New beginnings [Previous ¦ Next]
My parents moved to Calgary, and that gave me another escape route. I joined them later to become a landed immigrant and finish my education in geology in Canada. The decision, the wide open skies, a world that reminded my of Australia in its people if not its climate, all added up to a renewed life and belief in myself. I plunged head-long into Canada and turned my back to France, and as it would turn out later, my family. I was on top of the world and thought I could do it alone, carrying on the splendid isolation men are trained to. The western Canadian prairies, the eastern slopes and central ranges of the Rocky mountains, the long dry winters and a small friendly university, an honest a friendly people all helped me develop a parallel life to my parents' where I lived.
Little did I realise the developing rift between Mum and Dad, as she too found freedom and ended her education started in Paris when we emigrated! How did I not see that Dad dreamed of a son with the same career who would return with him at the end of his expat cycle? Or that siblings were bystanders deemed helpless by my parents... that Calgarians reflected what they saw, thus my parents would push themselves back home, as I watched them go back where I no longer belonged? Parents will not reject their own at first, so they sought to blame Calgary and thus were blind to my decision. I would call it home for twenty years, the longest I'd lived anywhere, and thus consider myself Canadian.
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