I was brought up in a mixture of cultures in a fairly homogeneous suburb of London. My mother is French Canadian, my father is an Irish Catholic from Manchester who told us barely anything about his life growing up and kept us almost completely separate from his family for most of our lives. We grew up in middle class surroundings attending both public and private schools and my father had a variety of jobs, one successful high paid career followed by much more blue collar jobs later in life. Even my accent, and my brother’s accent for that matter, is neither posh nor the opposite, I don’t know anyone with my accent. I can assimilate in pretty much any British social situation, but I never feel “like” anyone else because even I don’t know where exactly I am supposed to fit in.
Growing up we spent the majority of time with our mother and when we visited family it was in Quebec in Canada so I considered my roots to be almost wholly French Canadian. My French Canadian family view me as British of course with my British accent and my “British skin”. My father doesn’t even have a northern accent unless he is tired so I honestly don’t associate myself with any part of England. My husband is also British, but properly so, he knows where he came from, it’s clearer.
Moving to the US has been immensely liberating for me. When we moved to Brooklyn my struggle with who I was finally began to come to an end. My upstairs neighbor and good friend was Polish, my best friend Canadian, other close mommy friends Mexican, Dutch and British. For the first time in my life I was surrounded by people who didn’t appear to belong but together we belonged perfectly in our amazing multicultural, diverse neighborhood. I will forever love Bay Ridge, Brooklyn for being the first place I ever truly belonged. Now I live in Los Angeles. On the surface you might think the same applies. I feel more like I belong than when I lived in the UK and these days feel British, Canadian and American in pretty much equal measure. I know to my British friends this may sound shocking. When you wonder why I don’t discourage my officially American children from using American words and spellings and why I have wholeheartedly assimilated myself into the culture of where I live, it’s because America, the place I was brought up to dislike, has become a home which to me enthusiastically embraces my differences and has no need for me to conform.
I no longer feel that desperate need to belong or to know who I am because everyone I meet, everyone I know, has their own story. None of us came from here, not even my American friends “just” came from here, nobody “just” comes from here, unless they are native American, which I happen to be, one 64th native I believe, my great great great great grandmother.
This all led me to a theory that it’s all about perception. People perceive other people to have perfect families, perfect relationships, of course they don’t. I may perceive other people as secure in where they belong or where they come from, but they may feel very differently. Maybe everyone feels like this, maybe nobody feels like they belong. I don’t know, how do you feel?
Now that I have had children with my half English, half Welsh husband and these children were born in the US, further confounding any attempts to put a pin in who we are and where we come from, I hope they will have pride and self assuredness in who they are and that they will be proud not to belong anywhere but everywhere. I remember my mum explaining to me that I am not half British and half Canadian, I am British, I am Canadian. I exist and they ARE expecting me.
