seventeen women raised me

there's nothing new under the sun. i've heard it a dozen times, but i'm not sure i fully understood it until we were assigned to write a memoir piece. i've heard a good deal of wry, disparaging comments about memoirs telling the tragic tale of a broken childhood, and so i'm afraid of telling a story about loss, which is my story. but if tragedy is what sells...

my life has been one long series of cliches: a longing for home inspired by the twenty different houses of my first twenty years. boarding school from 1997-2009. a childhood and family sacrificed on the altar of christian ministry. balkan wars. german villages. moving to new york and moving away again, cold and jaded. absent parents. suicide by hanging. falling in love at sixteen and reading poetry together, sitting in trees. encounters with genocide and refugees. rape. gangs. drive-by shootings. third world poverty. sarah lawrence. small  farming towns in the midwestern prairies. working for room & board on wyoming ranches. cathedrals. chinese kindergarten, where i was given a number instead of a name. number three. crying in front of my first chagall painting. red lipstick & floral thrifted dresses.

these symbols, images, and plots crowd the pages of every memoir out there. i feel like it's all been done, and always better than i could ever dream of doing it. i feel like the line i've been fed my whole life, "everyone's story is important and valuable," is suddenly being proven false. maybe i don't have anything new to say at all, and maybe i can't even figure out how to say old things in new ways.

saying old things in new ways. that's writing a classic. but classics require resolution, some moral or conclusion drawn from the story. and my story? it just feels muddled. it feels like everything is layered on top of itself until i don't know what's what, or what's ended, or what i've learned.

it's like lucy grealy said: truth is unretainable. maybe that's the moral of my story, that i keep learning the same lessons over and over, the paradoxical lessons of my own insignificance and of the father's unmitigated love. cherished. i learn about grace not only every year or every month, but every day. every morning i have to remember again that god's grace is relentless and all-encompassing. every morning, i discover myself and the world and god again. every morning when i wake up, i have to remember again that my father is gone, like he dies again every morning, and sometimes, before i open my eyes, i'm not sure what country i'm in.

i don't know how to write about these things without sounding pretentious or assuming. like maybe i don't have a right to write about hard things, like maybe i'll end up sound piteous. or maybe i don't have a right to write about the places i've been because i never fully belonged to any of them. how can i write about the ethnic cleansing in kosovo when i'm neither albanian nor serb? how can i write about china when i left at age eight? am i allowed to write about germany even though i'm losing my german, words fading out of my mind each day?

i do not belong anywhere. i've been everywhere, but never anywhere fully. i have half of everything, and therefore own nothing. can you put something down on paper if you do not possess it?