Coming home to myself
..but not in the way you think…
“What if it's not that we're trying to be something we're not?
There's a particular kind of judgment reserved for women who fall in love with cultures that are perceived not to be their own. The New York woman obsessed with French aesthetics. The Midwestern woman who turns her home into a Scandinavian dream. The internet has words for these women: Delusional. Try-hard. Performing. Fake.
As my daughters tell me all the time, “People do be frontin’ mom.”
But to me, there is a way more interesting question underneath it.
What if they're not?
What if the women who feel pulled toward a place they've never lived, or barely lived in, or only carry as an old family story, are responding to something far older? I'm not making a scientific claim here. I'm asking a quieter question. Why do some lives feel like they just fit, and others feel like those pants with the pleated fronts that we know make us look funny from the back?
Here’s a real quick bit about me
Seven generations back, my family is Swedish on my maternal grandmother's side and French on my maternal grandfather's side. My paternal grandmother was adopted, but 1 thing we do know about her is that she came from a German family.
I have never lived in Sweden. Or France. Or Germany. And yet I am happiest in low light, and my decor is all white and beige. I love arranging flowers, walking long distances in cold weather, and drinking something hot while watching live feeds of places it is snowing while it’s 95 degrees
where I live. When I randomly chose a language to study 4 years ago, I chose German. I am obsessed with the French woman aesthetic of dressing and self-care.
I was born in England. I am fundamentally English. The first three formative years of my life were spent on English soil, in English rhythms, with English voices. I moved to America after that. I have lived most of my life here. And yet a cuppa is, as I said to a friend recently, the end-all be-all. So help me, his Majesty Amen. I have strong views on the difference between the words “British” and “English”. I grieved when the Queen passed. My comfort food is cottage pie, and I have a jar of Marmite in my pantry.
Not because I'm trying to be English. Because I already am, and a piece of me has been waiting to go home.
There's a phrase I keep returning to. The Body Remembers
We carry our history. Brene Brown wrote “The Body Keeps Score” and, while I’ve never read it - I’m sure it has a chapter on how our body remembers our family history on a biological level.
How else can I explain my love of lingonberries and salmon in every form known to man?
Maybe that's poetic license. Maybe what's actually happening is more cultural than biological - the stories we were told as children, the smells in the kitchens of grandmothers we barely knew, the way certain landscapes look like home before we've ever seen them in person.
Whatever it is, I don’t think it's delusion or being fake or trying to be something you’re not.
I think it's a woman in her forties, fifties, or sixties, finally giving herself permission to stop performing the culture she landed in and start honoring the one her body keeps reaching for.
It’s also not reinvention, a reset, or a glow-up.
Which is something we should take a minute to address. The language we have for women who change in midlife is almost entirely a language of reinvention. The second act. The new chapter. The rebrand. And every time I read those words, I feel something inside me cringe.
That's not what's happening here.
I’m not becoming someone new. I'm refining who I am and coming back to myself. The self that got put on pause to be a mom, a wife, a coworker, a student, a coach, or whatever else life has thrown our way. There's a difference. And the difference matters.
Reinvention is what you do when you've decided that who you are is wrong and needs to be changed or corrected. Refining is what you do when you've decided that who you were before was mostly on point, and the work now is to shift the noise off, drop what no longer fits, and what was always true becomes louder.
The pull towards a culture your body recognizes
isn't reinvention, it's refinement, it's not adding a new identity, it's subtracting the parts of your life that have been quietly causing conflict within you.
There's a class layer worth naming here as well. The women who get celebrated for cultural belonging are usually the ones with money and time - the Francophiles who can afford the trips, the Scandi minimalists who can afford the redesign.
Immigrant women holding onto home cultures inside this same space are often told, instead, to let go and blend in. Both groups are doing the same thing. Only one of them gets a Pinterest board.
But underneath the class lines, the impulse is the same. We're trying to come home to ourselves. The body is asking for a place. I think that's allowed.
I think it's more than allowed. I think it might be one of the quieter, truer reasons women change in midlife. Not because we're becoming someone new. Because we're finally being who we already were before life started “lifing”.
If this landed, you might like this post here — “The Roses I said I Said I Didn’t Like” - Refining in one small moment.
