I'm writing this somewhere in South Dakota, sitting in the passenger seat of our van and looking out at the endless rolling grasses, so different from the trees and rivers and lakes we've left on the road behind us. I'm surrounded by coats and shoes and stuffed animals that have been thrown at me by exuberant and/or fighting children. I'm thinking about what needs to be done when we get home. Unpacking, of course. Cleaning up the inevitable grime that it didn't ever occur to Seb, dear boy, to even look at in the past six months. Laundry. Wrapping the pile of Christmas presents that arrived in the mail while we were gone. Figuring out a new schedule as we re-start piano lessons, ballet, regular school, Malachi's new job, and on and on and on.
But I don't want to think about all those things. I want to think about where we were, what I miss. I don't know why I miss it so much when I have so much good to return to. Anyway, how much can you miss something you've only known for half a year? How much can you love it?
Valid questions. Whenever I write something, I hear a particularly unmerciful critic's voice in my head telling me why I shouldn't. Here are all the reasons she has told me not to write this post:
It will seem overdramatic or exaggerated. Honestly. Can something really be life-changing in six months? Also, foreigners shouldn't presume to know anything about a place they're new to. Also, people in general shouldn't presume to know anything until they're over the age of eighty. You'll seem like you're trying to show how special you are. You'll seem like you're bragging because you lived somewhere new. People live in new places all the time and it doesn't make you cool. You'll seem like you're saying you can't learn new things unless you have a break from your regular life. Lastly: no one cares.
But here we are driving home, and while I still have so many posts to write about what we saw and learned and did in Quebec, I feel a sudden tug to write this one before I'm home and it's all in retrospect. I don't know what I'm afraid of, a veil of forgetfulness being dropped over my eyes as soon as regular routines return? Yes, that; and that when things go "back to normal," I will go back to normal. As if it had never happened.
So yes, Critic, it's true I could have probably learned those things without going away to Quebec. But something in Quebec shook them loose and helped me recognize them. And I have to hold onto them tightly now, or I'll lose them again.
So, how much can you miss or love a place you've only just started to call home?
A lot, it turns out.
———
Everyone is going to ask me "How was Québec?" and I won't be able to answer all the things I want to answer—nor should I (for all the reasons The Critic told me above, and because it would take too long, and because they're mostly just swirling unorganized thought-tornados in my head anyway)—but I can put some of them here, at least.
One theme that I've been circling around is identity and purpose. In Quebec I became acquainted with incompetence to an unprecedented degree. I actually gave a talk about this in my branch there (in French, thus neatly demonstrating in real-time the topic I was talking about) but I have noticed it again and again. Things I have always assumed I could do because of my own cleverness turn out to have been mostly due to my circumstances. Familiar situations become easy to navigate, and if you live a life full of familiar situations you might start to assume you're more clever or competent than you really are. And though I would have nodded and said "of course, of course" if someone told me that before I went to Quebec—I didn't feel it in my bones like I do now.
Even then, I have only scratched the surface of this lesson, probably, because of how much easier it is to go be a visitor (even a long-term visitor) somewhere than it is to actually immigrate. I still have a home, a family, life to return to—making it easy enough for me to laugh off or enjoy the quirks of a different culture, to shrug away rudeness or prejudice, to be (somewhat) patient with feeling alone or out of place. But what if this was all you had, this foreign shore, and you had to learn to be at peace with your own incompetence and clumsiness—had to embrace a new identity as "quiet" or "shy" or "slow" because of the language barrier—and you could never regain (or at least not without years of practice) the ease and the casualness and unthinking belonging with which you lived at home? Home is part of who you are, so when you have left home—who are you?
I don't want to forget who I was and the things I thought in Quebec—the abject helplessness and humility when everyday actions became difficult and unfamiliar. The new realisations to go along with new experiences. The sense of accomplishment and satisfaction I felt when I did get through a conversation in French. I don't want those things to fade away. I even want more. I want to understand the little jokes thrown off at the end of a comment, the snatches of conversation overheard in the grocery store. I want to be able to tailor my spoken words to my thoughts rather than being constrained by my limited vocabulary. I want to be able to tell people how grateful I am in more than simple, inadequate phrases. In a way, it just makes more clear the inadequacy of language at all—because even in English where I know all the words, there are some things too wide and deep to express. Maybe what I'm really longing for is the time when I can communicate, without any limitations at all, what I feel in my heart.
My French did improve. I would have liked to have another six months, another year, to improve it further. Church helped me the most. I gave two talks in French, with painstaking effort and lots of back-and-forth on google translate, and pronunciation marks to help me with the hardest words. I bore my testimony and gave a couple halting prayers (those the scariest of all because I didn't prepare for them first!). But in actual conversation, there were plenty of times I felt like I understood absolutely nothing, and a few times I thought "I might be actually getting it!" There were many times someone gave up on me and switched to English ("My English isn't good," they'd say, in English ten times better than my French) and I felt pitifully grateful. There were a few lovely times when someone complimented my accent, told me I sounded Quebecois, praised me for my vocabulary, or, most flattering of all, didn't comment on my language at all and we just talked. I felt pitifully grateful for that too.
I talked to a sister at a Relief Society activity who had fled the political situation in Brazil to settle in Quebec. We both stumbled along in our second-language-level-French for a while, and then as our conversation moved deeper we gave it up and went to Portuguese/English on Google Translate. She told me she would probably never go back to Brazil or see her family members there again. I asked how she stood the sadness of it, if she sometimes longed just to go home and be home. Maybe she just couldn't or didn't want to tell me the whole story in one conversation while eating salad and cookies. But she seemed sincere when she shrugged and smiled and said, “I’m not so sad. Now my home is here.” I felt such admiration for her. It made me want to approach every new stage with that same calm bravery.
And at what point did she let go of her old home and embrace the new? At what point would others accept it too? How many times do you have to walk around a corner or climb a stairway or stand overlooking a view before that place counts as “yours”? Not yours because it's no one else's, but yours because it's imprinted in your feet and your eyes and your heart? There are places on Aspen Avenue in Provo where, like the gentle dips in an old stairway, there are imprints of memory and experience worn in by forty years of repeated footsteps. But there are also places on Rue Saint-Jean where, in five months, the impressions left on me have cut as deeply and dramatically into my heart as footsteps in new-piled snow. Maybe the newness, the strangeness, the tender and raw parts of myself exposed by so much change, allowed them to cut deeper in less time. The question remains, I suppose, if they will melt like snow or stay in place like stone. Am I someone new now, or not? I think I suddenly understand a little better why the Savior felt so strongly to keep the scars in his hands and feet. Once you've beaten a new path through any sort of wilderness, you don't want it to disappear as if you've never been there at all.
———
If the places cut in deep, what about the people? I've always believed in theory that small interactions matter, that even one conversation or one smile can be important at the right time. But it's hard to actually see it happening in a practical way. This casserole was so inadequate. This attempted comfort was so feeble. On my more cynical days I doubt that any of us can really make an impact on anyone else unless we're close friends or family (if then??). But in Quebec I found that even when I couldn't speak adequate French, I could speak Church and I could speak Relief Society, and it's amazing how far those things go in forging relationships. Smiling, greeting, laughing, gesturing, thanking, serving—sharing those simple things with our branch members could be done without much French at all, but brought much more closeness than I expected.
On the last Sunday in our branch, after I played the piano for primary and the song leader carefully called on each child in "famille Nielson" to have a turn to roll the cardboard dice and pick the song—and after I played the piano for choir practice and the Christmas musical number they will sing without us in a week or two—and after a nice lady showed me the little diorama of Quebec she had made for our family out of beads and driftwood and carefully packed in a box for us, and told me (in rapid French I only understood 60% of) about the symbolism of each little part of it—and after talking one more time, and then still one more time, to each friend—and after giving long hugs and taking pictures and crying and wiping our makeup and laughing at how much we were crying and promising to come back, of course we'll come back, and you come visit us in Utah too, please, if you're ever in Utah please come…
After all that, and even knowing that God has been in every single detail of this trip, from the fact
that we went to
how we went, from the house we lived in
to the place we parked our car—until we've learned without a doubt that of course He led us there, and of course He led us to these people, for them to leave their marks on us and we on them—
And even knowing that because all this is true, of course God was in control of when we went home as well, and if we had needed to stay longer for those relationships to matter, he would have had us stay longer. And therefore, since he did not, they DID matter but the time is still right to go home. We are needed at home. We can do good at home—
—Even in the knowledge of all that…the act of leaving—oh, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts. So much so that it almost makes me wary of serving a mission with Sam someday. If it can hurt so much in a few months, how much more in a year or two? How much more when your every day is meeting people and serving them?
Of course I don't want to exaggerate it, because even though it's true that the people in our branch were sad to say goodbye, and they wished we could stay, and we wished we could stay—they'll be fine. It's not like they'll be just sitting there crying about our absence forever. And we won't either. We will go back to other people we love and other people we can serve, and we will do good in other ways and it will all be fine. But I don't want to minimize it either. And maybe that's part of what hurts about it now. It hurts to consider the possibility that all of this could feel so deep and so meaningful and so important, and then eventually just wash away like a sand castle on a beach. I want to look back behind me and see those grooves worn in the stone. I want to remember. I want to be different and stay different. I'm afraid the incessant demands of normal life will beat over me like waves until I'm smooth and unmarked again.
———
I found it so confusing when I first learned how to say "I miss you" in French. You start with the other person—Tu me manques. It seems like that would mean "you me miss," which comes across as a little high-handed—why should I tell you if you miss me or not? But it uses the reflexive form that means something you do to yourself or that relates to yourself. My brother explained it as meaning something more like, "Tu me manques—You are missing from me."
It feels like the best description as we leave this place we embraced and loved so quickly and so deeply. "You are missing from me, and though I felt perfectly whole before, I am suddenly incomplete. I hold new holes, where there were never holes before." I feel a new awe and a new fear, thinking about it. What if there are other holes inside me I'm not even aware of? Holes that can only be filled with people and with places I don't yet even know? How can it be worth it to keep realizing how incomplete I am?
As I think about it, I recognize this feeling as what happens with each new child in the family as well. You are perfectly content without him—or nearly so. Then he comes, and fills up a place you didn't know was empty. And forevermore there is a little ache in that place—when he is sad, when he leaves, when he is hurt. You could and do learn to live apart from him, when you have to, but you can never live feeling quite as whole and unwitting as you did before he came.
So now I am suddenly questioning if there are yet whole rooms full of people I need but have yet to meet, whole cities I love but have yet to discover—wondering what it means if at this very moment, I'm walking around as full of holes as a Swiss cheese? Those holes don't hurt yet because I don't know what it's like to have them filled—but someday, will they be filled and then emptied again—leaving me to feel the new emptiness of their loss? Will each thing I grow to love leave me a little more incomplete without it?
Are our Heavenly Parents filled entirely with holes?
But they can't be, because Jesus Christ and our Father "
fill the immensity of space", and so the holes must be temporary and mortal, and they must have a purpose. Maybe these holes and these deep impressions give place for more "
yearning for home," more longing to "
range through the whole world, anxious to bless the whole human race"—to bless people who suddenly look like our brothers and sisters and feel like pieces of ourselves. Maybe when we get back to heaven, that's when all the holes will be filled, and we will know at last what a fulness really means: Not just superficially whole because we don't know what's missing. Full because we were hollowed out and we knew it and we
felt it, and then at last completed again. Full because all the pieces that were missing from us have finally been brought back.
When we meet ne'er to part with the blest o'er the way,
Never more from our loved ones to roam!
When we meet ne'er to part,
Oh what songs of the heart
We will sing in our beautiful home.
———
Every night this week when I've fallen asleep, I've done it walking the streets of Quebec City in my mind. Up the hill to Rue Saint-Jean…past to the cemetery and St. Matthew church…across and up Honoré Mercier with its sudden rush of wind along the tunnel of buildings…under the street lamps and along the city walls all the way to Port Saint-Louis, legs burning as I climb the hill to the high viewpoint between the Citadelle and the Plains of Abraham. How long will I be able to wear over those paths in my memory? I don't want to lose the imprint of those streets and hills and walls. But I know I will. I'll have to.
And yet—
nothing good is ever lost. President Packer
promised. I cling to that. So how do I "
lay hold on every good thing" when the landscape never stops rushing past; when the Lord has more and more and more for me to see and learn? How can I keep all these things and ponder them in my heart when new things keep crowding in and demanding to be felt? In forty-four years, I've only just started to catch the tiniest glimpse of how many people and how many places might be "missing from me" if I let them. I can't possibly fit another half-lifetime's worth. Can I? My heart would have to
swell wide as eternity to hold them all, and what eternity-sized hole would be left then!
Well, these things will come in their time. For now, I'd choose to keep each of these small new holes, if I can, even when it hurts. Québec, you are missing from me. Until we meet again.
