Foreign Words and Sad Places

In high school I studied Spanish for 5-6 years and spent a month one summer in Mexico. In college I studied Russian and spent a semester in Moscow. I was never that proficient at either one, although I actually have a bachelor’s degree in Russian (it got me an interview with the National Security Agency, too!) Unfortunately I never studied German, nor did Craig, so when we were living in Germany on sabbatical his French and my Russian and Spanish were almost useless. Of course, there was the driver who met us at the airport who did not speak English, but had learned Russian in school (we were in the former East Germany part of Germany) so we managed to communicate that way—both in our rusty Russian. But what I found amazing was that my brain seemed to have some part dedicated to “foreign languages” that was activated while we were there. So in a store I was just as likely to come up with a Spanish or Russian word as I was a German word. It’s like I knew I need something other than English, but all those “foreign” words were just lumped together in one place in my brain.

I guess that is a little bit like how I’m feeling now. I’m leaving a group that I've been a part of for about a year, but that seems to have just triggered a whole host of other “sad” places in my mind. Add to that the acknowledgement that tomorrow would have been my sister’s birthday, and I find that I am back grieving about losses—losing my mom, losing my sister, losing what I had hoped for in this group, and losing the people in the group that I cared about on whatever level. It’s funny that last night I found I really wanted to talk to my Mom, even though I would have never in her lifetime gone to her with those kinds of feelings, which then also makes me sad. So, I end up just feeling sad in general, which maybe is not a bad thing, just a “thing”.

I think it has always been hard for me to leave things. When I would be at summer camps I was never really homesick, but I would be heartbroken at the end when I had to go home. Not because I dreaded something back home, but because I felt I was losing something I had gotten there. Maybe because for that week or whatever I had felt a sense of “belonging.” You know how camps really push that sense of community and fellowship, so even if it is hokey it was something to be a part of. Even though I didn’t get the sense of belonging I was looking for from this particular group, it was still something. And that is hard to give up.