U.S. Customs

When "the usual way of doing things" becomes a trap

A few weeks ago, two German exchange students moved into our house. For 10 days, we adjusted to life with high school girls, picking up their towels and making late trips to collect them from the mall in the dark.

In the carpool line at school, S-I-X kids piled one-by-one into my SUV while the parents behind me tried not to lie on their horns.

Since one of the girls had celiac disease, I scrambled to prepare gluten-free dinners for eight people that might somehow be eaten both by picky seven-year-olds and by Germans who had never tasted tacos.

I was forced to count on my fingers when the high school girls told me to pick them up at “1700,” and they counted on their fingers to figure out what hour their parents would awaken in Bavaria.

We were all flexing new muscles.

A few days after the Germans flew home, our family left for a long-awaited spring break trip to Costa Rica. In a matter of days, we all went from stumbling over German to stumbling over Spanish, from sampling every variety of German candy to drinking an unhealthy number of Costa Rican sodas. I stuttered between “danke” and “gracias,”and once I even caught myself saying “merci.”

We went from “showing off” a screamingly loud American-arcade-slash-bowling-alley to being introduced to the Costa Rican rainforest.

The kids went from relinquishing their bedrooms at home to sleeping all together in one hotel room.

It was a lot of culture shocks in quick succession—followed, almost comically, by Daylight Savings Time. Yesterday morning my kids headed back to school in a daze, unsure whether it was summer or winter, morning or night. The fridge is empty and the clocks are all wrong.

We are trying to remember what a “normal” school week looks like. One of my daughters cried herself to sleep last night because she misses the capuchin monkeys who tried to steal her breakfast in Papagayo. How boring our American city suddenly seems.

Trouble.

And I’m thinking about the unexpected beauty of that. It can be a gift to grieve an alternate existence, to know what else is out there and want it.

---

In her wild and wonderful book How to Do Nothing, Jenny O’Dell points out that our customs become so “customary” we stop naming or even thinking about them. Customs are those things we do over and over without necessarily knowing why, like idioms that have lost their original meaning. And yet, they are the conventions that regulate social life, the inherited things we build our lives around. The way minutes add up to all the hours of our lives, customs add up to all our doing.

Here in America, the Joneses¹ never go to school wearing uniform sleeves that are too short. We laminate the labels for our Egyptian pyramid project and buy new colored pencils to complete our book reports. We are early for baseball practice. We schedule haircuts before our hair starts to cover our ears.

The customs here are: school all day, activities all afternoon, busyness and striving, polish and optimization. We move between air-conditioned rooms and from screen to screen. I am always trying to make our lives not those things, but I am never able to forget that I am swimming upstream. It is never easy to buck a custom.

O’Dell advocates for a view of the self that is “the opposite of the personal brand.” In her vision, instead of being fixed and recognizable, we allow our interactions with the world and other people to change us. We shapeshift as we take in new information and experiences. We hold customs loosely. We are water, not ice.

The language of personal branding—like “leave a lasting impression!”—only makes sense here, in America. We are so inundated by advertising, we don’t see how we’ve internalized the principles of it, selling the package of ourselves as a way of life. We fix our customs and mechanize our lives.

I like to play a game in my head. Which of my “givens” would seem silly to an outsider? What custom would it redden my cheeks to try to explain?

Is it that I dye my hair and paint my nails?

Is it that I have olive oil shipped to my house by Amazon?

Is it that I have drapes custom-made for my living room?

Is it that I buy a chai latte every Monday morning?

I want to be water, not ice.

---

When someone lives in your home, you notice all the things you otherwise wouldn’t: bedtimes, meals, forms of entertainment. You become hyper-aware of your own noises and smells. You wonder if other families pile on top of each other while watching tv or stay in their pajamas on Saturdays or if their fridges are cleaner than yours (yes). You are careful not to leave your fingernail clippings on the coffee table or dishes in the sink. You are suddenly very self-conscious about the poo-colored smoothie you drink for lunch.

After the weeks we’ve had, I can almost see the gears turning in my kids’ heads. I’m watching as they sort through what it means to be them: American, southern, born in this one family. White, privileged. Gen Alpha.

From the jump, we don’t get much say in our identities or customs. We do what the people before us did, who are doing what the people before them did, and on and on. We tend not to question the usual ways.

I distinctly remember lying in bed as a kid, trying to work out what language God spoke. I was maybe 7 or 8, and it made sense to me that God would be aligned particularly with some culture or nationality, and after careful consideration, it made the best sense that He would be aligned with America. I remember reasoning through it and concluding that God spoke English.

I love this memory, because without it, I would never believe the extent to which I had internalized my own customs—my Americanism—as the best or optimal or most natural way of existing in the world.

Surely, even God was like me.

It takes so much work to shake off the “givens,” and maybe it’s especially hard for Americans. It’s difficult not to feel like the center of the universe when, everywhere you go, people speak English and watch American movies and imitate American fashions.

But God is not American, and neither is America God. To sort the inherent things—what we might call the “real”—from habits and practices and expectations requires us to pay attention, ask questions, and learn.²

In Costa Rica, while tubing down a river, I pointed out to my daughters that we never saw a woman with shaved legs.

Just because everyone around you is doing something, I told them, you are not married to that custom. It is not you.

You can set it down beside you, look at it, and decide what you think about it.

---

One day, we ate authentic Costa Rican food in the heart of the rainforest. Our guide Pablo explained the dish was called casado, the most common lunch in the country. Rice and beans, a protein, fried plantain, and vegetable “hash.” It is always the same.

Casado in Spanish literally means “married.” Pablo laughed. “You understand? Marriage is the same thing again and again?” My husband and I cut eyes at one another. We understood. “This is like casado, always the same.”

I will gladly marry this plate of food.

Sitting at the picnic table, my mind flits to my digital subscription to the New York Times recipes section. Into my inbox are delivered new recipes every week. New combinations, new presentations. New new new better better more.

I wonder how many tiny, unnoticed customs are draining my energy, like apps running in the background and sucking a phone’s battery. Probably I don’t have to slather my face with retinol at night or constantly update my wardrobe. I could move to the jungle and leave behind my razor and my recipes.

I am not trying to romanticize travel—my kids cried when I made them taste a plantain.

Still. I am constantly trying to show them: This thing that feels inherent might not be. I want to pry loose their little fingers from whatever customs they think define them. I want them to know: This is not the only way to do things.

If you could clear the space in your mind taken up with customs, how would your imagination fill it?

What would you do with a clean slate? What would you make of the world?

---

We are back to the school-homework-extra-curricular grind. I imagine a new looseness around our house, but it is one thing to not wear makeup for a week in Costa Rica, quite another to grocery shop “unmade.” The striving clicks reliably into place the moment we pull into our driveway. I think it’s stupid that women shave their legs, but I shave mine anyway. I want to eat rice and beans for dinner every night, but what would people think?

I lack the courage to adjust my brand.

When the Germans were here, they asked us one night at dinner about Stanley cups. In Germany, they said, they are impossible to find. They had heard Americans are obsessed and wanted to know why. We had, of course, no answer for that. Do they do anything special? No. Do even the little kids have them? Yes.

I considered crawling under the table. Three daughters, three $40 Stanleys. Plus little rubber straw toppers in various shapes that will persist eternally in the landfill next to all the American “fidgets.” These are the silliest of customs.

But my cheeks were not red because I saw my kids learning to distinguish between what is inherent to them and what was just… put on top of them. What they can shake off when they’re ready. (Maybe we don’t “need” Lululemon skirts, hmm?)

And I don’t forget: some of our customs are beautiful. I would choose again and again to live in a big family where my kids drape themselves on top of me like laundry and turn anything that’s not nailed down into an art project. I would choose sleepy Saturdays and taco Tuesdays. I would choose not to clean my fridge.

Casado.

I am wondering: Which customs enrich our lives, and which trap us?

Which are (like my marriage) habits I return to because they make me better? And which are (like my everlasting fight against gray hairs) cages disguised as harmless rituals?

---

While the German girls packed their suitcases to return home, my daughter and I snuck out of the house to buy them a going-away present. It took us a few stores, but we finally found what we were looking for.

At home, we loaded up my car and scanned the house for errant items. Then we presented the girls with their presents: brand new, 40-ounce Stanley cups. As we’d hoped, they found this hilarious.

Two weeks later, as our family left Costa Rica, I purchased four bottles of lizaro sauce. It is the essential ingredient to help me make gallo pinto at home: rice and beans.

I lack the courage to break the trap of so many customs, but I am learning. I hope my kids are braver than me.

For now, a couple of Stanleys in Germany, some lizaro sauce in South Carolina. It’s a start.

1. It will never cease to amuse me that that is literally our last name.

2. Why does the whole world speak English? The answer’s not pretty.