by Lisa McKay
“I don’t know,” Matt said slowly, shrugging. “I mean, we left when I was one. What’s home supposed to feel like?”
I recognized the inarticulate confusion I’d stirred up and rerouted, jumping to something else I’d been thinking through recently.
“Do you guys remember much about early childhood?” I asked. “I feel like I can’t remember as much about it as other people say they can. Some people talk about remembering things from when they were two or three, but I struggle to remember anything much clearly before five, at the earliest.”
“Me, too,” Matt said. “My memory’s crap.”
“Mine, too!” Michelle said. “I can hardly remember anything from Bangladesh, and I was seven when we left! I was just talking about this in counseling the other day.”
Michelle paused then, looking pensive.
Of the three of us, Michelle had made the most definitive decisions about the place she would call home. The previous year, she had married her high school sweetheart, Jed, and moved back to Maryland. This transition hadn’t been entirely smooth, and as she’d essentially adopted America, Michelle decided that she might as well experiment with one of the common cultural mores and try seeing a counselor as well. From the little I’d heard, I was dubious as to whether this woman was going to be a good fit.
“What’d she say?” I asked.
“She …” Michelle paused again. “She said childhood memory loss is common in abuse cases.”
“She said what?!?” I asked, sitting up.
“She also wants you to come to a session with me next time you’re in town,” Michelle continued. “She thinks it might help her understand me better.”
“I cannot believe that she suggested to you that you may have been abused as a child in your second session with her,” I said. “That is so dodgy.”
“I’d never even thought about it before, but do you think it’s even a possibility?” Michelle asked, trying – and almost succeeding – to sound as if my answer wasn’t that important.
“It’s possible, I guess,” I said. “But it’s unlikely. Total amnesia about abuse does happen, but it’s really not all that common. Plus, all three of us have the same problem and we certainly weren’t being abused at home. Did she consider that perhaps a lot of moving around as a child disrupted your ability to lay down early memories?”
“No,” Michelle said. “Just abuse. So will you come to counseling with me next time you’re in town?”
“Yes,” I said, lying back down and looking up through the leaves. As was often the case in L.A., there wasn’t a cloud in sight.
“In the meantime,” I said, “just tell her that when we were little and people asked you questions, I used to tell them that you didn’t talk, then I’d answer for you. And I don’t think that you said the word no to me until you were twelve. Also, I used to hide in your closet occasionally while you were brushing your teeth at night and wait until you were in bed and it was all dark and then jump out and scare you. I am very sorry about all of this now, truly I am. But I do not believe it constitutes child abuse of the type your counselor is probably thinking about.”
“You got off lightly,” Matt reminded Michelle. “She told me I was adopted.”
“Awww,” I said, smiling at the memory. “I did. I even made you a fake birth certificate.”
“Okay,” Michelle said, clearly happy to let this go for the time being. “Shall we call Mum and Dad?”
“Yes. Let’s ask them whether they think you were abused as a child,” I said.
“That is not funny,” Matt said sternly. “And do you want to give Dad nightmares for a week? Even without the prospect of abuse, I reckon he’d still be upset to think that we couldn’t remember things as well because of all the moving around.”
“Why?” I said. “Are we not allowed to acknowledge that growing up leapfrogging borders may just have come with some price tags attached? Does it all have to be positive? Would any of us trade our experiences despite those price tags?”
*
My memory improved with time. I do better with recalling our later houses.
Brown carpet here, marble floors there. Here a kidney-shaped swimming pool, there a swing set or a courtyard. Windows sternly barred with black metal, or white wood clutching small clear panes, or great glossy sheets of shatterproof glass that looked out from the 27th floor and didn’t even open.
These places were all homes in their own fashion. They just weren’t home, singular.
That was probably my other problem in Hawaii. I’ve always had this sense that home should be singular. That you really have only one.
When I put these two ideas together – the singularity of place that I’ve burdened the concept of home with – I understand better why from this vantage point nowhere I’ve ever lived looks fully like home to me. It has less to do with whether that place felt like a home during the time I lived there than with there being about a dozen such places.
Accra, Ghana
Ten days into my latest Africa trip, I found myself eating alone at the hotel in Ghana.
It was a precious pause during what was turning out to be a draining stint.
Overall, the workshops in Kenya had gone well. There were the usual challenges, of course. Jet lag and nightmares prodded me awake at 3 a.m. on my second night in country and left me lying there thrumming with fatigue and questioning my decision to embark on this line of work in the first place, whether anything I do really makes a difference, and whether I’m actually worth anything as a human being.
Those are really fun hours, those ones.
Then there were the late nights filled with the tedium of organizing handouts and name tags. During the workshops, there was a plethora of unexpected questions from the group, including, bizarrely, in the middle of a discussion of stress and spirituality, “Can you explain the stress of menopause?”
Every international assignment, however, teaches me again what makes the long flights, the 3 a.m. angst, and the huge amount of energy it takes to facilitate worth it. These are amazing people who sit in these workshops. They are people who have chosen to work in the slums and help children to stay in school instead of unwittingly embracing life sentences of boredom, menial labor, or crime by dropping out. They are lawyers who prosecute case after case of child sexual abuse or land-grabbing. They are people who have made careers of documenting the stories of refugees in camps all over Africa who are desperate for a chance at another life. Persecution histories, these stories are called, and they are largely tales of horror and fear.
This was the group I was working with in Ghana, people who spend much of their time in camps in West Africa interviewing an endless stream of displaced people seeking refugee status and resettlement in the United States. The first day’s workshop on understanding and coping with traumatic stress had been lively. This group was also full of interesting questions like “What should I do when a refugee I’m interviewing starts showing me their wounds or demands that I touch them?” And “When someone is obliquely referring to having been raped, should I use the word rape or mirror their language? How can I encourage them to give more details without breaching cultural taboos around rape and causing further shame?”
When faced with questions like these, I sometimes use a facilitation technique I could call “tapping into the collective wisdom of the group.”
Of course, I could also call it “In this exact moment I have no idea how to address that well, so let’s ask everyone else present what they think.”
There is little spare time on one of these international work trips. From the time I hit the ground, I’m usually absorbed in meeting with the team, liaising with management, sorting out logistics, reviewing my notes, presenting. But there are pauses – odd moments when I’m alone in an airport or my hotel room and not completely focused on what needs to be done next. In these gaps there is none of the normal rhythmic “to-do list” of life to distract me, no grocery shopping, laundry, cooking,
ringing people. There is no buffer between me and my thoughts.
Dinner in Ghana that night was one of those pauses. For one hour I deliberately relaxed into the echo of the day, inhabited the weary intoxication of knowing that one hurdle had been crossed, and refused to think about the next three days.
I sat by myself at a table outside while the waiter cleared away all the other place settings, as if to emphasize my solitude. I used to hate this practice. Now I’m so accustomed to eating alone that I rarely notice, but that night I thought of my California friends and smiled. I don’t think that being served fresh fish poolside is what most of them imagine I spend my time in Africa doing. More like risking food poisoning, or worse.
Food poisoning. Not an experience that needed repeating. I made a mental note not to eat the salad that would come with dinner. That was where the biggest risk would lie.
Dinner. Malaria medication needed to be taken with dinner. I dug through my bag for the pills, only then thinking that maybe I should have chosen to sit inside instead of braving the mosquitoes.
The soft darkness and winsome breeze were too beautiful. I decided not to move.
At the next table a French couple united against the pleas of their young son, who had returned from the buffet with three deserts. Implacable, they sent back the crème caramel and the boy began to cry. I learned that the romance of the language does have its limits; a child whining in French is no more charming than one whining in English.
I opened the book I was holding and focused on a quote by Marcel Proust.
“Come now! Were everything clear to you all would seem in vain. Your boredom would populate a shadowless universe with an impassive life made up of unleavened souls. But a measure of disquiet is a divine gift. The hope which, in your eyes, shines on a dark threshold does not have its basis in an overly certain world.”
Would a shadowless universe really not be preferable if it meant finally, permanently, illuminating the darkness?
I have often seen refugees in airports in Africa on their way to their new lives, holding nothing but sleeping children and sealed plastic bags full of official documents. I examine them covertly while we all wait to board, trying to imagine what it is like to leave behind the only home you have ever known, perhaps forever, on the strength of nothing but the uncertain hope that there must be something better across that wide, dark oceanic threshold.
Caught in the departure lounge, in that final pause separating a grim past and the unknown, I can rarely discern either disquiet or hope in their eyes.
Just exhaustion.
Five men strutted across the lobby of the hotel and pushed through the glass doors toward us, commandeering the last remaining table by the pool. They were tall and lithe, moved with authority, even gestured loudly. Three of them wore white tunics that dropped from neck to ankle, magnificent against skin that was darker than the night sky.
They ignored the crying child but spared me a little more attention without noticeable pause in their animated debate about the credibility of someone I eventually surmised was a local politician, or maybe a gangster.
I returned my eyes to the book and William Inge spoke.
“He who will live for others will have great troubles, but they shall seem to him small. He who will live for himself shall have small troubles, but they shall seem to him great.”
What does it really mean, to live for others? Does motive or action take the lead in that tango?
People often ask me what I do, and if I describe it just right I can come off sounding like a cross between Indiana Jones and Florence Nightingale.
“Wow,” one woman said to me recently, “that’s not a job, that’s a calling.”
Yes, in some ways. But I have often wondered whether it’s not an inferior high-adrenaline substitute for the living for others that happens day after day in marriage and parenthood. The kind of living for others that slowly wears the sharp edges off your core selfishness, that plays out in a million little installments instead of the occasional big sacrifice.
I’m pretty sure it’s easier to live for others when they are half a world away and you just visit occasionally.
Music drifted out over the pale marble tiles that circled the pool. Nothing’s gonna change my love…Cherish…Wind beneath my wings… I can’t live if living is without you. It was the same type of music, I suddenly realized, that I’d heard at the airport, on the radio in every taxi, and in the hotel lobby competing valiantly with the soccer commentary: ’80s love songs.
I looked at the empty chair opposite me and thought about feeling lonely, but I was too tired. I settled for wistful.
I wondered what my family was doing right then. Where was Mike? Was he thinking of me, or had he mostly thought the better of our sudden e-friendship? Was he eating alone and feeling far from home?
Home.
All those places that I lived growing up did feel at least somewhat like home during the time we lived there. That had something to do with the little things we took with us, those portable threads of continuity: books, music, and pictures. But it had more to do with people. With family – those other four who were always there – and with friends. Without those people somewhere in the picture, there was no amount of “stuff” that could make a place even come close to feeling like home.
I laid my book aside as the food arrived and let my thoughts slide past the next three weeks and settle back in California. In three weeks I would be the one laughing with friends over dinner. Perhaps someone else would sit alone across the room, a silent witness to our camaraderie, savoring their moment of anonymous solitude and thinking that for them, too, home rests far more on the foundation of people than of place.
Perhaps they would remember that we all stand shadowless and disconnected from substance and meaning unless illuminated by the care and insight of others. And that while we may need pauses to recharge, life is lived in communion.
Perhaps they would also think about place and people like this and then wonder why the puzzle of home still did not feel complete and what the missing pieces were.
Los Angeles – Accra – Washington, D.C. – Sydney – Zagreb – South Bend – Nairobi – San Diego – Atlanta – Madang – Kona – Canberra – London – Baltimore – Itonga – Vancouver – Harare – Dushanbe – Lira – Petats – Port Moresby – Brisbane – Ballina – Malibu
Icicles in Heathrow
London, UK
A week later I walked into Heathrow Airport. The icicles decorating it were a sudden and disconcerting reminder that Christmas was coming.
When I had transited through Heathrow two weeks earlier on my way to Nairobi, there had been no streamers of blue light cascading from the ceiling or coned evergreens winking fiercely. Now there were. Starbucks had not been selling coffee in red and white cardboard cups and drawing Santa hats and candy canes on its chalkboards. Now it was.
I sat in my favorite airport café, Pret a Porter, and tried to take stock. The abrupt realization that Christmas season had arrived in the West while I had been gone was jarring, and the pink pigs hanging from the roof of the next store and whizzing in battery-powered circles didn’t exactly prove grounding. I got up, ditched my coffee cup, and prepared to waste the next several hours of my life wandering through airport limbo.
Twelve hours from then, I knew, I’d be landing in Washington, D.C. Michelle would want to know how the trip had been. And I wouldn’t know where to start, because the previous two weeks had been more a stream of potent, rushing moments than a story.
Saturday, the day before I leave Los Angeles. I am dressed in my pajamas at a costume party and sitting outside on the cold stone bench of a barbecue eating Mexican food without the safety net of a paper plate.
Two days later, Monday, a twenty-four-hour layover in London. I am sitting on a gravestone and eating meat pies, again with no safety net in sight. A friend from high school, Angela, and I did try to find a bench, but they were all full of uniformed British schoolchildre
n who for some reason were not in school, so we figured that the occupant of this particular grave would not mind the company. We talk of friends we knew when we were both teenagers growing up in a peaceful, promising Zimbabwe that no longer exists. We watch Angie’s toddler, Abby, sleep in her pram. She is a stark reminder of the fact, bewildering to me, that we are no longer teenagers. How did that happen?
Thursday. Nairobi. Work. During workshops I am nowhere else. There are only words and thoughts, and I am always searching for the right questions. One day of facilitating drains, three days’ worth of energy. I work again over solitary dinners by the pool, occasionally glancing up to see bougainvillea glowing purple in the shadows. A waiter, a beautiful man – tall and graceful and dressed in a spotless tuxedo – thoughtfully carries over a glowing copper brazier and places it near me to ward off the dark’s chill. We share a silent smile. I go back to work.
Wednesday. Accra. The last workshop is over. The bubble of total absorption breaks and Ghana elbows its way in.
It’s 6 a.m. and I’m headed north on my last day in the country with a silent driver named George for one precious day of adventuring.
Traffic and people. Chaos and heat. Pollution and dust glued to me in equal measure by the humidity. Women balancing buckets and boxes on their heads, selling plantains car to car.
10 a.m., Elmina castle – the Portuguese and Dutch trading post that brokered the most valuable of commodities, slaves, until the late 1800s. I am standing on the governor’s balcony overlooking the three stone cells that used to hold hundreds of female slaves awaiting the transport ships. At the governor’s pleasure, the women would be driven from these holding pens into the courtyard below to mill around until he had made his daily choice.
When I look up I can see a church in the middle of the castle, placed directly over the dungeons that used to hold male slaves. In that church, words from Psalms 132:14 are inscribed above the door: “This is my resting place forever; Here I will dwell, for I have desired it.”