Just a Little Bit Polish

Just a little bit Polish

That’s enough for me.

Just enough to be Polish

That’s all I can be.

My background,

       Upbringing,

            Ethnicity,

My family of origin

But not my identity.

Polish-yes, but American now.

Married to a Latino.

Mother to Filipinos.

Global citizen and child of God.

In my Father’s house

There’s a place for me

And at the door

They don’t check ID.

Let go of the labels, child.

Let go and just be.

Don’t be proud to be Polish.

Don’t be proud, you see?

Be content, be grateful

Be at peace, be free.

Just a little bit Polish

That’s enough for me.

29 October 2019

My New Identity

I don't have to identify as Polish.  I can be Polish-American, or I can just be an American born in Poland.  Polishness is a part of my past, but it is no longer a priority for me.  I appreciate the culture and the fact that the language has an emotional affect on me, but it is now secondary at best to who I really am.  I'm an American Catholic, a woman made in the image of God.  I am a wife and mother by vocation.  I am a child of God; a daughter of the King of kings.  I am called to be another Christ.

Being Polish is something that has been an integral part of my identity all of my life, but why?  Because this is the identity that was given to me. This is what I was told that I was, without any consideration of my life's circumstances making it virtually impossible to actually maintain this identity long-term.  My mother left Poland at the age of 31.  Her identity as a Pole was already cemented.  It is unrealistic to expect that I would internalize the same identity as her, just because I am her daughter and I was also born in Poland.  I was raised in both countries, and I came of age here, in the United States, outside of a Polish community.  I was not allowed to question my identity because it never crossed anyone's mind that there was anything to question.  It wasn't done out of spite or maliciousness.  My relatives just didn't know any better.  Their experience was that of an adult immigrant (my parents) or a non-immigrant (my grandmother and maternal aunt).  Whereas my experience was that of a child-immigrant.  I had no role models with this experience, so it has taken me 30 years to figure out that the identity that was handed to me simply doesn't fit.  I have no reason to feel guilty about it.  It is what it is.

I don't love Poland any less if I merely say I was born there.  I am no less proud of having this other culture in my background.  However, I must be careful here.  Being proud of my Polish heritage does not negate being proud of my adopted nationality - American.  My loyalty lies with my current nation now.  My "home country" is now the United States.  In Polish, the term is slightly different and carries a different nuance: "ojczyzna", roughly translated "land of my father".  This is still very true.  I can still say, in Polish, that Poland is my ojczyzna.  But not my homeland.  My home is here now.  My heart is here now.  I am grateful for my past, but it no longer defines me.  My past no longer has a hold on me.  It no longer demands loyalty nor guilt.  It simply is my past.  

My future, on the other hand, is where I am now, where my children will grow up.  My future is the United States, and I must put aside the petty judgments and comparisons that I grew up with that were attempts on the part of my relatives to heighten my Polish pride.  There is nothing better about being Polish, or European, or American, or any other nationality or ethnicity, for that matter.  There are pros and cons to every culture under the sun.  I am well aware of the dark side of American history.  Colonization of indigenous lands and importation of human slave labor being two particularly evil aspects of the US.  But those, too, are in the past.  It may make my Polish relatives feel better to focus on our differences, but they don't impress me anymore.  Ultimately, we are all children of God, and ultimately we all return to the Father.  The sooner we realize this and start living it out, the sooner we can establish God's kingdom here on Earth. 

So next time someone asks where I'm from, I won't answer the question with a question, as has been my habit: "Originally?"  I'll simply say I'm from Virginia, which is where I spent the majority of my time until recently. 

I won't brag anymore about our multilingual children, either.  Because both of us now speak mostly English to our daughter, and only supplement with our native languages.  I actually wonder if, instead of "native" I should use a different term here as well.  "First" languages seems to fit much better.  There's no denying that my first language was Polish, and my husband's first language was Spanish.  But we are no longer "100% fluent" in them, and that's the connotation I have with the term "native".

We're not any better than other Americans for being a multilingual family, which we still are, even if our kids end up only receptive multilinguals (meaning they understand but don't express themselves in other languages).  We're not any "less than" either, less than those who are more fluent, more dedicated, more plugged into their communities of origin.  Everyone has strengths and weaknesses.  I'll take our current linguistic situation as it is and rejoice that it no longer defines me.

Now there's one more aspect of my drilled-in Polish identity that is on my mind.  My surname.  I made a big deal out of legally changing my name to my mother's much more Polish-sounding (not to mention therefore feminist!) name.  Both my siblings followed suite.  My husband and I compromised by hyphenating each other's names, and our children have both our names.  I've now had this name for 15 years.  And yet it didn't make me any more Polish than when I had my dad's surname.  It didn't empower me as a woman, either.  Because my worth comes from being made in the image of God!  Not from what my name is.  Finally, I regret having caused my father sorrow by abandoning his name.  Even though tradition would've had me abandon it anyway and change it to my husband's, the fact is that I replaced his with my mom's, and that I set an example for my siblings, and now he has a grandson that rightfully should've had his last name but doesn't.

This last one I may or may not be able to get resolved.  But I feel freedom in being able to decide for myself what is most important, and while my past is something I value and am proud of, it does not define me.  It's hard to admit this as it sort of feels like striking out on my own, but I'm turning 40 years old this year - it's high time to strike out on my own, isn't it!?

What Makes You an American?

What makes someone an American?  Is it merely American citizenship?  Or is that just a technicality?  What makes anyone associate themselves with a given nation?  I think a given country's culture is what makes that country unique.  This includes history, geography, traditions, food, clothing, religion, music, values, language.

I was born in Poland to Polish citizens.  I'm ethnically Polish (albeit about 75%, per my dna test results!)  I speak Polish and I'm Catholic (which highly correlates with Polishness). On the surface, this makes me Polish.  To boost, I hold dual citizenship, so my European Union passport likewise identifies me as Polish.

But over the years, I've struggled to put my finger on why this simplistic formula just wasn't working for me anymore.  I'm an immigrant, and as such, I'm essentially a cultural transplant.  I started my life on one trajectory, but at age 8, the trajectory of my life changed drastically.  Sadly, it was a much bigger cultural shock than my parents could've prepared me for.  They assumed a Polish-born, Polish-speaking daughter of two Polish-born, Polish-speaking parents would grow up to be - what else? - a Pole (Polka).

Whenever I did anything "Polish", I would be praised for it, in particular by my maternal grandmother.  My letters to her would always be praised, albeit with a grade attached: "You only made X grammatical mistakes, your Polish is still very good!" (Gee, thanks for judging and editing my letters instead of just reading them for pleasure, and for making me feel as though every letter "home" was a test of my Polishness.)

I hate to say it, but even though my parents adopted the United States as their new countr by virtue of moving our little family here (it was just me and my parents when I immigrated here), they never embraced it to the exclusion of our country of origin.  Unbeknownst to them, their Polish daughter was quickly becoming an American teenager, something no expat parent could possibly be prapared for.  I grasped at proverbial straws wherever I could, trying to make sense of the world I was living in, the world I was coming of age in.  My parents weren't able to prepare me for American adulthood - how could they?  They weren't American adults themselves.  Even my dad, who did become a naturalized citizen when I was 14, still only knew what he learned from colleagues and television about American culture and values.

I grew up trying desperately to please my Polish parents/family while at the same time making sense of the often contradictory values I was met with in my American school and among my American peers.  I had no Polish community to fit into, as we settled in an area without a Polish presence.  Now I know that community is crucial.  Humans are social beings.  We must feel that we belong.  One way or another, we will make it so that we feel we are a part of a community, any community.  This is why kids join gangs.  This is why people join cults.  Less extreme, this is why there are cliques, and why sports fans can be each other's mortal enemies.

So where did I belong?  We attended church, but that's just what it was - attendance.  It was not participation.  There was no fellowship.  I never made any friends through our church.  It was in and out, Sunday obligation fulfilled.

My parents worked very hard, so they were very busy.  My younger siblings were born 15 months apart when I was still a "tween", my dad worked overtime or two jobs in addition to a crazy commute, and once my siblings were in school, he and my mom started an alteration business for extra income.

I get that they were concerned about providing for us kids the economic opportunities they didn't think we could've had in Poland.  I cannot know how founded this concern is, because I only know life here.  But money was a big deal.  Making it, saving it, being very selective when it came time to spending it.  The assumption was made that the ticket to a happy life is a certain socio-economic status, and the higher one's formal education, the better one's chances at said status.

I'm a pretty literal person.  I set my sights on something and I'm not easily swayed to reconsider.  And so, having heard from my family that education is crucial, and since I was a pretty good student and - as an introvert - enjoyed studying, I took it upon myself to pursue a doctoral degree as my life's mission.  All because I simply assumed that having a PhD would mean employers would seek me out and offer me work.  It took many years of higher education - five years on top of my Master's Degree - to finally come to terms with the reality.  The truth was, there was nothing magical about a doctoral degree.  There was no guarantee of employment upon defending a dissertation, and even my own college professors were making no more annually than my dad, who did not have a college degree of any kind.

I withdrew from my doctoral program after many sleepless nights, lots of tears, and facing a total loss of identity.  Up until that point, I was the good little Polish daughter who would be "Dr. Karolina".  In fact, when we visited my grandmother and godmother in Poland shortly before I made the decision to quit my PhD program, I received gifts and congratulatory cards on account of the degree I didn't even have!  It was just assumed that I would follow this trajectory.  That was a lot of pressure, because what did I have to fall back on?  Absolutely nothing.

Being done with higher education after 11 years of post-secondary schooling was the beginning of the end of my primary association with the nationality of my birth.  By then, I had changed my name to my mother's because it was typically Polish.  When we became parents several years later, there was never any question I would speak Polish to my kids, but even choosing a baby name included considering if Polish-speakers could spell and pronounce it.  I was going to raise Polish kids.

And then, I started parenting.  And while I do speak Polish to my kids, when it was time to name our second, I was already disillusioned enough with the Polish aspect of my identity to not let that determine what we would name our son.

What was holding me back before?  On some level, I was still trying to please my Polish parents and relatives.  I was still trying to prove that I was Polish enough.  I was still trying to live up to an impossible standard.  I could no more claim 100% Polish identity than I could claim any other nationality.  Except American.  At one point in recent years, I thought I had figured it out.  I wasn't 50/50, I was 100% Polish AND 100% American.  But now I see that this was merely wishful thinking.  The truth is, I AM 100% American.  By virtue of my citizenship.  By virtue of my English fluency.  By virtue of my having served in the US Army.  By virtue of my understanding and appreciation of various (though not all - still learning!) American traditions and passtimes.

But I am no longer any more Polish than other Polish-Americans.  I used to differentiate between Polish-Americans and Polish expats like myself.  I followed my relatives' cues in judging myself to be more Polish than them. I no longer deem my language ability as some sort of secret handshake that gives me the priviledge of Polish idetity.  Nationality is circumstantial.  There is no reason to boast of one's national identity.  No nationality is any better than any other one.  I thought I believed this when I would call myself a global citizen, but really, before I was more like a nomad with no home base.  NOW I can truly call myself a global citizen.  An American, first, but with international ties and interests.

  What makes YOU an American?

The Problem with Labels

Looking over my first full year as a mother, I noticed something about myself.  I'm not as superstitious as I used to be.  Tonight is New Year's Eve, and normally I run around making sure the house is clean, there are no outstanding balances anywhere, no grudges held, everything ready to ring in the new year with no old baggage.  But tonight, I'm not stressing about any of that.  There is nothing magical about tonight's midnight.  It's an arbitrary social convention established to help us divide events in time.  I will not jinx my 2015 if I'm still line drying clothes washed in 2014 (the day before).

Similarly, I've noticed that I'm not as religious as I was when starting the year. I hate to say it (Ok, the old me would hate to say it), but there's a  lot of overlap between what's deemed superstitious and what's considered religious.  Mainly it's a matter of perspective.  And this year, try as I did, I just can't recapture my old sense of religiosity.  My last ditch effort was to convert to Judaism, but then I realized it made no sense to do so if it wasn't because I thought there was more truth in Judaism than there is in Catholicism, where I'm already comfortable at least.  And while the unofficial Quaker in me still hopes to one day find a meeting where I will feel at home, as it stands, all religion seems to be an elaborate system of myth, legend, superstition, brainwashing, and power trips.  On one hand, these are meant to encourage the masses to follow some level of ethical living.  On the other hand, they mask the truth and beauty and genius of God that is buried deep underneath all the excess baggage.

As I've considered my spiritual journey thus far, I've noticed that I give way too much thought to external validation.  I've always been an outsider, so I don't know why I ever thought that I could actually find a religious community where I fit right in, both in terms of practice and belief.  And yet I've tried, and taken way too personally when others take it upon themselves to tell me I'm not "..." enough to really call myself X. 

Well, I've just about had it with trying to please fellow human beings.  Perhaps they actually believe everything the Catholic Church (for instance) teaches, and that's great for them.  But for them to try to tell me that unless I am at least trying to accept the official dogma I'm not "really Catholic", that's just absurd, ignorant, and their problem - not mine!  Being Catholic, heck, being any religion, is merely one aspect of one's culture.  I grew up with Catholic tradition, I went through the external Catholic sacraments of initiation, I choose to worship at a Catholic church (for now), and that's as Catholic as I'm going to be.  So what if the more observant Catholics bemoan my presence?  So what if they try to tell me to "go where I do believe what is being taught"?  Why should I have to leave?  That is only applicable if I'm working within their framework of what is True and holy and valuable. 

I'm not purposefully going to go out of my way to disrespect any religious sentiment (so long as it doesn't fly directly in the face of my values, which sadly some religious teachings do).  But I'm not going to be pushed out and treated like a pariah for being a free thinker. 

My problem all along, of course, has been that I wanted to belong.  And when I couldn't conform my own mind in order to belong, I set out to try to find those who already agreed with me so we could belong together.  Now that I'm finding that hard to find, I may need to reassess this need altogether.  Why do I need to belong to an official religious community?  Why must there be a commonly understood label for my spiritual experience?  Why must I be like everybody else?

Politically speaking, I'm an Independent.  I do not vote based on a candidate's party affiliation because individuals vary too much.  What a party may typically stand for doesn't necessarily mean each individual candidate will uphold that ideal.  And what if - hold onto your hats - there are things that each party stands for that I value?  In other words, I may not be a fan of big government, but I believe in helping the poor even at the expense of the filthy rich.  Or I may not agree with abortion on demand, but I do think gay couples have a right to marry.  If I officially say "I am a Republican" or "I am a Democrat", this automatically conjures up all the affiliated stances on various issues, regardless of my actual opinion on each.

Similarly, I've found the trouble with religion.  If I officially say "I am Catholic", the assumption (perhaps even rightly so) would be that I don't believe in using birth control, IVF, gay marriage, and that I pray to different saints based on my needs at the moment.  The holier-than-thou would say that if I disagree with them, then I have no right to call myself Catholic.  But the better question is - why do I want to?  Just to have a label to fall back on?  If the Catholics don't want me, why do I keep trying to justify why I should be allowed to keep calling myself Catholic even though I disagree with several key Catholic social teachings and, what's even more troubling, the major basic tenets of Christian faith.  They are right.  Religiously speaking, I'm no more Catholic than a Quaker or Buddhist is Catholic.

In a way, my Catholicism perhaps is similar to my Polishness.  I still have fond memories of living in Poland.  I still hold to some Polish traditions that are dear to me.  I still speak the language.  But just how Polish am I, really?  I'm not up to par on the latest Polish news, nor do I even espouse to some popular Polish outlooks on life anymore.  I haven't exactly stopped being Polish.  It's just that my Polish identity has faded over the years.  It won't ever totally disappear, and I'm glad for that, but I'll never resettle in Poland again and feel at ease living and working there.  I guess that's the same with my Catholicism, too.

And even my Americanness hasn't exactly simply taken the place of what my Polishness used to be.  I'm glad to be an American because of various reasons, but not because I fully agree with everything "America stands for".  Materialism, keeping up with the Joneses, the whole Savior-complex when it comes to interfering in world events.... I could do without those.  And perhaps my pro-immigration and universal healthcare attitude is enough to make certain Americans tell me to "go back to where I came from", or otherwise that I'm not "American enough".  If I disagree with every private citizen being allowed to carry a weapon, I must not be American.  It doesn't matter that I served in the US Army while some of these gun-happy "patriots" didn't.

If I keep letting people tell me what I can and cannot call myself, I'll no longer be Catholic, American, or a slew of other labels that perhaps don't fit me to a T.  (Feminist?  Not if I'm pro-life.  Mother?  Only if genetically related to my offspring.)

So I'm going to try something new in the New Year.  I'm going to use labels if doing so helps me, and I'm not going to worry if anyone disagrees with my use of the label.  Ideally, I'm going to try try TRY to live label-free.

Global Citizen

I have been known to get stuck on choosing the best label for something that I see as defining some aspect of my identity.  I say "stuck" because rather than allowing me to fully immerse myself in whatever the given aspect is, I feel as though I must first establish an identity marker before I proceed, so that I can associate whatever activities, behaviors, or beliefs with said label. 

It's not all my doing, mind you.  I've had people tell me that I shouldn't call myself this or that, and so I'm hyper-vigilant about it now, because the last thing I want is to be accused of being disingenuous.  But why bother with labels at all?  Good question.  I know that everything is transitory, and that we are not who we think we are.

I've become aware of this after my recent trip "back home" to Poland.  I remember myself at the age of 7, preparing to emigrate with my mother.  I remember myself "back home" at the age of 11, on my first trip back for the summer.  I remember myself "back home" turning 18 in my hometown.  (I took great pride in knowing that I "became an adult" in the same town where I was born.  I even made sure I was "independent" - going to visit the recent grave of my great-grandmother on my own - at the precise time marking the anniversary of my birth.)  It gave me some joy to become engaged to Alex in "my home country" as well, at the age of 22.  A few additional trips "back home" and I grew to expect the feeling of "coming home" at every subsequent trip to Poland.

During my most recent trip back, Alex, Maya, and I (plus my parents) stayed in a hotel instead of with family, as was our usual set-up.  Perhaps that was the single biggest mistake, albeit unavoidable considering there were five of us showing up to surprise my grandmother on her 80th birthday.  But try as I might, in the two and a half weeks we spent in my hometown, with my closest extended relatives, I never felt "at home".  In my grandmother's house, where my mother and I lived for a couple of years leading up to our emigration, we were mere visitors.  We were waited on hand and foot, treated quite hospitably to be sure, but I did not want to feel like a guest.  I wanted to feel at home, among "my people", and I never did.

I digress this much to say that upon my return, I realized that I cannot go back to my childhood, that what I remember of my hometown is mere memories, accessible only through my own mind, with some assistance from old photographs, perhaps.  I realized that who I am today is no longer who I was when I left Poland, or even who I was at each of my subsequent visits.

I say all of this why?  Because "who I am" is transitory.  It makes little sense to assign a label to a moving target.  And yet, it is the nature of our ego to insist that it is "the real me".  Hence, my apparent need to label various aspects of my identity.

My nationality identity has been taken care of.  My recent trip solidified what I had already suspected.  I have a hyphenated national identity (Polish-American), and I no longer fight with the fact that most others who self-identify this way don't speak Polish and/or have never visited Poland, much less lived there or were born there.  I used to pride myself on being "more Polish" than Polish-Americans, though I wasn't quite as Polish as the Poles of Polonia (the Polish diaspora that my parents identified with for a time) or obviously the Poles still living in Poland. I have made my peace with this, and I'm happy to focus on the American identity over the Polish identity.  The former is who I am now, whereas the latter identifies where I come from.

If anything, I now see the Polish-American identity marker as a spectrum, with those who can awkwardly spit out the words "pierogis" (with the inaccurate English plural marker "s" at the end of the otherwise Polish word) on one end of the spectrum, and recent immigrants on the other end.  With time, I have slowly slid down the spectrum, away from the recent immigrant end and closer to the middle.  I still speak Polish and am literate in the language, and I have many fond memories of the country.  So I'll never be at the other end of the spectrum, but I no longer feel any need to lord this over those who, by circumstances of their birth and ancestral heritage, do find themselves at that end.

I may hold dual citizenship, but my dual identity is anything but equally weighty on both ends.  Polish is where I come from.  It has had an inescapable influence on my upbringing, values, thoughts.  For better or for worse, I did not have an American upbringing.  I cannot identify with my native-born Anglo-American peers, because we come from different cultural home bases.  But I am no longer immersed in the Polish culture.  I do not live in a Polish neighborhood, I do not worship regularly at a Polish church, I do not cook traditionally Polish food (generally speaking).  I do speak Polish to my daughter, Maya, but honestly, it's not so much to link her to her mother's heritage, but rather to give her an edge linguistically (since knowing a second language at an early age makes learning subsequent foreign languages later on that much easier, not to mention the broadened horizons of being able to learn about the world from the vantage point of a different language and culture).  I also speak Polish to Maya for the sake of the few Polish relatives that are still in my life, primarily my mom.

I don't expect Maya to identify as Polish-American, and I think this realization has helped me distance myself from the label as well.  After all, how can my daughter and I not share the same national identity?  Then again, that's precisely what happened between myself and my own parents.  They retained a lot more of our mutual Polish roots (How could they not?  They were fully adult by the time of our migration.) whereas I was also heavily influenced by my American peers growing up.  Perhaps this is another reason that, until I had my daughter, I tried desperately to emphasize the Polish in Polish-American so that I would have that generational link to my parents.  But now, I find myself emphasizing the American in Polish-American so that I can have that generational link to my daughter.

In the end, none of these labels ought to matter, because patriotism taken to an extreme breeds racism, hate, and international violence.  Deep down, I consider myself a citizen of the world, with no one country holding my loyalty without question.  Yet, to be fair, at least for me, I'm only able to see myself as a global citizen because I've had the advantage of being exposed to people and ideas from around the world, something truly uniquely American.