Belonging

Driving home from work one day, I passed two vehicles from our local fire company. While I was stopped at the stop sign, I waved to the driver of the fire truck, a man we attend church with, and I was struck with this sense of feeling like I belonged. There we were, two people of thousands in the community, and our paths crossed and we acknowledged each other.

Two days earlier, our family made a spontaneous decision to go out to eat after church because it was Veterans Day and some local restaurants were offering free meals to veterans. I had just finished a weeks-long eating experiment so we hadn’t been out much, and we like to treat my husband to freebies like this for his service in Iraq a lifetime ago. My family slid into the booth and I went to the bathroom and on the way back, I recognized one of the servers.

“What are you doing here?” she asked at the same time I said, “Are you serving my family?” She had just walked away from our booth. We both were left shaking our heads because although we see each other often during the week as co-workers (she’s a student teacher), obviously we didn’t expect to bump into each other outside of the school where we spend so much time.

The day before that, I saw a friend at an event our sons were both participating in. We mostly interact online and only see each other occasionally in person. Our kids attend different school districts, so this, too, felt like belonging.

I used to think things like this were no big deal. In fact, I expected to run into people wherever I went. (Maybe you are wondering why I am making such a big deal out of this.) But that was when I lived in the town where I grew up. The town where my parents grew up and my grandparents had lived for almost the entirety of their married life. In my hometown, it is unusual to not see someone you know when you’re out at a restaurant or running errands. The town is smaller than the one in which I currently live, which may be a factor, but I’m not ruling out the family connections as important in this equation.

This all got me thinking about how little work I had to do to be accepted in the town where I was born. I belonged to a family and just by knowing my last name, people who were practically strangers could determine where and to whom I belonged. When you can trace multiple generations back, you get a free pass for belonging.

How different it is when you move to a new place. We have lived in Pennsylvania for 10 years now, working on our 6th year in our current community. This is how long the work of belonging sometimes takes, and I will be the first to admit that we are bad at it.

When you weren’t born in a place and you don’t have generations to trace back and no one can correctly pronounce your last name, you begin to build barriers around your heart almost without trying. (At least I did. Maybe you are different.) Every cultural reference you don’t understand, every butchering of your name, every way you look and sound different–they all become the bricks you use to wall yourself off from the ones who belong. And you ask yourself a lot of questions about how to belong.

And “will I ever belong?”

Sometimes you even convince yourself you’ll never belong so you stop trying. Instead, you do everything you can to convince people you’re so different and weird that you could never belong anyway, with the secret hope they’ll agree and reject you. (Spoiler alert: the “you” in this story is “me.”)

But your kids will make friends and you will know all the teachers at the school and you’ll find jobs that you love with good people and some of your best friends will live a short drive away. And you’ll start to see people you know when you’re out in public and not just at major events like the Christmas tree lighting or school or church events where almost all of the people you know get together. You’ll find out your kids go to school with the daughter of one of the librarians at the main branch downtown. And when you attend a prayer vigil, you will see a friend you haven’t seen in a long time.

Your world will suddenly feel smaller and bigger all at the same time. You will start to feel something like belonging.

You will know the backroads, the best pizza places,  the names of your neighbors, and the first place to call when you need a good deal on an appliance. You will start to care about things like local government and building projects in your neighborhood.

When at first you felt like a seedling vulnerable to uprooting at the slightest wind, you now feel like a tree with a sturdy trunk and deeper roots, one that could survive a gale.

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There’s something else about belonging, though. Something I can’t quite put words to or hold in my hand. While I feel more belonging to this place and the people around me, I can’t explain my current obsession with this song which complicates my sense of belonging.

There are still times that I feel like I belong nowhere. Or maybe what I mean is that I belong everywhere. And to everyone. My allegiances and loyalties cannot be neatly packed into one box, and maybe we’re never supposed to fit neatly into a box anyway. As much as I feel a part of things, there are still parts of me I hold back in certain circles, for fear of rejection. (I am a complicated human, sometimes wishing for rejection, sometimes fearing it.)

If you came here looking for the perfect answer about how to belong, then I’ve disappointed you because I don’t have it. I barely have imperfect answers.

All I can say is that sometimes belonging seems like it takes no work but that’s probably because others have done the hard work before you. When I think about my hometown, I think about the work of building relationships my grandparents did before I was a twinkle in anyone’s eyes. I think about the work my parents did in staying in their hometown. Staying is its own kind of hard work.

And if belonging seems an impossible dream, give it time and know that it takes work, but even those are no guarantee. Some circles will never be cracked open to new people. That doesn’t mean there aren’t other circles waiting to welcome you.

So, let me ask: where do you belong?