Two hats

On the 23rd of August, 2007, the last place in the world I wanted to be was a town in Kildare, Ireland. I didn’t want to leave my friends, or my school, or forfeit my American High School experience. I wanted to stay in my house with my dogs, and my friends, and my brother in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, which closely borders the city of Albuquerque. Since we had returned to the relatively large town seven years earlier from a three-year stint in Munich, Germany, the last thing I expected was for my dad to be sent back to Europe again.

It really was a travesty, moving to Ireland. I mean, it’s probably worse than losing a limb or being diagnosed with terminal cancer. At least that was what fourteen-year-old me thought. On my first day of school, after draping myself in the itchy awful uniform that they required us to wear at Maynooth Post Primary School, and begging my dad to walk me into the creamy building on my first day of school (where they had told me weeks before that I would be skipping a year of school ) I prepared to meet my maker. I mentally coached myself not to cry when I sat by myself at lunch in a room full of people a year older than myself, as I shakily followed my dad through the front doors. It wasn’t until I heard two passers-by making fun of a first year for having his mother walk him to school, that I felt completely and utterly stupid. I was in fourth year. At that moment any hope that I had ever had for even having any acquaintances in school went out the window. I was dead meat.

I felt utterly nauseous for about twelve seconds until a group of girls heard my dad speaking to the principal and stopped to ask if I was American. Within four minutes I was being introduced as “Our new friend Megan—she’s from America!” Being dragged from one person to the next by the wretched navy wool jumper, I was now a “legend.” The next three years were a blur of new faces, some friendly; some not so friendly. Every time I went back to Albuquerque for Christmas and summertime I scolded myself for ever thinking Albuquerque could be better than Dublin.

Looking back now the only memories I have are the kind that make me laugh, either because they are completely hilarious or because I was so completely clueless. In three years I went from mistaking the Duke of Leinster for the Duke of Carton to having written fourteen essays about Irish history and getting mostly A’s on them. I went from driving through Maynooth for the first time ever, thinking it was small and overcast and sad, to walking through the town that had become my home after school every day and turning to my friends to say “You know, Maynooth is a really lovely town.” I had gone from loathing the small town stereotype that meant everybody was involved in your life, to forgetting that there was any such thing as a town where you didn’t know every single person you walked by.

Most of all, I had been the girl who had turned my nose up when everybody in New Mexico told me how much I would love living in Ireland, and how I wouldn’t want to leave. Soon I became the girl who dreaded ever having to leave a place as charming and comfortable as Maynooth, sitting in my room wondering if I’d ever be as happy anywhere as I had been there.

The first few weeks back in Albuquerque were a lot harder than the first few weeks in Maynooth. Here there was nothing new to learn, which was probably the best part about living away. I found myself missing the freedom of hopping on a train and heading into the city. I learned that I knew my way around Dublin a lot better than I do around Rio Rancho. I realized that we spell words differently here than the way I had adapted to spelling them in school. Taking a placement test at the college I will be attending, I was proud to discover that studying for my Leaving Cert prepared me to take any test I could possibly take here. And to my surprise I learned that I truly and dearly miss putting on that awful itchy uniform every morning, because it means that I won’t be going back to the school that I had once hated, and now saw beauty in every corner of. I even think the uniform is kind of cute now.
But most of all, by “suffering” through the “travesty” of living in Ireland, I learned that not only can I do anything now, but I always could. A taxi driver taking me to say goodbye to my friends the day before I left told me “Home is where you hang your hat.” I guess I have two hats.