I'm going to a BS (that is, Bible Study) on Thursdays on the American army base. It's through the chapel and so I knew a few people, and now its been a couple of weeks and I know most of the eight to twelve women.
I missed this - I forgot about this. A woman's Bible study was how I really got to know and get connected to the women in New Jersey - and I already feel it here - in just these couple of weeks. (I LOVE maternity leave!) I enjoy the company and found a few sisters (they don't know yet, but I'm pretty sure we are on the same plane).
So last week and today posed good questions: What are some adversities you have faced and some lies you tell yourself about this? I'm doing the exercise here - because while I hadn't thought about it before, I know there are things I've been telling myself that just aren't true - and maybe if I could just identify them, they would take a little less of a hold.
Belief: I am an outsider, I'm weird. I am a yabanci, a foreigner - never to be on the in. I don't fit.
I don't feel this with Tolga, we share everything, talk things out if there's a problem, and when I feel on the outside, I tell him and he gives me the affirmation I need to dismiss that crazy outsider feeling. And, over the years, the feeling comes up less and less.
It is a feeling that occasionally flares up when something happens and turn me into a suddenly short-of-breath panicky person thinking crazy thoughts when something seemingly benign to everyone else has happened.
This feeling most often came up when I was around Hakan and his wife. My sister-in-law takes on the traditional role of the Turkish bride with all its duties. When my sister-in-law comes to our home in Kusadasi she takes over serving tea, and she won't accept my help (that's her German side). My brother in-laws don't call me abla or yenge. The house no longer feels like mine or ours - but that I'm a visitor, or worse a spoiled useless guest sitting while my sister-in-law is sighing and serving Anne, Baba, her husband Hakan, and whomever else needs to be served.
The reason this feeling of being an outsider is hard to reconcile is because in some ways I keep myself on the outside in my attitudes that are criticizing and condemning certain cultural habits. For example, I kind have wanted to smack Hakan upside the head when he sat down and asks his wife, multiple times to fill his tea while she is juggling cooking and babies or limping from a turned ankle or a hurt back. I get irritated when Anne is still serving Gokhan tea and preparing the table in spite of having cooked all day or in spite of some ailment - while Gokhan has done nothing but stare at his computer all day. So, I want to be on the inside, be their abla or yenge, without embracing all the traditions.
I'm okay with wives serving their husbands, I'm just not okay with the tradition creating lazy men and overworked, resentful, and ailing housewives...
Sigh.
I guess that's what makes me the yabanci. It's behaviors that my Turkish family and others do - the ones that I can't understand, the actions or words that don't make sense to me - these are the ones leave me sometimes standing on the outside holding my backpack of beliefs and bags of common sense and suitcases of my own cultural thoughts.
So where's the untruth here?
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