Negotiating my own identity

gathering in the kitchen
Originally uploaded by bonbayel

This picture shows a part of my identity that only my family knows. I am sitting in a cottage kitchen by a lake in Maine together with my husband, my mother, my daughter and my sister-in-law.

Mom and Dad lived by this lake for almost my entire adult life, while I was living in Denmark. Their home was our home in America, and it looked sort of like this.

I sometimes wonder how I could end up in California. (Hint: that guy on the left moved here and then asked me to join him.) But I think that being by a lake in Maine is hidden deep inside me.

My life has been a constant renegotiation of my identity. I went to 4 schools in 3 states (NJ, OH, PA) before college in OH, and Mom and Dad added 2 more states (TN and ME) while I was in graduate school in a 6th state, NC. And then I lived in 5 different towns in different parts of Denmark for 29 years. Moving requires a change of identity every time, even within the same state.

• I went from saying "tomahto" to "tomayto" when we moved to Ohio, to avoid being laughed at.
• Moving from HS to Oberlin College meant moving from a school where I was one of the top students to a school where everyone had been that. I no longer got straight A's, which was required a lot of renegotiating of who I was.
• I went from a future physicist to a nobody in the science department, because my competition had increased dramatically.
• So I majored in German, and became a linguist during graduate school at UNC.
• I moved to Denmark, where it took a while (at age 25) to learn the language and the culture, and where I never entirely fit in.
• I became the wife of a man who had grown up a farmer, quitting school after 7th grade, but through night classes ended up a Ph.D. from U.N.C. He had to constantly renegotiate who he was throughout his life because of class culture differences, and then later because stroke left him not able to teach or be as active as he'd been. I will write about his struggles with his identity elsewhere in this blog.
• Strangely, in Denmark, I became the scape-goat American, who was expected to defend the Viet Nam war, which I had petitioned against in 1965, to pollution, even though I have always been an avid environmentalist, to whatever else people held against Americans:
  "Just because you're an American doesn't mean you can teach English well."
  "'English' means the language of England, not the U.S.," was a battle I ran as a teacher (and my daughter, later, as a student.)
• This was aided by my becoming the mother of 2 children, who taught me the culture as they learned it in school.
• In Denmark, I was a HS teacher of German and English - grammar, which is sort of like math, but also literature, a subject I'd avoided all my life, so I constantly felt that I wasn't preparing my students properly in that area.
• I dropped that for the world of business - for which I started dressing more appropriately and had my ears pierced, so I could wear a bit of "no-fuss" jewelry. But business in Denmark was not ready for a mature, foreign woman with a university degree in the humanities, so I had to hop from one temp job to the next doing things like translations.
• I became a small business owner, developing and running a diaper service for about 5 years, never making a profit.
• This lead to studies (and a few jobs) in environmental management.
• And finally a move to California as a new wife, with a whole new barrage of identity negotiations.