We've just celebrated an anniversary: four years in Toronto. Four years! Yet I still feel like a newcomer. I spoke to a friend yesterday who also moved to Toronto from England with her son and husband. My friend told me that she checks in with her son every so often to ask him whether he feels Canadian.They've been here several years longer than we have but her son always answers 'No!' My friend confesses that this pleases her. I think I would feel the same way if my children also answered 'no', and I wondered why.
Perhaps because I don't think I will ever feel Canadian. I lived in England for 17 years and never felt English, so it's reasonable to suppose that the same will be true with regard to Canada,But somehow, here in Canada, that is something of a subversive attitude. In England no one ever expected me to 'feel English' or to become English. I might have taken British citizenship (though I didn't, to my regret and to my husband's dismay), but even if I had, there would be no possibility of my claiming Englishness. In Canada, acquiring Canadianness is the goal. People eye us up and almost seem to test us on our degree of integration, to discern whether we are yet woven tightly into the Canadian fabric (which I envision as a bright woollen blanket from the Hudson Bay Company). Immigrants can be heard on television and radio proclaiming 'I am Canadian!' in proud and possessive tones.
I can't see myself doing the same thing.
However, the four-year check-up reveals that I have nonetheless found happiness in Toronto. I love my house, my street, my neighbourhood. I very much appreciate being based in North America. Last week, daughter and I took a road trip to Asheville, North Carolina, to see dear friends from Sussex who now live in Norway-- but were spending much of the summer in the USA. It was a long trip for us (longer for them of course) but a beautiful one, on highways clinging to the spine of the Appalachian mountains. I never knew there was so much of West Virginia, or that it was such a stunning state. Mountain mama, take me home. As Bill Bryson said of Durham (England), 'Go there now. Take my car!' North Carolina itself is also lovely and Asheville a hip and happening town with excellent food (Over Easy, Curate) and home to the exceedingly friendly and comfortable Windsor Hotel. But mostly Asheville (and The Windsor) contained our beloved friends, a family including one of my daughter's two closest friends from Brighton. The joy of getting to see the girls together made every inch of the (very very very) long drive worthwhile. Not that anyone is asking, but 2600 km. -- over 1600 miles-- in 6 days. Eight degrees of latitude (43 to 35 N). Halfway to California! After that trip we added another 650 km round-trip to visit friends at their gorgeous cottage by a lake. The True North.
Another aspect of the four-year check-up reveals how much our family's life has changed simply due to the passage of time rather than to relocation. No surprise I suppose, and yet, I am surprised. This summer has been busy for everyone, but for everyone differently. Each of the five of us has spent a substantial amount of time away from the rest of the family, at camp or with friends or home without the others (the adults). This very evening, in fact, husband and I sat on our front porch eating takeaway Thai food in the gloaming, just the two of us and the dog. Eldest child had gone on his own by bus to Cambridge (the Ontario one), middle child to stay with friends in Niagara-on-the-Lake, and youngest negotiated a sleepover with one of her chums in the neighbourhood.
Peaceful. Pleasant. And yet a little, just a little, melancholic.
My parents recently gave me a printed copy of an email I sent them fourteen years ago. I tend to deride them for printing things rather than letting electrons live happily as they are, but I'm so glad in this case that they did have a paper copy. The account from which I sent that message disappeared unexpectedly when husband and I closed our phone account in England, so I no longer have access to the gazillion messages it stored (stupid OneTel). In the email I described our firstborn at the age of two years. I reported his utterance of many adorable bon mots: for instance, of his newborn brother, he said 'I make him happy!'; he sometimes called me 'Lady', and his father 'real Daddy' to distinguish him from a photograph. What drips from the text, and that I at the time took entirely for granted, is that his father and I were our son's whole world. Our boy attended nursery for a few hours a week but would never choose to spend a night apart from us. How slowly, but inexorably, did we reach the point where he disappears off to a yurt with a gang of friends for 5 days, or wanders about Germany with his brother? I know and I don't know; this transformation is still a mysterious process in my eyes. I've done so little in comparison with my children's marvellous accomplishments.
I did get some good news today about an accomplishment of my own: a story I submitted to a competition was awarded an honourable mention! I'm thrilled:
http://momayapress.com/awards/momaya-press-awards-2014/
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