Not belonging

As I get older I think with regret about how I seem to belong to no place and no group.

I've just spent an evening with friends at a quiz night here in Adelaide. At the table M and I were the only people who were not part of the F family. There were brothers, sisters, and in - laws.

It was a very pleasant evening.There was that easy-going familiarity, but also the lack of curiosity, which characterizes  encounters between homelanders and migrants in Australia. I found  it both relaxing and frustrating at the same time!

How is it that I have never managed to do this for my own family? Why have I not made it a priority to build a family network for my own children? The F's have so much support for each other and their children. My three have only got their mother and myself. No wonder they are struggling. How could I not see that this would happen? The result is a family suffering from 'culture shock' in Adelaide.

I feel responsible for all the problems my family is having at present. M was such a happy person and now she is sad. She has no family to help. However, she is a very strong person.

It's not just a question of 'belonging'. It is not being needed. It is ot being able to contribute. It is not being valued - which makes me feel depressed, hopeless, worthless.

I don't want people to feel sorry for me and 'help' me. I want to contribute to other people's lives. Sometimes, I feel overwhelmed and  humiliated by it all. When this happens I want to break off communication and hide from everyone. But then I feel even more lonely.

When I see how things could have been or should have been I feel envious of my friends.

As for myself I realise now that I will never really belong anywhere. I might aswell be anywhere. Here in Adelaide , if it weren't for the 'F' family, we would know no-one. If we dropped dead tomorrow no-one would notice -or care when they found us.

I don't think this would be true if I had been an African, South American, or an Asian. I have always believed this 'loneliness' and 'solitariness' -to be a dysfunctional artifact of living in a developed country.

In Africa, Asia or Latin America I haven't felt this loneliness , but on the other hand, because I am not indigenous to these places, there was a certain feeling of alienation of being a "foreigner"-no matter how well I was treated by the locals.

That was a different feeling to what I feel in Adelaide