How to Not Fit In
Despite being a citizen of Ireland, I didn’t set foot there until adulthood. Plans for family visits when I was a child always fell through. Flights were expensive, several hotel rooms would be needed, and how would we drive around? It wasn’t until my late 20s, when I found myself with a good job and in a healthy relationship, that I could manage a trip. I traveled alone from San Francisco to Dublin, the flight somehow ten times as exhausting as my regular flight to New York. In Dublin airport I took the lane for EU citizens. The man processed the passports of the French couple in front of me without a word. I approached and slid over my passport, expecting the same silent treatment. The customs agent did his work and smiled at me. He said, “Welcome Home.”
Welcome Home. It hadn’t been sarcastic, or embellished. He simply said it and moved on to the person behind me. This sort of casual acceptance should’ve made me feel euphoric. In any Irish-American’s dream, it would’ve been a crucial detail. I used it in The States, of course -- how could I leave such a moment unexploited. In that moment, though, I felt strange. Deceitful. This couldn’t be home, I thought. I had never been here before.
After a couple of days exploring Dublin, I took the train from Heuston Station to Galway. Both sides of my family come from the countryside north of the city, though my mother’s was nearest - in a small coastal village in Ros Muc. My grandmother had traveled to many countries, but her favorite stories were of visiting this extended family. The connection she spoke of most, the poet Caitlín Maude, had passed away before I was born. I had no contact with other relatives, so it made sense to simply stay in the city and leave the countryside for another trip.
My first full day in Galway I purchased a trip on a bus tour for Kylemore Abbey and The Quiet Man cottage, one of my family’s favorites. While I waited, an older man passed by the line and looked at me. He stopped mid-stride. Then he approached me and asked, "are you a Maude?" It turned out he had met my grandmother and knew my grandmother’s cousins. He offered to take me back to the village located in Ros Muc, to see family and the village. He gestured to some items in his hand, said he was going to drop them off, and he would be back in a moment.
Naturally, I boarded the bus and hid from him. I was too young, and the situation too awkward for me to admit I had traveled alone and I didn’t actually want to go to the countryside and rely on spotty cell coverage for safety while traveling someone I had never met before.
Hunched low in that seat, I wondered then as I often wonder now, what would have happened? I would’ve been safe, I think. But I imagined that trip, of meeting the family my grandmother said wouldn’t speak to her in English, who still lived in whitewashed cottages with glowing peat in their fireplaces, proud of their gardens and suspicious of cities. And that began the first rough sketch of The States.
After the tour I got an early dinner at a pub, where I people watched with a book in hand. A group of friends off work nodded to me when I offered them my table’s spare chair and a mean drunk man scowled at me as he was firmly asked to leave in what was clearly routine. On my way back to my hotel, I passed by a rowdy group of men in Liverpool jerseys who sang "Galway Girl" at me as I passed by. How surreal of an experience, to be catcalled in a way that was frightening, as catcalling often is, with the underlying message "you belong here." I included all of these anecdotes in the book. Everywhere I turned, it seemed like I fit into the overall picture, even if I didn’t belong.
On my last day in Galway, I visited the museum and then took a walk to Grattan Beach. My grandmother had given me shells from that beach. I wondered if I would find any good ones. Alone there on the wet, smooth sand, I found a perfect one, swirled with purple and pale pink. I looked out onto the bay and came to a realization. I had come to Galway not for the city, or my Irish ancestral roots, or to discover myself. I had come to find my grandmother, but she was still gone. We had fought the last time we spoke. She had lived through hard times, had experienced so much loss, and it had hardened her. We argued after I became engaged to my husband, who was not Irish, not Irish-American, not even a New Yorker. She had been cruel, I had been angry, and before we could smooth things over, she died. I stood on the beach, holding the small shell she would never see, and mourned her all over again.
The rest of the trip included the embarrassing moments one might expect in a foreign country. I paid too much for things, I got lost, I couldn’t understand a server’s accent and ordered the wrong thing. I let go of my expectations and enjoyed myself as a tourist. I could’ve achieved some kind of belonging, had I followed the man who knew my grandmother and inserted myself into the lives of people who did not know me. Maybe it would’ve worked out. Or, maybe I would’ve ended up a bog mummy. I’m not sure. But despite my genetics and my connections, I did not belong there and didn’t especially want to belong, either. A vestige of that feeling went into The States, and now the well is dry.
