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 L
echon, 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.
