The Hummus is Always Creamier on Somebody Else’s Plate…

Even before I was an immigrant child, I was a migrant child. With the explosion of Chernobyl in 1986, my parents rushed me out of radioactive Kiev and I spent the next few months of my childhood travelling all over what was then the Soviet Union, staying with different relatives and friends of my family. Then just a couple short years (memorable for canned food deliveries from friends in Moscow and prohibition from any interaction with nature) later, we packed our bags and set off with a whole lot of other sad-faced refugees on our journey through Austria and Italy to land in icy Chicago. I could write novels about my memories of those years, but that’s not the point of this post. The point is that in my 7 year-old mind, I had pictured America as a magical, glamorous, science-fictitious place, full of lights and colors and faries and flying objects, sort of how I still picture Las Vegas having never been there. I remember very clearly looking out the window at the empty, grey suburban landscape the morning after our landing and feeling overwhelmingly disappointed. This is the magical land we left my grandparents and aunt and cousin for? Of course it didn’t help that my father immediately began referring to “Americans” with the same disgusted tone that one may reserve for cockroaches, blaming all the hardships of immigration on these local Ignoramuses’ small-minded un-intellectualism.

We moved once a year for those first few years. Each year it was a new school, a new group of friends, and a new opportunity to make myself into someone knew. From our first apartment with shedding, long, lime-green carpeting and hand-me-down furniture, in the super ethnic and diverse suburb of Skokie to our second one which I loved because two of my friends lived in the same building, to our final one which would be the witness to my parents’ divorce and eventually to my brother being born, and then right before high school to my first single-family house in white bread snobby Highland Park, which still awakens in me long-dormant teenage angst and inferiority complexes. As soon as it was humanly possible I fled Highland Park, first becoming a permanent guest in my boyfriend’s dorm in college and eventually renting my own apartment. But even once I was on my own, my destiny to some extent in my own hands, I kept moving. I moved around the neighborhood in Chicago, then took the first opportunity, packed my life into a suitcase and relocated to New York, and from there, still unable to commit, filled out the paperwork for my second immigration in 23 years. The longest I have ever lived in one home (since Kiev) is the house in Highland Park, where I spent a total of just over five years, not consecutively.

Of course the minute I landed in Israel, a magical transformation took place in Chicago. Rather than being the cold, moody, colorless city I grew up in, it became an enchanting, ultra urban and cutting edge utopia. Even the weather became better! And Israel, the land I had spent so many years irrationally drooling over, became a chaotic, frustrating nuisance of a place, full of “local, small-minded un-intellectual ignoramuses.” Yes sir, it seems to be true, the apple indeed does not fall far from the tree.

But even within Israel, my love for hippy, laid back Jerusalem fades and Tel Aviv, which I used to look to me like a materialistic yet provincial New York-Wannabe suddenly starts seducing me. It seems I have a commitment problem. Whenever I move to a new place, as I unpack I am already thinking what a headache repacking will be. Owning anything that doesn’t fit into a suitcase or that is too heavy to fly with makes me break out in a cold sweat.

Today during lunch my coworkers were talking about how amazing it is to go Home and stay with your parents, how they would take their Home over any hotel in the world. Without thinking, I blurted, “I’ll take a hotel, thanks.” Everyone looked at me in shock. The truth is, I don’t feel much of sentimentality for any of the apartments or houses I grew up in (and I loooove hotels!). None of them were ever Home in the way that my coworkers mean. Sure I love going to visit Chicago because I love seeing my family – but if they could come meet me in Paris or Beijing or any other city the world, I would be just as happy. Sure there is an ease and a familiarity to good old White Bread HP, I even occasionally get a ping of nostalgia which I very quickly and systematically suppress, but certainly it doesn’t have the comfort for me which I think most people associate with Home.

When we went to Argentina a few years ago, Awesome Hubby took me all over Buenos Aires, eagerly showing me the apartment where he grew up, where he and his brother and sisters played, where they went to preschool, where his Mom grew up, where his Grandma grew up for Gd’s sake! There is no such place for me. And I see my little brother, born and raised in the Chicago area seems to be a much more balanced person, totally comfortable and happy in HP and in his house, which he has inhabited for 13 out of his 15 years. He doesn’t seem to have that need to constantly change his surroundings and reinvent himself the way I do.

Now that we are planning to start our own family, the imminent question is no longer when will I ever settle down, but how? I know what kind of childhood I want for my hypothetical children. I certainly don’t want them to be unstable and antsy like me! I want them to grow up their whole lives in one place… the question remains though, where will that place be? And how will I handle staying put for long enough for them to grow up?