I need a do-over. I started this blog on the wrong foot, so I deleted my original post and am reclaiming the right to start over.
As my profile states, I recently moved back to South Louisiana after living in upstate NY for 15 years. What’s that like? You might ask, and many have. I have no good answer for that anymore. At least, not without cursing. What’s that like, indeed. It is literally THE SUBJECT of this blog, so stay fucking tuned and hold onto your fucking hat.
Consider this your warning: this isn’t going to be some feel-good mommy blog with puppies and crock pot recipes, hell naw. Since moving back “home”, I have felt increasingly cut off, isolated, ostracized, and SILENT, nay, SILENCED by everyone around me. Here at “home” I am not free to be myself, I have to hide who I am because who I am is DIFFERENT. You see I have always been different, I just left and went someplace where my difference was closer to the norm for 15 years. I am not gay or black or punk or anything interesting–I am a plain, 42-year old, married, college-educated white woman with one child. On paper, you can’t get much more boring than that.
Why am I having so much trouble adjusting to the Land of my Birth? Well you see, I’m not a red-blooded racist, I’m a pro-choice feminist, I have been married to the same man for 15+ years, I’m not religious, and I identify as a moderate Democrat. By upstate New York standards, that’s a pretty typical description; it’s when you add ‘and currently living in South Louisiana’ that it gets…interesting.
“And now the state line felt like the Berlin Wall”
Yes I’m quoting lines from “Crooked Teeth” by Death Cab for Cutie for dramatic effect. I hadn’t listened to this particular song in oh, maybe 10 years, and the line inspired me to restart this blog tonight. I’m not punk but I am into indie rock. Maybe I should have mentioned. Moving on.
Why am I silenced? When you find yourself living among people you spent most of your adult life defining yourself against, when you find yourself surrounded by self-righteous and hypocritical religiosity at every turn, when you find yourself surrounded by secret racism in your family and community, and you realize that southern charm is a simple cover for assholery, and you meet almost no one who self-identifies as a free-thinker, or is even capable of having a connected thought of their own much less participating in a reasoned argument, somewhere along the way you just stop talking and engaging and yes it’s like I’m in hiding now.
My husband and I find the situation we’re in strangely bonding. We feel like we are a secret society of two, forced into hiding because if They find us, They will make our lives a living hell. Because in Trump’s America, reasonable people who want to live and let live are anathema, we are an Enemy of the People down here. And I prize nothing more than peace in my life. It’s definitely an ‘us against them’ vibe. I had tons of friends in New York; here I’ve managed to make maybe two friends I see eye to eye with on things and trust generally. It’s not as easy to assume affinity with people here, because they can be perfectly lovely and then suddenly say some racist bullshit and I’m like NOOOOOO it’s over.
“You can’t find nothing at all if there was nothing there all along”
Why did you move back? you’re surely wondering. Didn’t you realize what South Louisiana was and how different it was going to be from Upstate NY? The answer is, yes and no. I left my hometown of Baton Rouge when I was 14 and ended up finishing high school in New Orleans and went on to college there as well. So I finished out my ‘time’ in Louisiana in New Orleans, a very metropolitan city, especially as compared to where I live now (Baton Rouge). I did visit home when I lived away, and I somehow got hoodwinked by nostalgia for family interactions I was missing out on (extreme #familyfomo). Kids would grow up in a blink to me; a baby cousin would suddenly be in elementary school over the course of 5 or 6 well-spaced visits. Then when I had a child of my own, the longing to move home grew stronger: I wanted her to know of my people. I was growing disenchanted with my then-career of 12 years in NY, and then there was a job offer here and BOOM–we moved back.
The biggest joke of all? The family togetherness I moved back for doesn’t exist, at least not the way that I thought it did. Time and circumstance has created a distance between my mom and her brother and his family that I never thought possible. I moved back and discovered that the family togetherness I was missing all those years was gone, just like that. Maybe it did exist, maybe it didn’t; but even if it did, it’s unattainable to me now.
But you have your mother right? Oh, bless your heart, kind reader, that will have to wait for a future post. If you stick around.
Chicken Stew 