in between two hometowns and utah
#6 go miami heat
I missed a week! The family I work for planned a little getaway to Utah and offered me to tag along since my family lives in Utah. It’s always weird to tell people my family lives in Utah since I wasn’t raised there, but somehow everyone in my immediate family ended up in Salt Lake (no we aren’t Mormon). Not only is it not where I’m originally from, it's the opposite of where I was raised. I was born in South Florida, just between Miami and Ft. Lauderdale. Technically my house was closer to North Miami but my school and everywhere I went as a teenager was in Ft. Lauderdale. It truly feels as if I was raised in two cities, two cities that I go nowhere near when I tell people I am “going home” and that home is somehow Utah. Utah?? I’ll just never be able to say it with homegrown confidence.
I feel like a lot of my life has been nestled right in between two things, and recently I’ve come to terms with that. I’m adopted so automatically, right out the gate, I am living two identities- the birth family and the adopted family. To add to that, my siblings and I are just all over the place when it comes to our parents. My older brother is actually my half brother, my older sister a half sister to me and also to my half brother, and my younger brother and I share only adopted parents (you don’t have to read those confusing sentences again- none of us share the same exact blood). I am able to get away with just calling them my siblings without using “half” until it’s revealed my older brother didn’t move to the US till he was 16, and then that throws everything off again. My in-betweenness of being adopted is then layered with a culture that three people were born and bred in and two people can’t even form a sentence in that language (I do know how to say “money” and “small” in Bulgarian, the most crucial key words).
I always identified as Bulgarian until I was 21 and my dad told me over IHOP pancakes that my birth father was 100% Greek. Shocked I asked why I was never told this before and was given the explanation that Greece and Bulgaria are neighbors so it’s basically the same. But again that conversation has led to me catching my breath the moment someone asks me where I’m from because both countries bop into my head fighting over who will get picked and how much I want to keep talking to the person asking.
Instead of taking me to Bulgaria, my dad just showed me episodes of Rick Steves’ travels there
I don’t think I'm unique in this. I think a lot of people experience an identity crisis but lately I’ve been faced with it because everything around us is so unstable, I just want something clear, to the point and to define a circumstance. Even Sunday night I couldn’t fall asleep because I was retracing my steps to the exact moment (first day of 5th grade) when I definitively started going by Beth instead of Elizabeth and why the heck did I decide that. My brain also couldn’t compute ever being called Elizabeth before even though I distinctly remember the exact moment exclaiming that Beth is my name and my classmates I grew up with letting out a ...wut.
Pause to see this sheep jumping on a trampoline.
While I was in Utah I read Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid and it blew me away for reasons other than the book’s intentions. The book is thematically about race but the core relationship of the nanny to the family they are employed by hit me in the gut. I luckily have always worked for families that treat me as a family member and I’ve never experienced anything I would be able to turn into an expose one day. But the relationship between nannying, the kid and the family has always been another stuck in between situation for me. Even though I’m not the mom, I still love the girl I currently nanny deeply- so deeply that if my anxiety starts ticking upward I’ll watch videos of her and I at the park to bring me back down.
It was nice to read sentences from this book that felt plucked from the innermost crevices of my nanny brain. Sentences when I try to say them out loud to people get dismissed because they might sound depressing or self-deprecating. There’s a certain shame around the idea of nannying because it means you aren’t where you want to be yet (unless you are a career nanny). I literally looked my parents in the eye over the weekend and had to assure them that nannying is a career for some people, I am well paid and I get benefits because of my job, and a day later read the nanny in this book having a similar conversion with her parents. It was nice to read something- even though it was fiction- that made my thoughts about being a nanny clearer and those thoughts trace back to the unclearness of being stuck in between two places.
I recently met a friend at a park and was complaining about my nanny job solely because I felt like I am too old to not be the kid’s mom. I used to say nannying was great because you get to do all the mom things, get paid for it and go home, but now there’s a certain emptiness to saying goodbye at the end of the day. I think this is because after a long week of nannying I could say goodbye as I said hello to friends at a bar but we don’t have that anymore. I only have episodes of Fresh Prince to greet me and the desire to maybe go for a run in the Unhealthy Air Quality Los Angeles air. These days I’m not annoyed with the job as much as I’m annoyed to be in a position that feels so unclear. I’m not the mom. This isn’t my intended career. And no, I don’t have a house I can rip up the bathroom floor and install a cool tile design. I’m just stuck doing something on the outskirts of something I want to do and it makes me feel like a fraud for mimicking what I should be doing (kid/career/central air).
But the desire to want to be out of this in between is only heightened because we are all stuck between everything right now. First wave, second wave. Is he gonna… you know…. is HE? Not being able to trust one poll regarding the election. What even is quarantine these days? There’s things we can do, can’t do, sort of can do, absolutely can’t do and ...can we do? Nothing seems definitive and even if it does we still have to loudly proclaim to reassure ourselves it was outside, masked, and distanced as if saying those words makes you more resistant to Covid. It feels like “I’m Bulgarian but I don’t speak the language or grew up there and also my blood is Greek” came to life.
I do love being single, I love not being too financially tied to anything (except my Citibank credit card, whoops), and I love having an open ended life. I just don’t love that every single thing feels so open ended (I’m still holding out for the possibility that he… you know... he might…). But I can’t change being stuck in between a DNA identity and a lived identity and I’ll probably waver between the two forever, but at least I know my love of feta cheese comes from both places. I also know that living in between two things is an identity in itself so maybe on day I will back down and embrace Utah as a part of who I am even if that means I break both my legs skiing.
re: what’s going on
I love Jess Tholmer’s monthly book newsletter and you should read it too! I have screen shotted a bunch of her book recs during the course of our Internet friendship and the ones I have been able to read have not let me down.
A very soothing, calming website I discovered from another newsletter is this site where it lets you look out of people’s windows around the world. I was very unproductive writing this issue of my newsletter because I couldn’t stop refreshing the windows.
A window in Portugal!
I had to take a break from watching bear videos. I found a hunter’s YouTube who told excellent bear encounter stories and I loved his cadence of storytelling so I became obsessed with his channel. Then… the Sasquatch videos started popping up and I realized this man has dedicated his life to being a Sasquatch truther. I became one for one week and got way too deep and simply needed to hit pause.
If you live in LA, I highly suggest this voter guide for the upcoming election. I think it’s important to still read through all the props and know exactly why you are voting for things but this is a good launching point.
IS HE THOUGH ??? You know… is he going to….
That’s it! Unless I am somehow able to take another safe road trip out of the blue- see you in two weeks!