Where do You Belong?

I was reading another blog today. (Here). And it spoke to me. Where DO I belong? I have memories like this. Going, and being with my grandmother, who played rummy too, and taught me, and knock out whist, and I played too.

Somehow, there was a sense, there, in that house, playing those games, of a sense of past and connectedness. A feel of forever. Where does that come from? It cannot be in bricks and mortar, as I remember more than one home for those people. Are some people better at holding the ribbons of family through time? Did my grandmother hold on to them? Does no one do that now that she is gone?

I feel her not being here. I changed my life after she was gone, to being myself, geographically back to the thread of family here. But it is not that which counts. So, what does? Would I feel better if I lived in a house that also contained a pack of cards, and taught my kids to play? There is no point us buying a beach house, we can walk to the beach from here.

What happens, if you become detached from that thread of history that carries you along in the line with your before and afters? Would I feel better if I had not chosen a new name? I don’t think so. I don’t feel history requires a name to continue. And, any way, even if it did, women through the ages have done this in this family. So, it is the connective thing anyway.

I have a connect to travel forward, in my children but, it doesn’t feel continuous. I don’t know why. I don’t feel part of anything, and I feel uncomfortable to have my children in those connections, I know that they are entitled, but I don’t want them to be trouble to a disconnect. I have to sometimes be uncomfortable so that they have the chance to make a connection that I cannot make.

Maybe this is why fostering was a possibility for me. To offer that connection somehow, without having to hold on to a permanent thread. I am open to being a point of connection without being able to hold on to anyone in any way to be a two way link.

I am struggling to build a new family, from here forwards, but it is sad to know I have somehow lost the thread of before. Everyone likes to know where they have come from. Me I feel like I materialised one day and SOME people could cope and accept that and some could not. I want something more clear and positive for my children.

So, I feel very confused. I have seen separate beach hut summer generational history things recently (see also here) and it makes me ache. Partly that is my connection to summer in the USA country by a lake, and maybe I *should* give my children that too. But mostly it is an ache for a belonging that I don’t have and don’t know how to give.