this or that prticular rule, and inevitably forgetit and manage to confuse myself later on.
When you get down to it, these are surface things. These are things you get over and move on with, making do when you need to. There's more to this discomfort of mind than the little things.
I once wrote a very long story that dealt with the issue of home. It was based on an actual experience of mine, and the piece was less of a work of creative non-fiction, than it was a method of catharsis. It was about a woman--me--who got stuck overnight in the Heathrow airport, in transit between Chicago and Stuttgart, with her very active two-year-old. She was alone. Her mom and dad were safely tucked away in their cornfield abode, a six-hour flight behind her, and her husband was anxiously awaiting her return to der Vaterland, 90 minutes ahead. At the end of the story, the woman finally realized where home was for her. It was with her husband, and she embraced this realization wholly. And yes, when I finally boarded the plane that would take me home to my husband, that's how I felt, too. To an extent.
Unlike that woman, who in all other ways was really me, a part of my soul got left behind when I left my Motherland. I've never been able to retrieve it--even after that turning-point at Heathrow, where I came the closest I'd even come to accepting Germany as my new Home.
It's clear that I need to be back home. I need to be near my support system, my family and friends I hold dear, and with whom I hold good relationships. I need to be in a place where I can reach out and grow and nurture everything about me that I had abandoned in order to be with my husband in Germany, things that are stubbornly difficult to achieve here, either due to lack of availability, or because of that damned language gap (which brings new meaning to the words that haunt the English tube system, Mind the Gap) I mentioned before.
There are so many risks involved in relocating our little family to my hometown just beyond the Chicago Far West Suburbs. Assuming my husband gets his green card (and there's no reason why he shouldn't), there is the money issue. And the job issue.
We're luckier than most, though. We will have to leave everything behind and start over. But we have a home to go to--my parents will gladly put up with us while get on our feet, just to have us in the same country again. We'll have a car all our own, thanks to my dad, who just bought a new car yesterday and said he'll store his old one for us to keep when we come Home.
We'll even have some pretty furntiure, which my mom put in storage for us a year ago, when she replaced it with new. My old double bed will be waiting for us, too--considerably smaller than the German one we're used to: two twin beds nested together in a single frame. And our son will be able to enjoy the classic turned-wood bunk beds I'd used during my adolescence, and later used by my sister (we're ten years apart).
We've got way more already waiting for us than most immigrants have when expatriating themselves from their homelands.
But the biggest risk isn't not finding jobs for boths of us, as one might think. In my mind, the biggest risk is the emotional one for my husband. He wants to move to America. He's wanted to for ages. But wanting a thing and being happy with it are are two different matters, indeed.
I wanted to move to Germany, too. What if, like me, he found he just couldn't drag the deepest part of his heart away from the land he grew up in and truly be happy in America?
What if it happened that neither one us can truly be happy with one another, because neither one of us can truly be happy and fulfilled in the same place, at the same time?
It won't stop me from taking the risk. But will it stop my husband, once he gets that stamp in his passport, and my parents call to inform us that his green card is waiting for him on their kitchen table, and it's time to go?
Questions to think about.
(and I'm wondering, too, if I'm capable of writing about anything without turning it into a thesis???)
