I have been in the U.S. for three-months, after a six-month study abroad in England, and I feel like I have come semicircle: I left the States with one runny nostril, sounding like Stevie Nicks, and now, once again, I'm in desperate need of those hankies I rambled on about in a previous blog post.
I say semicircle because I feel as though I've returned not fully whole- there's pieces of me scattered on park benches, playgrounds, trains, and other forms of public transportation that are a lot easier to navigate and more reliable than the VIA in San Antonio. Then again, I feel like I've grown (totally disregarding the five-ten lbs I gained by living off goat cheese ciabattas and frappes), matured- if you call learning how to smoke a cigarette properly- "It's like you're sucking a straw"- maturation (thanks, Vanessa), and made more whole by the people I met and the experiences I had.
Some people are told they get six months to live. I felt like I wasn't living and told myself that I needed six months to live, away from the predictable, away from Texas, away from the U.S. I proved myself, my family, and my friends, wrong by "surviving" in a "strange foreign" country.
To My Family, Friends, Etc.:
1. Shockingly, the majority of people in England speak English.
2. I spent a month studying abroad in Canterbury July '09.
3. Surprisingly, there are dentists in Canterbury.
4. ASDA is a chain of grocery stores now owned by Wal-Mart. The American influence is growing. Cue evil laugh.
I went back to Canterbury knowing a handful of English people (whether I wanted to or not). That's it. I didn't know any of the Americans who were also studying abroad in Canterbury. There were no other Texans (that I knew of), no one from my university. I knew all this ahead of time. I chose this. Some may call me "adventurous" (why, thank you), others may call me "irrational" (or stupid, once done reading this blog entry).
When I was eight, I told my mom that I wanted to go to summer camp for a week, just like two of my older cousins had year-after-year. I wanted to prove to my family that I wasn't the six-year-old who cried because she "missed her mommy." The first night at camp, well, I was homesick and cried myself to sleep. By Tuesday, I was calling my mom on the phone in the camp director's office in hysterics, saying, well, that I "wanted my mommy." My mom(my) did eventually come to get me the day before camp ended.
Around the holiday season, my aunt likes to regale the family with memories of my attempts to spend the night at her house, which usually ended up with me in her bathroom looking at myself in the mirror, crying. Two other aunts tell similar stories with different mirrors.
To my family, that's Jordan: the only child of a single parent, totally and utterly dependent on her mother, something of a 21st century Norman Baits without the cross-dressing and, oh, schizophrenia. That's not to say my family isn't partially correct. A part of me does enjoy seeing 'Mom' flash on my phone four-ten times a day, or seeing her name in bold line my inbox. I even enjoyed the time when she called me around 2 a.m. (England/ Western European Time) while I was in the older English boy's flat- with his friends- (for .15 cents a minute) to make sure that I was OK because I hadn't called her that day. I didn't want to tell her where I was because I didn't want the (cute) older English boy and his friends to know that my mom(my), who was over 3,000 miles away, was checking up on me. Somehow she knew where I was and I had to call her two hours later and leave a message when I got back to my dorm so she could stop worrying.
This six-month study abroad was a test for our present and future mother/daughter relationship. I'm pleased to report she's still calling me at every inopportune moment, making me feel, eh, about six-years-old. But I wouldn't have it any other way.
No comments:
Post a Comment