Americans Abroad and Political Blunders

As an American living abroad, it is easy to find yourself living in your own cultural bubble. With television and radio broadcasting in a language foreign to your own, your world becomes quiet. It was one of the most difficult things to adapt to upon moving back. After years of quiet, I felt as if I was constantly bombarded with commercials and voices, telling me what to do, where to shop and what to buy. I had to remember how to tune it out again, once those voices were speaking my own language. I noticed it with the kids too. When we first arrived, they were fascinated with American commercials, often singing the name of the stores we passed, like: O, O, O, O'Reily's! Auto Parts!

However, whenever something big in the world-wide political arena happened, that safe cultural bubble would burst. And language barriers aside, as the only Americans walking around our little town, we would hear about it.

I once spoke with an American woman who had been living in Belgium a long time, they had arrived during the years of the Bush administration. She told me stories about school children, chanting anti-American sentiments and singling out her children once at an event. She described how those attitudes had shifted, and it was so much better for Americans once Obama came into office.

It's not something most Americans think about. Our borders are vast and our world is isolated. Most of us don't have to worry too much about what those in other countries think about us. It is assumed that people, for the most part, like Americans. To which I would now be forced to point out that "like" is probably too strong of a word. "Tolerate" might be better. In any event, while we were living overseas, the fact that our president was popular in the foreign countries where we lived, worked and traveled, helped.

But this week, I am thinking about my expat friends. America's thoughtless lack of a presence in Paris, will not go unnoticed. And my American friends living abroad will most certainly hear about it.

Declaration.

I hereby declare my period of mourning for Belgium, over.

I went into the Christmas season with a melancholy heart. It was impossible not to remember, and thereby re-live, all of the stress we were under last year as we made our move from Belgium to Minnesota. I was dreading our one-year anniversary. 

But instead, a really great thing happened on our one-year anniversary. My heart stopped hurting. The physical pain I felt in my heart whenever I thought about Belgium, went away. It was like a switch had been flipped. I'm not sure why. Except that with every day that passed, up to that point, if I thought back to what I was doing the year before, those memories always took me to Belgium. Once we hit the one-year anniversary that changed. 

And I am so very glad. It's not easy to live under that black umbrella of mourning. Belgium will always be in my heart…but now I appreciate that it doesn't break in half every time I think about it.