The name's, 'Mud'

I like movies like, 'Mud' (2012), full of atmosphere and vernacular, rich in metaphor (the character's name, the white shirt, etc.) but also overflowing with human failing, and the loss of innocence, and the gulf between; expectation and reality; hope and faith.
This is a momentous week for me... for us as a family. The end of a long, torturous journey certainly, but also the end of some expectations. To change one's citizenship is not to change one's nationality, I wrote somewhere else, but equally, to change one's citizenship is to confront the change in one's own identity.
This is a country that has maintained some myths about itself since inception, as do we. Change affords us a chance to redraw, reset, renew... but that renewal brings with it a convivial maintenance of those same myths that are sold to us as a facet of reality. If the means to success is only ever via one's own initiative, failure can also only ever be your own fault, the pitfalls and treacherousness of the road notwithstanding.

We have to take a pledge, under God, of allegiance to this myth, this entity, this complicity... this nationhood. An allegiance to continue being, but now essentially transformed by the gift of legal status - an identity now bestowed, not born with... an identity of one's choosing.
Gratitude... To whom? - the country, its people, our benefactors who helped us along the way. 'You must be so glad, so relieved, so grateful...' say they, the words left hanging... waiting... waiting for an affirmation, a confirmation that here now is someone that should be grateful for what I was born with - an implicit bias... of one's own greater status... of someone else wanting something that has come naturally to me.
The poverty in 'Mud' (2012) is like a mood; all-encompassing, never remarked upon, a state of being... natural. A citizenship conferred can never be like that. It must be an aspiration, a goal, a constantly remembered edifice to artificiality. 'When did you come over?', they will ask my daughter when she's grown... 'When I was two,' she will say... to a reception characterised by a relaxation of breath, emblematic of a complicity shared, a reckoning of a mostly common naturalness.

It is hard to say that things have ever been worse 'back home', but that is something you can say about a lot of countries nowadays... There mightn't be anything to go back to, but is there something to look forward to.... except 'othering' for the rest of my life?
I want to say I am happy, but this country, over the last six years, has made me wary of admitting to too much... it is enough to say, "I am relieved," I have learnt... lest anything more becomes an invitation to violence.