A Beautiful Thing/Родина

by Christina Gossmann

I want to tell you about a beautiful thing that recently happened to me. It has to do with my family and acceptance. Maybe some of you will relate.

My family is spread all over. My mother lives in Germany, my aunt in Spain, another aunt, uncle and cousins in Central Russia, my grandma and more cousins in Southern Russia–and I’m in Kenya. When my aunt announced that she was going to marry her long-term partner, we decided to get together, in Barcelona, to celebrate.

Not everybody could make it but the three sisters reunited. Vera, Nadeshda, Lubov–Faith, Hope, Love. I also joined and saw my mother’s sister from Central Russia and her husband for the first time in 14 years.

We were all nervous. After such a long time, you don’t know each other anymore. You–literally–have to get used to speaking the same language again, learn first-hand what has happened over all those years and what kind of person you’re related to and dealing with.

My aunt is a hard-working woman who likes to shed a tear or two over shared memories, and tell stories about her children whom she adores deeply. She is also the eldest among the three sisters, and you can tell. Even though it was her first time in Barcelona and she let others decide what to do, it still felt that she had the ultimate control. It was also her who, without hesitation, pointed out the obvious, everybody else was too polite to verbally notice. One of the sisters had gotten a little belly (“What is this? And you are wearing this tight dress?”), the other one was anxious and stressed (“Quiet! Just sit down for once and relax! You’re driving everybody crazy!”), her husband drank a bit too much (“Here we go again…”) and I was lacking a good part of crucial Russian cultural know-how (“She doesn’t understand Ukrainian jokes. You must explain again.”). But in this same direct fashion, she would also tell you when she liked something about you or something you did. After a few days together, she hugged me–suddenly–and said that I was a sensible and intelligent girl who was interested in people and the world, and that she was impressed and very happy about how I had turned out. I felt honored and glad and relieved.

My uncle was a bit of a different story. He is a man full of jokes and opinions. Many of them sounded offensive to my Western, liberal ears. There were jokes and comments about peoples he clearly disliked and there was the way he did not look at me when, on our second night together, I left the women’s family story circle on one side of the room to join the men’s political talk on the couch and hear his thoughts about Syria and Crimea–merged into one argument against American world policing. I chimed in occasionally, probing his argumentation, but he attributed our generational, cultural, sociopolitical differences to my having spent too much time in the US. It’s true, spending time abroad will most likely widen the horizon of your opinions, but I’m sure that’s not what he meant.

After a while, he decided to give me a lesson of sorts. He asked me to join him on the balcony, away from the (protective) women. While he smoked a cigarette, he told me about his two children whom he raised to love Kuban, the region in Southern Russia where we are all from. Even though his children had been born in other regions of the Soviet Union, he took them to Kuban as often as he could, because he wanted them to love it as much as he did, and to view it as their Родина [liberally where you’re born or your homeland]. Clearly, my uncle loved his country–and he expected me to feel the same. Standing on this little balcony, overseeing a narrow street in the Gothic quarter of Barcelona, where one of my aunts lived and where I had spent more time coming of age than in Russia, a country I left at age 2 and had only visited a few times since, I felt the pressure of needing to belong. I felt that I had to choose sides (my homeland’s side in this case) and stick with it, no matter what. Most of all though, I felt sad and disappointed that my uncle did not see me as the person I was–complex background and all. I had not grown up in a different region of Russia, like his kids, but a completely different country, Germany. And even that place I had traded in over 10 years ago for the US, South Africa, Kenya and others, because I did not feel that I belonged. People like me who face dilemmas of not truly fitting in anywhere have since been dubbed “third culture kids.” Even though I had grown up with the Russian language, food, stories, mentality and culture, I did not belong to it–and I never would, at least not fully. And that was something my uncle could not accept.

We spent the next week cooking, eating, strolling, laughing, crying, arguing, making up–and on my last evening, just before I was to head to the airport to fly back to Nairobi, a beautiful thing happened.

Over another lavish meal, accompanied by a great deal of spirits, my uncle raised his glass to make a toast. He looked at me and he said: “Forget what I have told you about your Родина. Home is where you are happy, where people accept you as you are–and where your mother is.” Everybody drank to that and my mother beamed at him, but I knew that this was a private exchange between him and me. That he, like me, had continued thinking about our conversation on the balcony. That he had learned, as we spent time together, that I could not and would not belong–and that that was OK. It was one of those rare times when you see somebody opinionated change their opinion. And it was in this moment that he stopped trying to make me something I was not and accepted me instead.