Foreign at home

I'm tired of being foreign. When I turned 16 I came to the US as an exchange student from Ukraine and stayed here for a year. I later came back with my now-husband when I was 18. Now I'm 22. Five years of living here is still not enough to stop feeling foreign. I wonder what happens in fifty.

I was trying to remind my students today how to do addition of fractions. As I was writing out the problem, I could tell folks in the classroom were disagreeing with what I wrote. I looked at the board. It all seemed perfectly fine. I checked the answer again. Correct. Yet more and more of them -- now I'm sure with the addition of people who really had no clue but liked the idea of a teacher being wrong -- were getting frustrated. "She doesn't know what she's talking about", someone said.

It's not the first time something like this happened to me. It's like looking at a green object that you know is green and feeling like an idiot because of everyone around you claiming that it's blue, just because your culture has a slightly different margin for what is considered green. I used to write "7", "1", and "9" differently, long division looks completely backwards if you're from eastern Europe, you put a dollar sign to the right of the price, now apparently the way you are taught to notate the process for adding fractions is quite different as well. I still got the right answer.

Such things are small and are normally not as significant as what happened today, but they add up and it reflects on your competence and overall self-worth. Last time we went to Ukraine, I realized how confident I really am when I'm in a familiar environment, intuitively knowing how to act in certain situations and being able to relate to most people's past experiences. One of my friends, who's married to a Russian, said that when they went to his homeland for a vacation, his posture changed. He was the alpha-male all of a sudden.

I don't want to go back. I don't know where exactly I belong, but for now I live in the US. And this is home.

I don't like it when people ask if I think that Americans are stupid, obese, or anything else, assuming the paradigm of "her vs us". I don't view it this way. Love of my life is from around here, my friends are American, I pay taxes to the US government, I live here. I am a part of what constitutes AMERICA. True, I can't vote, but it doesn't mean that I am completely politically neutral or that I'm not interested in governmental matters of this country.

I speak with an accent, I may have a different background from you, sometimes my behavior and perspective amuzes, BUT it doesn't mean that I wouldn't want to finally learn the ways of this country, assimilate and fit in.