Home

I started this blog counting the number of days we have been away from the United States, as well as the numberof days I have lived here in Mazatlán. We have been here for 8 months (33 weeks or 230 days). It seems silly to start my posts with its day 230 at this point.

The reality is it still doesn’t feel 100% home. I still feel like an outsider. I have blonde hair, blue eyes and pale skin. I do not look like anyone else here. I think there is a lesson in this I need to learn. Maybe it’s a level of compassion I had some how missed for others that might have felt alone in a sea of white people. Now I am aware. It doesn’t make me feel like I don’t belong, it just makes me feel different when all I want is to feel the same as everyone else.

I am desperate to speak Spanish fluently but 8 months in and I am still not fluent. I do admit I understand more. I do admit I am learning new words and their application every day. I do admit I am streaming 4-5 words in sentence together instead of 2-3 but I am still pretty far from where I want to be.

I want to be a surprise. I want everyone around me to assume I am just another ‘Gringo’ until I open my mouth and speak.

I want Mazatlán to feel like home. 100% home because anywhere in between is hard. We are losing our home in MD right before our eyes, literally. We have watched strangers walk around and talk about us on cameras as they pick apart our design choices or talk about what they would rather do to make it their home. We have watched inspectors walk around inside and out and finally a deal being made right in the very kitchen we made our deal on our dream home. It’s hard. I have been trying for weeks to talk myself out of that house for good. I have been working hard to make Mexico my ‘home’ and its hard.

Home is where the heart is. Home is where your loved ones are. Home is where my closest friends are. Home is where our children are. Home is where you live. Home is where you feel safe and comfortable. I miss the feeling of home. I am still somewhere between homes. I am desperate to trying to let go of one home, so I have room for another. People who pick up and a leave a state or the county they have loved in their whole lives all go through this. I have been through two big moves in my life before this and they were easy in comparison. I know when I left Connecticut for Maryland, I had a tough time. My girlfriends were my life. Today, I am lucky to connect with one of them and we were a tight group of 8. That was 16 years ago. I have started to make friends here. All the people here I call my friends have made Mazatlan home. It is not where they are from but where they happily ended up.

Was it the circumstances in which we ended up here that adds to the baggage of not being able to feel like this is home? Is it that we rent here and so I know deep down that this is someone else’s home? Will it feel like home when this apartment is all I can call home? Will it feel more like home when I am surrounded by all of my favorite things instead of someone else’s décor? Will it feel like home after I have just given it more time?

I am not sure I even want a permanent home. I kind of like the fantasy Rick and I created to travel the world on our 53’ Catamaran. We of course lost the boat, but I am not sure I have let go that dream. Maybe we will just use Mazatlan as a stepping stone.

With all of our uncertainty we have endured in the last year, one might think we are getting quite used to the “I am not sure what’s next” but my need to find home is in direct opposition to that. Am I looking for home? Or am I really just looking for my next path and I feel a little lost right now, clinging to the concept of home to stay sane?