On the Absolute Loneliness of a Well-Integrated Immigrant, and How to Live With It
It felt like a layer of snow, new and white and soft, covering me completely, and isolating me from the world around, muffling the outside sounds. That time I felt it, physically felt it, was the evening I left my husband of almost twenty years. I was grown-up, relatively established, well, as established as a PhD student could be, but I was to start anew with my daughters, and for the first time in my life, I was completely and utterly alone.
I took a step back, I looked down on myself: Sitting on the floor, my elbows on my knees, my head in a my hands, covered with a thick layer of a fresh new snow. Everything that was in front of me: Finding a new job (my PhD funding was running out), renting an apartment, being a single parent to my two small daughters. Now, I’m close to my siblings, in a way that does not come easy, being close to your siblings as an adult takes years of hard work and commitment, and I also have good friends, close friendships I had been building over many years in much of the same way I was building the relationship with my siblings, but they all lived abroad. Every single one of them. At that particular moment, my mother, my brother, my sister, and me, we lived in four different countries. Now we live in three. Not much of an improvement.
So I sat there, and I acknowledged it, and I got to work. I did fix it all eventually, the apartment, the job, the kids, the apartment literally too, I started with staring at the paint roller and turning it around, it took me three hours to figure out how to fix it to the frame (no, there are no Youtube videos to explain you that, it’s apparently considered trivial), but eventually, I did paint my whole apartment, room for room, I demolished the built-in closets and put in new ones, because, the colours were ghastly, the closets non-functional, for who else was to do it?
Now, you don’t have to be an immigrant to feel it, but we’re perhaps more susceptible to it, and maybe we’re not. Maybe having your family around and feeling alone is even worse. I don’t know, I really don’t.
So, I did make it alone, I did not crash, I did not die, but I was still alone. At times stopping and feeling after the layer of snow, and finding it.
Mourn at times, and make some good tea
Now, even if you make it, there are times, especially around holidays, and even more if you happen to be born into something as obscure er Orthodox Christianity, and you celebrate exactly the same holidays as the majority do, only on totally wrong days, and no one even knows its your Christmas or Easter, and no one even thinks that you may be missing your family, so, yeah, there are times when the loneliness hits you with extra force, and then it’s ok to feel sorry for yourself, so just sink into it, but make sure to make some spectacular tea.
I wrote this recipe to myself, some months ago, alone on a my Christmas Eve.
How to make spectacular mint tea
Start with oranges, peel them with a sharp vegetable peeler, making sure you get only the upper, orange layer. Fill saucepan with water, put in sugar, and stir until the sugar dissolves. Put in the orange peels, bring them to boil, then take them off the heat and let them stay overnight. The next evening, add sugar, bring them to boil again, and set aside. Repeat over the next four evenings. Take the peels out, let them drip off, and hang them to dry for a day. Then make chocolate-covered candied orange peels, and get them out of this story. The sugary water, the one you’ve been boiling your orange peels in, and that’s supposed to be discarded, give it a look, squinting a bit. Taste it and exclaim “Damn, this is good!”, then pour it over in a sterilised glass, put it in a fridge, and mostly forget it.
Celebrate Christmas (the other one, the one that’s not really yours), than travel to your home-country, spend a swirling week with your family and friends, get back, start working, and feel you’ve been hit in the face by getting back to the everyday routine way too sudden, way too soon.
Start the first weekend productively, by getting sick.
Now, back to the tea: Bring the water to boil, pour it in a cup, and add dried mint leaves. It’s important that the mint leaves are grown, harvested, and dried by your mother. Pour the tea in the cup you’ve gotten from your brother, and pretend you’re totally ok being alone and ill on the Christmas Eve. Add the orange syrup, and a piece of orange peel.
On the Christmas Day, continue being ill and feeling sorry for yourself, but then in the afternoon, welcome back your daughters, and celebrate your Christmas a bit anyway, with vanilice, and small gifts, and the best tea you’ve ever had. Sans the orange peels, which your oldest one has eaten up at an amazing speed. All of them.
Go to bed way too late, debating with yourself whether you’ll bother to make candied orange peel again, decide you will, know you won’t, but feel generally more prepared to face life in general and tomorrow in particular.
Make your own family and feed them well
Now making the family takes some more time, but the feeding them well can be done in a couple of weekends, so I’ll start with the feeding part. It should actually begin right after your Christmas, you should say to yourself: No way I’m going to spend Easter like that. Decide already then to go for a full-blown Serbian Easter, with coloured eggs and the obligatory four course meal. Now you don’t have to do nothing much for a couple of months, but you should start making hen broth and rolling sarma the weekend before, otherwise, no way you’ll pull off making a four course for ten people. And then invite your whole other family.
Now, making an other family takes a bit more preparations: Start around twenty years earlier. Pick a couple of friends, and just love them. Get occasionally upset with them, and, frankly, barely tolerate them at times. And keep at it for years and years. And the moment of revelation will come, I promise! For me it came about ten years ago, Andra (that’s my Icelandic sibling) and I were going to a really good party, and we invited Cecilie (she’d be my Norwegian sibling) to come along, and she couldn’t because she was going to the cinema to watch — waaait for it — Twilight. Twilight! Not only she publicly acknowledged that she had watched the whole Twilight saga, but she actually preferred going to watch the stupid film to going to the party with us.(No, I haven’t watched it myself, I’m just deeply prejudicial.)
And then I felt it, the same type of exasperation i use to feel over my own siblings, who can, between us, irritate me to tears at times. But what I’m i do to about it, ditch them? You don’t ditch your siblings: You’re stuck with them. And that’s what I felt that evening, a decade ago: I’m stuck with her. And that “stuck with her”, could also be rephrased as “I guess I love her unconditionally.” and “I’ll be there for her no matter what” and “Oh, I know she puts up with me too, and that she’ll keep on doing it for ever”. Just love someone, and, you know, treat them like family: See them way too seldom, and feel bad about it, but when your obscure Easter comes, invite them all over.
Now those friends, that are now siblings, have in the mean time hopefully gotten husbands, and children, and stepchildren, who — if you’re extremely lucky! — happened the be the same age as your children, so you invite them over to your tiny apartment on your obscure Easter, or Hanukkah, or Eid, or whatever holiday you may be celebrating, and you’ll get to celebrate it in the way all family-centered holidays should be, and as you remember them from when you were little, with way too many people, and way too many kids, and a borderline intolerable amount of noise, and when you have overfed them (the essential part og the Orthodox Easter, and, I believe, any proper family holiday), and they all pile up on your tiny sofa, stuffed and blissful, and you can’t stand on your feet of exhaustion and exhilaration, reach for it, feel for it again, the utter loneliness of an well-integrated immigrant and say to yourself “Yes, still there, but I know now I can live with it, and given time, the snow may melt.”
