The 92%

The 92%

The way culture shock in an individual creeps from mild amusement to mass hysteria is not through said individual seeing novel things or interesting artifacts. Visiting museums does not cause culture shock. Culture shock is insidious in that it wallops when the individual attempts doing hum-drum things in a foreign environment. And exactly how foreign that environment is makes a difference.

For instance, if you were in, say, Cameroon, in a hut with a dirt floor and no running water surrounded by grasslands and elephants and civil unrest, you would not expect to walk up the path and pop into a Wal-Mart and grab some native-generic Little Debbie cakes. No. That would be silly. But if you are in an English-speaking country with houses and paved roads and trees that look like trees you’ve always known which are wafting shade onto a polite-looking, modern-dressing, sufficiently heterogeneous population then you MIGHT just think you have the right to assume that you can get Little Debbie cakes (or your personal cultural equivalent) within a reasonable proximity of your person.  If you are moving between Australia and America, however, that assumption would be incorrect.

I am now watching, empathizing, suffering with Superhusband in the same odyssey I traversed over my nine months in Australia.  I can see the frustration on his face, the furrowing of the brows and tightening of his jaw and hands. I can hear the questions burning in his brain: “It costs HOW much? You can’t get that for HOW long? How many miles? What’s that in kilometers? WHY do you do it THAT way?” I know he wants to give up and jump on a plane sometimes, just like I did.  I know he tries to like things like milk gravy and turnip greens and sandwiches with un-buttered bread while doing without HP Sauce and Nescafe Blend 43. It hurts. It’s not normal. Anywhere we go, one of us is violently uncomfortable and often inconsolable.

I know I have not written in a long while, and when beginning this particular entry I had this whole gimmick planned where I would use slight hyperbole in describing the lengths to which Superhusband and I would go to get him a familiar-tasting sandwich.  But we have had more weighty matters on our already-compromised brains than sandwiches.  I will not downplay the struggle by making it about a sandwich instead of (what I believe is) real, spiritual warfare. We are fighting for our lives.

And it’s not just Superhusband who’s going through the culture shock—my own version has crept in. I am starting to believe in that old adage “You can’t go home again” not because you really can’t, but because you shouldn’t try.  I realized, after bringing my very exotic husband back to Florence, AL, that I haven’t lived here full time since I was 17. (Ok, there was that time when I was 27 after fat camp and before Huntsville, but don’t judge.) There is not much here that is familiar.  I don’t even know how the rental market is here because I’ve never lived in any residence in this town besides my parents’ house. On a very real level, I don’t know how life works here nor can I teach Superhusband how it works. I can tell him how things were when I was in high school, but the nostalgia of going out for icecream in your pajamas and then watching Dirty Dancing wears thin after a couple of weekends. And let me tell you, bad things happen when BOTH individuals in a couple are culture shocked. 

For instance, Superhusband’s English tastebuds pulled rank tonight and decided that we could NOT eat steak and broccoli without peas and carrots. Anything else was unacceptable, nay, unconscionable.  So we went out for pizza. Last night, at about the same time, I was weeping robustly at the canned musical accompaniment to the fireworks display at McFarlane Park because I really was “proud to be an American,” thanks to Lee Greenwood. It did not seem to occur to my senses that the riffraff on all sides of us who were fist-pumping and spitting chewing tobacco (or colloquially, “chaw”) from behind their well-quaffed mullets were not setting the most patriotic nor sentimental mood. Just last month Superhusband and I made fireworks of our own in a tiff that stemmed from not being able to find a certain Australian candy bar in Wal-Mart. And then we couldn’t find a single place within a 200-mile radius that would exchange Canadian money without a retinal scan and promise of our first-born. At this point he proclaimed unequivocally that we would NOT live here, not ever. But that was not before I blubbered at a VBS sing-along to none other than “Booster Booster.” Seriously. It was not that I thought I was seven years old again and sitting in that same auditorium, encouraging all those around not to be grouchy like the proverbial rooster. I just wished I was; because when I was seven I knew who I was supposed to be and what I should do next. I don’t know either of those now, and I have lived too recently like the rooster. Not that my family and friends who are here haven’t welcomed us with open arms and homes, it’s that those things can’t be my life anymore (at least not in their entirety.) I am a different person, and I’ve married a different person, and the road ahead is anything but clear. It’s hard to be a different person in a place that’s just like you remember it.

At times like these, it seems it would be enough for us to just get out of bed every day, be reasonably clean, eat at regular intervals and not throw the f-bomb at anybody.  But we so want to move ahead when the political wheels of our immigration case seem stalled. So we plan trips and see friends and drive through Washington, DC in the dead of night pulling a trailer with a motorcycle on it. We email government agencies, print photographs using international technology and mail them around the world, we slip our hopes and dreams inside ExpressMail envelopes and watch them speeding off into the unknown. We attempt to breathe new life into a 1920’s home (my parents’—not even ours) and make Frankenstein-esque modern conveniences out of pluck and leftovers. And we desperately try to make each other feel a bit more at ease.

So, what I’ve learned through these weeks of coming home and finding it anything but homey is that 92% of married life (for us, at this critical juncture) is forgiveness, and the other 8% is not getting offended even if you have a really good cause.  Superhusband has had to forgive me for reverting to teenage tendencies and smarting off to my mother and to him.  I have had to forgive him for blaming me for most of the economic problems of America and some of its poor import choices. Over and over, sometimes at lightning speed, forgive, forgive, forgive. Lord, just give us the strength to keep letting go when we’re white-knuckling our faith and clinging to reality.