The Origin of Species

It is so easy here to feel like I have been plunked down on some strange planet inhabited by another species, albeit human-like. This species here looks the same as the species I grew up with, but confusingly interacts completely differently, lives under a very different set of values and and depends on a completely different type of support network to get by. But as different as they may be, they have accepted me and called me their own. Their adoption of me as been so complete that I have come to think that maybe, after all, I am really originally one of them, but was maliciously kidnapped and left by a spaceship on the planet with the other strange species where I had previously thought I was born.

I have developed a whole new set of desires and needs here, like wanting to get married and have kids right NOW and to live in the same place for the rest of my life so I can enjoy a stable community and never travel anywhere ever again so that I stop getting sick and homesick. I feel completely inadequate sometimes for not having any family here and not even being able to enjoy being linked with the extended family of a husband, not having a house to call my own and not having a big enough butt. I have forgotten the so-called benefits of my decades of education and travels and network of friends all over the continent. All I want is to be just like everyone else here, settled down with a family and a local job and a hired trabajadora to hand wash my laundry and cook lunch for me and my husband and kids every day.

I am scared to be returning so soon to the place where all of my new (or repressed and only recently valued as they should be?) needs are going to be misunderstood, ignored or impossible to satisfy. Where according to my new criteria, the boyfriend who has loved me so well for so long, and whom I am still going home to because at one point he embodied my most important values, is suddenly substandard because he has no family nearby to share with me, wants to live in a few more foreign countries before settling down, and doesn´t want kids. Where I will step off the plane and immediately upon arrival feel my life return to an uncontrollable fast-forward that will never again be possible to enjoy.

A thousand thoughts go through my mind every day about how things might be when I get back to the States. Many are bad, like the intimidation of jumping back into the job search after being out of the professional circle for 2 years, and having to start all over again no matter where I choose to set myself down. But I also think about visiting with friends that go far far back, like many of you reading this, and about possibly traveling to New Zealand with the friends I met there 10 years ago to celebrate our 30th birthdays. I think about basking in a mild sun that doesn´t bake me to the bone every time I step outside. I think about moving back out west and being able to hike every weekend. I think about going to yoga classes and swimming in a pool again. I think about how much more normal I will be as a 30-year-old never-married single woman with no home and no children, and how being that average again might allow me to relax back into the values that served me well in an earlier stage of my life. I think about how easy it will be to find healthy, clean food in the grocery store. I worry about how easy it might be to forget my farmer friends here who work 14-hour days to get that food from their farms to the market for export.

And I also wonder: how soon will I be able to return to my new homeland, Honduras?