Happy Belated Birthday, America

I still miss QuikTrip’s crushed ice and cherry syrup, aggressively cold air conditioning, Hidden Valley ranch dressing, and the simple luxury of a slow walk through Target because I needed toilet paper but leave with $143 worth of stuff I didn’t need.

You can take the girl out of America, but apparently you can’t take America out of the girl.

This year, my husband and I celebrated America’s 250th birthday the only way that made sense to us: The Varsity-style chili dogs (IYKYK) and Independence Day. It wasn’t all that different from our 4th of July celebrations back in the States, just minus the parade and the fireworks.

Somewhere between Will Smith punching an alien and Jeff Goldblum saving the world with a laptop, it occurred to me: My son will probably never celebrate the Fourth of July the way I did.

Most of my childhood was spent in the rural South. Every July, our one stoplight town disappeared beneath a sea of red, white, and blue. People claimed their spots along the parade route hours before it began, setting out lawn chairs in the same spot every year. Kids ran through the streets with sparklers while adults caught up with neighbors they’d known for years. As the sun set, everyone looked toward the same patch of sky, over the towering yellow pines, waiting for the first firework to explode overhead.

Fourth of July holds some of my favorite childhood memories. Even now, I can smell the fireworks and feel the itch of chiggers on my ankles.

Living abroad has changed the way I think about America. There’s something interesting about seeing your home from the outside that takes away the constant churn of politics and reminds you of everything else. From thousands of miles away, America has become less about election cycles and partisan politics and more about front porches, Fourth of July parades, Thanksgiving dinners, and the people and places that shaped me into who I am.

It has also taught me that patriotism doesn’t belong to any one political party. Loving your country doesn’t require believing it’s perfect. It means loving it enough to see both the strengths and the flaws, while still believing it’s worth celebrating and worth improving.

The older I get, the more I realize that’s true of every place I call home. It’s true of America, and it’s just as true of Israel.

Then, as Bill Pullman’s President Whitmore delivered one of the 90s most iconic monologues, I realized my son will be an American citizen with American parents, but his childhood will be absolutely Israeli.

He won’t know the excitement of counting down the days until the Fourth of July. He won’t know the sticky, sweet taste of a Bomb Pop on a sweltering summer day. He won’t grow up in a place where fireworks stands pop up overnight in empty parking lots. He won’t spend humid summer evenings chasing lightning bugs before the sky fills with fireworks.

Instead, his childhood will look different. Memorial Day and Independence Day will be spaced one day apart, marked by somber remembrance and then defiant celebration.

One day, I’ll tell him stories that begin, “When I was little…” But to him, they’ll just be stories threaded with Mom’s nostalgia. He won’t understand it like I do. That’s a unique thing about immigration.

Although my son won’t have my childhood, he’ll have his own. And the truth is, he wouldn’t have this one if I hadn’t left the one I had.

When I made aliyah nearly two years ago, I had plenty of reasons, but underneath them all was the hope that this country might help me build the family I couldn’t seem to build in America.

After years of infertility, it did. My son exists because of Israel—in the most literal sense imaginable.

If I hadn’t gotten on that plane, if we hadn’t made the decision to build a life here, if Israel hadn’t made fertility treatment accessible to us, there is a very real chance I wouldn’t be writing this essay with my son asleep on my chest.

So yes, sometimes I miss America.

I miss my family. I miss my food. I miss the rhythms of holidays and the feeling of home.  I’m nostalgic.

But then I look at my son.

America gave me my childhood, but Israel gave me his.