Home Is Where You're Welcomed

by Michelle Spences-Lee (Ireland)

I didn't expect to find Canada

Being a first generation bi-racial female from Canada I’ve never felt ties to the home I grew up in. Walking into my childhood low-income home (where my family still resides), you were bound to hear up to three languages. My father, a silky night sky black and my mother, a moon like white, I thought everyone had mixed-matched parents like mine. Having parents who were big fans of a landline constantly calling “back home” instilled a distant feeling of unbelonging on Canadian soil. At a very young age, not only by my parents, I was made very aware that I was originally from somewhere else despite having a birth certificate that insisted differently. Travelling, and the idea of travel came early. I was enamoured with maps and atlas’. I was constantly questioned about where I was “really from” making me feel like an impostor as an adolescent. On my journey to becoming an adult I fell in love with many things that now define who I am. I also developed a massive identity crisis. Though born and raised in Canada, my mother comes from a controversial land filled with misfits. Her scarce roots due to genocide of her family tree, make her only second generation to her claimed land, yet, because of her skin she is never questioned. My father, a proud West African with little roots due to the abomination of colonizers over his ancestral land, also has a demolished family tree. So, though I grew up and only know the life Canada has provided, I am now constantly asking myself “ Where AM I really from?”. Though my family didn’t have a lot financially, it never stopped my parents from throwing us all in a car and driving south to a new country and state. Driving from a big city through rural Canada to cross the border, often had us stopping in unpopular areas. Sometimes filled with people who looked just like my mom, and sometimes filled with people looking just like my dad so, I was familiar with a land outside of my own that harboured people that I could potentially relate to. At seventeen I took my first solo trip. I flew from Toronto to L.A. for the simple reason to see Kobe Bryant play at the Staples Center. It wasn’t until that first solo trip in 2006 that my eyes were opened to the answers travel could provide. Looking back, it was inevitable that I’d end up living abroad. In early 2015 after travelling to New Zealand for a second time, I decided within myself that I needed to take advantage of the cards that were dealt to me and play them strategically. I told my then roommate of five years that I was thinking of moving. Next, I sat my family down and let them know my plans. My parents, explorers in their own right at a different time, understood and my roommate was completely supportive. I think they knew I was off the beaten path a long time ago. October of 2016 I got on a plane with no plan, printed out visa details, and made my way to Amsterdam. It started out as Amsterdam for a year, then Stockholm for another - which turned into two, and now Dublin at least until 2021. Moving abroad resurfaced the early feelings of lost identity. Constantly meeting new people had me fielding the question I couldn’t confidently answer: “Where are you from?”. My passport is from Canada so I guess I’m Canadian. The first time in my life I wasn’t questioned about my identity, I was nearly thirty years old. I didn’t know what to do but embrace it. The way I speak, the way I write, the way I love, my politeness, my humour, my empathy, all the greatest parts of me come from where I was nurtured. A big city woman, despite her flaws that society constantly tells her to fix or forfeit, comes from a progressive country that could be better, but could also be worse. Now, in 2020, sixty countries experienced (and counting), I didn’t expect travel to teach me that where I’m from, nature and nurtured, is actually where I’m from.