Healing Three Generations
It’s 1999. Cher and TLC are dancing across the Billboard Top 100 charts. A young girl in an orange corduroy dress waves goodbye to her home for a strange, new world. Goodbye to the hummingbirds that would visit her by grandma’s flowerbeds. Goodbye to the avocado trees on grandpa’s ranch. Goodbye to nearly everyone she knew and loved as her parents each hold one of her hands in their own at the airport.
Hello to people looking at her like the alien she is now. Hello to ignorance turning to hostility when assumptions are made about the legality of her existence. Hello to magazines and TV shows whispering in her ear every day that people with her hair, her figure, her name just do not belong up there on the national pedestal. Hello to a new language, a new culture, even a new landscape that would occasionally get covered with a cold blanket of ice. She needed special clothes just to go outside those days. There were no avocado trees growing here.
The girl thought she would never see home again. She believed she would have to make a home from transient houses and friends for the rest of her life. There was no longer a place she could truly come home to — at least not anymore. It’s a necessary sacrifice, but you cannot fully understand what it means until circumstances force you to make that difficult decision.
Her parents did it so that the girl and, eventually, her younger sister, could thrive away from a broken home that erases hope and any legitimate chance at prosperity. It was the best sacrifice her parents could make, even with the uncertain path that lay ahead. They did as each of their parents did the generation prior, when they packed up their families across the ocean in search of better lives in Venezuela. The cycle continues.
Over two decades later, their investment has grown and their daughters have flourished. Life throws unpredictable curveballs at them all that scatters each of them around the country, but they persevere and continue on their individual paths toward success. The girl is now a woman with a degree and a job she works hard for every day. They can finally afford to see the old worlds — all besides their own home, which continues to boil in a pot of corruption and crime. She and her father decide to visit the home that her grandfather had left in Madeira over half a century ago.
She had never been here. She is on a small island off the coast of Africa, not at the northern tip of South America. The people here speak Portuguese, not their language. The feeling is unmistakable despite nearly having forgotten it over the years: home. Nostalgia sinks in: the tropical plants, the brightly-colored houses, the astonishingly beautiful sights as they drive through the land; the positive energy of the strangers around her, the great-aunts forcing her to eat from platters full of food, the feeling of actually belonging.
She is glad that her family is too preoccupied with the map and the beautiful rock formations in the tunnels. Her emotions bubble up to the top and explode into tears streaming down her cheeks. She had been trying to make a home for so long. She had been grieving the death of her home for too long. She felt she had to learn to love again. Now, the feeling of home envelops her with each sight and smell. Perhaps the home needed to be found before it was built.