Here I am, stuck in the middle with...y'all.
Thank you Stealers Wheel for the lyric.
Yesterday was Canada Day(hooray!). Wednesday is the Fourth of July (also hooray!). And I am feeling...hollow.
As the blog title suggests, I am a Canadian living in the United States. I was born in Canada, but I've lived half my life here in the U.S., and these two holidays so close to each other always bring up those conflicted feelings I have about whether I am Canadian or American.
By law, I am a Canadian citizen. My mother is a Canadian citizen, my father is an American citizen, and I was born in Canada. But I don't really feel Canadian anymore. I don't sound particularly Canadian, unless you get me talking to my family or friends up there on the phone and then I carry those pronunciations around with me for a few hours. I care about what happens up there politically, and I certainly would fit in there in many ways in my philosophies on life, gun control, socialized medicine, drug laws. And yet...
I really believe in the U.S. Constitution, and it's wonderful vagaries. I respect and believe in the system of checks and balances (even when it's corrupted), even if I'm not legally allowed to vote in elections here. I listen to American music, my taste is towards American food (with a few exceptions), and I've forgotten most of the metric system.
I've been thinking a lot lately about getting my U.S. citizenship. It crosses my mind every now and again, but it's been knocking on my brain pretty steadily since we moved to Georgia a couple of months ago. The problem is, it's expensive, it's time consuming, and generally it's a pain in the ass. Come to think of it, coming here legally with a Green Card was also time consuming, expensive and a pain in the ass, and my Dad was already a U.S. citizen! To come here legally, you have to be on a waiting list, you get to take a bunch of really embarrassing medical tests, and shell out a lot of cash, and be fingerprinted when you enter the country. We got through in about a year, partly because my Dad is a U.S. citizen, and I think we may have had some political help on the inside. But it was still tough.
To gain your citizenship, you need to have lived and worked in the U.S. for five years as a Permanent Resident Alien (which is my status). Then you need to fill out lots of forms (which they sometimes lose) at an Immigration Office that handles citizenship cases. The nearest one to me is in Atlanta. The cost right now is approximately five hundred dollars, not including travel expenses of course. You also need to take a history/civics test, which I have a feeling most U.S. citizens born and raised here couldn't pass. It's the hoops I have to jump through that have been the main reason I haven't gone through with it.
But it's also the fact that there's a little tiny voice inside of me that keeps saying I'll be losing something important if I give up my Canadian citizenship. It sounds stupid, but it's something that makes me unique, even if I don't mention it in casual conversation with everyone.
When I go up to visit my family, I'm overwhelmed by feelings of home, and I never want to leave. I miss buying butter tarts at Loblaws, I miss buying my milk in four litre plastic bags, I miss seeing TTC trolleys and buses. I miss standing on the shore of either Lake Huron (where my gran lives) or Lake Ontario (where I used to live) and feeling the breeze and watching the sea gulls. I miss the quiet that only comes with a really good snowfall. At the same time, though, when I am here, standing on my front porch watching the sunset, or standing on the beach at Tybee Island watching the shrimp trawlers come in or the dolphins playing in the surf, I can't imagine being anywhere else. I can't imagine not eating shrimp and grits, listening to people say "How y'all doin' today?", and feeling that warm, moist, chewy air caressing my face every morning.
And so I stand here, not really Canadian anymore, but not really American, either. Just somewhere, stuck in the middle.
