the immigrant in me

When I was growing up, it was a joke between my siblings-- to designate things as "fobby" as in "fresh-off-the-boat." Our parents are immigrants who flew over to this country in the 1960's. My five sibs and I were born here on the East Coast and we were raised in rural central PA, a place where our cultural reckoning was in small fits and starts. "Fobby" behavior would include bringing food from home to Hersheypark. Using a rice-cooker in your hotel room. As well as ironing your jeans. I came to have an acute sense of this and tried very hard to keep things as assimilated as possible, adhering to a pretty rigorously "vanilla" lifestyle. Thinking all along that it was safer to be under the cultural radar.

However, now that I am a mother, I can see that I am squarely seated on that "boat" I used to dread. What I dreaded was the desperate clinging of a refugee, the staunch refusal to leave to the homeland behind. When relatives would visit, it would fill me with shame to travel as a pack in the mall, to church, to Strawberry Square. We would be this clustered, multi-generational, clan not just walking but conversing in a different language and I would really begin to sweat when the native snack foods would be trotted out- not the Lechon, oh no, please, for God's sake, not the Balut! This was not congruent with my adolescent desire to be Denise Huxtable or Winona Ryder.

The boat to which I refer now is the boat of our own little family. And the country I can't leave is this house. Anthropologically-speaking, the nuclear family is good and trustworthy and what is outside of the nuclear family is corrupt and must prove its merits before I will trust it. Frankly-speaking, I am chronically clannish and I am realizing this more as time goes on. I am insistent that the boys reconcile when there is a conflict. They have always had two separate beds but have slept together in one since I can remember. Their friendship has the admirable and seamless communication of couples who have been married for decades. I shun play-date requests saying what I never thought I'd crib from my Mom, "Why do you need a friend to play with when you have your siblings right here?"

Back to that anthropological assumption, I think American culture is the opposite: What you grew up with in your house is okay but it is essential to make a mark and find meaning in a larger, external milieu. In other words, "ABH," Another phrase my siblings coined, "anywhere but home." As in, let me buy my lunch today. I need a new sweater because I have had this one forever. To be more precise, the phrase means anything that is different than what I have at home is superior. I love the heft of a homemade breakfast sandwich in my bag. I have arranged housecalls from doctors, two homebirths, seasons of food delivered from a farm, begun ordering school-clothing online. I am becoming a HOMEBODY!

I shamelessly cling to their babyhood all the tiny helplessness, to how clearly my role was defined. I am comfortable in the well-worn grooves of tummy-time and arboretum strolls. I know all the roads through pregnancy, the ups and downs of infancy, the peaks of discovery in toddlerhood. When I look outside the family, I dread the advice of most other mothers and I despise interrogation about the decisions we make for our family. The Desperate Housewives-esque competition and rivalry makes me want to "eat a bag of threepenny nails" to borrow a friend's phrase. I see that in this way, it is a homeland of my own that I am making. Protective and clinging as any refugee ever could be. I see now that is admirable to be a Fob. It is a noble and brave act, disembarking the boat. I'm not certain I can do it.