Oh Canada

“So sistah, do you feel any different?” asked my brother-in-law Arsenio, as I entered the kitchen, he turning the frying chicken, I peeling off my winter coat.

Do I feel any different?

I went to bed as usual on Friday night, drifting off gently, the magazine I was reading slipping from my hands as my whole body sank into the sweet release of sleep.

Did I feel any different this Saturday morning as I wandered through my “hello day” ritual – grinding coffee beans, brewing coffee, frothing the cream, letting out the doggies, rubbing their sweet bellies on their return and resisting their entreating eyes to give them a treat?

Yes I did feel different. It’s a gentle type of feeling, yet intense at the same time, a tumble of emotions at the culmination of a long-awaited and much anticipated outcome. The emotions one feels when you finally get that something that you have held firm in your sight. What changed? Yesterday, I earnestly took my oath of citizenship of Canada. Huge change in my life – my legal status at the very least.

Yet I am still the same Marguerite – weigh the same, live in the same home, the same three dogs resting at my feet, the same two children snug asleep in their beds on the snowy Canadian winter morning. I have the same list of things to do as I have had for a few days now – complete a report for my client, finish (more like start) my Christmas shopping, get my nails done, go to the grocery. Same details that permeate my life from day to day. Yet I do feel different.

I chuckled as I nursed my coffee, and mused: the oath of citizenship is like a marriage, and the ceremony yesterday was the wedding. Permanent residency was shacking up, testing the waters of compatibility. Citizenship is permanent. It is a mutual commitment to a country and the country to you. And I plan on never getting a divorce:
Canada, this is “til death do us part”. I am committed to you. You may not be my native land, but you are certainly my home now.

But what about Jamaica, the beloved land of my birth, my “native land”; the repository of infinite memories, bitter, sweet and the full range in between; the stirrer of my emotions – intense love for the beauty of the land and the magnificent, vibrant energy of my people, as well as frustration, worry, guilt and anger at the betrayal of hope. Do I now love thee less Jamaica?

And I muse further: perhaps my emotions in affirming allegiance to Canada remind me not about marriage but more about my experience on becoming a mother. When my Victoria daughter was born, I felt an intense swelling of primal love that I could not ever have imagined. Two years later when my son Shane was born, I was a bit worried that I would have to divide this love – love Victoria less to hold Shane in my heart. Instead, my love expanded exponentially to hold them both always and forever. The lesson:
there is no limit to love. Love cannot be divided, it can only expand.

I love you Canada
I love you Jamaica