Packing Up and Moving On

The Next Food (Network) Star

2010-08-22T19:25:00.004-04:00

Having missed the Survivor, American Idol, and Project Runway bandwagons, the kids and I have entered the 21st century and become fans of a reality show! This warrants an exclamation point because, until now, the reality show offerings have not really appealed to my television-f0r-family-viewing standards. They are too harsh, too vapid, too, well, stupid. And they tend, I gather from previews and the Washington Post Style section, to illuminate the worst in human behavior.

But our new favorite show, The Next Food Network Star, is different. The contestants say nary a word against each other. The challenges, while contrived, are really hard. The failures are real, as when Aria forgot to salt the potato gratin. And the victories are inspiring and delicious. Who doesn't love to see a beautiful shrimp curry from an untrained cook impress Bobby Flay?

Yep, my foodie kids and I are hooked.

At the root of this, of course, is the centrality of food in our lives. I have a post on this blog entitled "Butter and Such," indicating our familial devotion to (read: obsession with) food. But I mean this -- this notion of food being central in our lives -- in a broader way. Food is sustenance. Food is energy. At its best, food keeps us healthy and strong. Food is yummy and fun. Food is culture. For a mommy, food can be a daily chore. Food is what our bodies miraculously make for our babies as we hold them to our breasts, and food is what we obsess over as our children learn to eat peas and pears and chicken. Food is what we send with our children to school each day, a little taste of home in a colorful lunchbox. Food is celebration and tradition and holidays. But it is also a bowl of instant oatmeal at five-thirty in the morning when you've been up half the night with a fussy baby.

I grew up in a culture where, when someone died, the ladies made hotdishes and Jello salads. They brought their offerings of sustenance and support to the family and to the church basement for the funeral luncheon. They fed their neighbors and friends, bodily and spiritually.

There are many parts of my original culture that I have shed. For instance, I do not make hotdish with cream of mushroom soup and I do not make Jello anything. But today I did cook for a dear friend and her family. When her mother died yesterday, I cried with my friend, and held her hand, and didn't know just what to say, and assured her that her mother knew she loved her, and told her that I love her, and cried some more with her. Having lost my dad last summer, I remember too well the shock and pain, the exquisite pain, of the loss of a parent. As more friends arrived to offer their condolences, I slipped out, came home, and made a menu. It is, after all, what we do when someone dies.

This is what I love about The Next Food Network Star. The contestants cook because they love food and they embrace the challenge of making food interesting, beautiful, tasty, and representative in some way of their own identities. Sure, they want to be TV personalities. But I like to think that they compete in the contest to hone their skills in the ministry of food, too.

Eulogy

2009-10-24T21:55:00.002-04:00

My earliest memories are of Dad reading to me. He was a great reader to children—expressive and dramatic. And he was patient. When Mike and I were stuck in the ruts of toddlerhood obsession with one book (for Mike it was Katy and the Big Snow, for me, 'Twas the Night Before Christmas, year round), Dad read us those same books, over and over, playfully changing words to challenge our memories but providing the comfort for us of the same story, the beloved story, again and again. The gift of reading is one that both Mike and I passed along to our own children. It is a little piece of Dad's rich legacy.

As I struggled with his illness and anticipated his death, I sought comfort in words. Although Dad was not a poet or, for that matter, much of a fan of poetry, that is where I turned, to the art of words, to remember him, to honor him, to wrap my mind around my loss of him.

I started my search for a poem representative of my remarkable father where I was emotionally—focused on his end, his death. I considered the heavy rhymes of John Donne. His Holy Sonnets—“Death, be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful”—came to mind. But that was not right for Dad. Dad was too casual, too spontaneous, lived too much in the moment, for Donne's formal structures to speak for him.

I read Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose words were lighter, more celebratory. But Emerson felt a bit too proud, almost a shade pompous. And that, certainly, was not Dad, whose humility and life of service to others we remember today.

The Bronte sisters were too romantic. Dad was a man of fewer words, simpler words. He was straightforward, honest, and many times told me the truth when I didn't necessarily want to hear it.

My search for the right poem for this occasion ended with Carl Sandburg. He is a Midwestern poet who uses direct and descriptive language to create poems that celebrate humanity. They don't rhyme. They flow.

The Sandburg poem I chose for today is not about death. Instead, it is about the journey of life. And, as we all know, Dad's life was quite a journey. Whether he was travelling to Omaha or Baltimore to visit the grandkids, or to Tanzania to help build a hospital, or to Jamaica to work with orphaned boys, or to a youth group mission trip in Vermont, or from Orlando to Boston to deliver a bone marrow donation, Dad's life was full of roads travelled literally. But beyond that physical travel was the meaningful stuff of his life—making relationships, helping, serving in communities far and wide. We all know that about Dad. That is why we are here today.

This poem is a lovely representation of that duality—the literal journey from point A to point B and the more subtle one of relationship and meaning. This poem is called The Road and the End.

I shall foot it
Down the roadway in the dusk,
Where shapes of hunger wander
And the fugitives of pain go by.

I shall foot it
In the silence of the morning,
See the night slur into dawn,
Hear the slow great winds arise
Where tall trees flank the way
And shoulder toward the sky.

The broken boulders by the road
Shall not commemorate my ruin.
Regret shall be the gravel under foot.
I shall watch for
Slim birds swift of wing
That go where wind and ranks of thunder
Drive the wild processionals of rain.

The dust of the travelled road
Shall touch my hands and face.

Dad's journey surely was not without pain or regret. Disappointment and loss are essential elements of the human journey, and like any man, Dad experienced them. But in his travels, in his relationships with each of us, he had a full journey. And he finished his journey as he would have wanted it, with the dust of that travelled road, the dust of Christ-like service, the dust of commitment to marriage, fatherhood, and friendship, thick upon his hands and his face.

Counting on Baby

2009-05-19T11:25:00.004-04:00

Ethan is thrilled to be getting a baby brother. At dinner a few weeks ago, when we were sharing our anticipations about baby's arrival, Ethan shared this plan.

"Mom, I'm going to teach the baby everything I know about math so that when he goes to Kindergarten, he will already know everything I know," he said.

My heart swelled. Ethan loves math and is intuitively good at it. How sweet that he wants to pass on to his baby brother his passion. Of course, I also felt compelled to point out to Ethan that he will start high school on the same day the baby will start Kindergarten. (Dwell on that for a moment, mommy.)

But he was nonplussed. "Okay. I can do that." Such confidence. I asked him where he'd start.

"With multiplication facts."

Hmm. I asked him, "Buddy, do you think there is something the baby will need to learn before he tackles multiplication?"

"Like what?" he asked with wonder.

I suggested that maybe addition and subtraction may precede multiplication.

"But mom, you don't learn addition and subtraction, you just know it!"

I took a deep breath and shared the truth of infancy with him. I slowly explained that the baby will need to learn what numbers mean before he adds or subtracts or multiplies or divides. We will have to teach him what numbers mean, I told Ethan, by showing him groups of objects. We will have to teach him to count. We will have to teach him to recognize the Arabic numerals.

And for once in his life, Ethan was speechless. His expression told all. Mom, his face screamed, what kind of a moron are you giving birth to?

La Troisieme Fois

2009-03-05T10:11:00.002-05:00

Tout le monde connait la tour Eiffel. Elle est une icône de la ville de Paris et un monument de modernité.

La tour Eiffel a été construite de 1887 à 1889 pour l’exposition universelle pour célébrer la centenaire de la revolution française. Gustave Eiffel, l’entrepreneur de la tour, a imaginé une structure qui refléter l’âge culturel, scientifique, et artistique. C’était l’âge de Freud, Rodin, Jules Verne, un âge d’invention et d’avances techniques..

La tour fait 324 m haute et a 1665 marches. Chaque année, plus de 6 millions de visiteurs visitant la tour.

Moi, j’ai visité la tour Eiffel trois fois. En 1985, je l’ai visité avec ma famille. Mon frére et moi, nous avons désiré monter á la troisieme plate-forme. Mais ma mere, elle, elle ètait très effreyée. Donc mon frère et moi, nous ne sommes pas montés.

En 1989 j’y suis retournée. J’étais resolúe à monter la tour. Mais ce jour la, il fait chaud et la tour, il y àvait beaucoup de gens. Ils me pressent et moi, je me suis évanouie. Deux ratés!

L’été passé, avec ma propre famille, j’ai visité la tour Eiffel la troisieme fois. Mes enfants, eux, ils ont demandé de monter la tour Eiffel. J’ai dit, “Vous allez monter avec leur père, parce que maman est effrayée. Puisque j`ai suis plus âgée qu’eux, je suis effrayée des élévations!” Eleanor et Ethan, ils ont dit, “Mom, tu nous dois y aller!”

Donc, mon marie a fait une réservation sur le Jules Verne, le resto très élégant au deuxieme étage pour déjeuner. Il m’a donné beaucoup de vins. Et après une bouteille et un repas extraordinaire, avec mes enfants très jolis, j’ai saisi l’occasion et j’ai pris l’ascenseur au pinnacle.

Oh, Baby!

2009-02-03T16:20:00.007-05:00

I do not believe in fate. I do not believe in astrological signs, star charts, destiny, or luck. I do believe in god, but I do not believe that god has a plan for me. She may have a will, but she certainly has bigger issues to address than my weird career trajectory and my suburban ennui.

But in the wake of the indefinite postponement of our move to Belgium, my dearest friends assured me that a wonderful path awaits me, with or without the European adventure. Their confidence that this would turn out for the best, that the universe knows what it is doing, did not dimish my sadness. Many dear friends have said, "Kelly, everything happens for a reason. You may not know what that is now, but you will, and when you do, it will make sense."

It didn't exactly comfort me to hear this because, as a guiding principle, I reject it. But boy, did it make me laugh. For despite my belief in reason, in science, in math and probability and free will and plain old chance, I did have a good reason to believe that this change of plans may be convenient.

We discovered two days after our move was postponed that we will be welcoming a baby into our home in mid-August. How about that?

Would we have made a transatlantic move with a baby expected? Yes, most assuredly. We moved from San Francisco to DC when I was six months pregnant with Ethan, and we made that move without the conveniences and budget the Belgium move would have offered. Seasoned movers that we are, we would have been fine. (Our parents, though, may have disowned us or preemptively sued for custody of the new grandbaby.)

Does the excitement of a new baby mitigate my disappointment, my suburban stuckness? No, not entirely. It remains a heartbreak for me every day.

But the joy of anticipation that Scott and I share for a child we have wanted for a long time is a wonderful thing.

What to Write About?

2009-01-22T16:53:00.002-05:00

I have a long list of things I don't want my blog to be.

For starters, I don't want it to be a mommy blog.

I have nothing against mommy blogs. Indeed, there is something admirable about taking the time to document the life of the family in the midst of the raising of said family. And some of them make for enjoyable reading. I think I don't want to write one for the same reason that I don't send a holiday letter. Because while I love getting other people's letters, I cannot bring myself to assume that anyone wants to know so much about my family's goings-on. It's certainly not shyness that drives this. It's rooted, rather, in a fundamental distaste for the listing of the accomplishments and the cataloguing of the ailments. So while I may some day envy those mommies who blogged the details of their family lives, I will not do it.

A mommy writer could always engage in the mommy politics. But the meat of the mommy matter -- breast v bottle, work v home, cloth v disposable, jars v ice cube trays full of home-pureed carrots -- doesn't engage the full me. I am a breast, home-except-when-I-was-working, disposable, ice-cube-trays-with-the-first-kid mom by instinct, by choice, by judgment, but I don't want to write about it.

I also don't want to have a casual blog. Posting too frequently, without attention to quality, is not my style. (If you think this reads like the ultimate cardboard justification for my infrequent blogging, feel free to judge me. Really.) I want my posts to be thoughtful, important, and meaningful. I want each to contribute to the whole. And I want to work around a theme.

Could I write about politics? Sure. I certainly have strong opinions, a relatively well-informed set of positions, and plenty of material to work with. Especially now. But I count on Eugene Robinson, Paul Krugman, Hendrik Hertzberg, Ruth Cohen, Maureen Dowd, and the Davids (Brooks, Broder, and Ignatius) for the best of this kind of writing. In short, I want to read it, not write it.

The central struggle of the blog is that I had a theme. I was going to blog about the experience of an American mommy living abroad. My discourse would touch on parenting, but with a turn toward the consequences of the cultural choices we make for our children. My posts would engage in American politics, but from across the sea and with a nod toward the global perspective of one little household. My words would not document the lives of my children. There would be no soccer scores or club initiations or academic honors. But my words would record the nature, the rhythm, the flavor of our international family life.

What to write about now?

Packing Up and Stuck

2008-12-17T22:27:00.004-05:00

Today we learned that our move to Brussels in June is off. Technically, it is postponed by the firm management until summer of 2010, but I know the truth. For the firm, relocation is dependent upon a positive change in the global economy. For us, at this point, relocation is hinged on our willingness to stay in limbo for the next year, waiting for it to work out. Accordingly, we told Eleanor and Ethan today that we are not moving. Of course we still may relocate to Belgium sometime in the next few years, but it seemed unfair to require them to live in this uncertainty, especially since we aren't sure if we can do it.

After all this anticipation and preparation, this is an enormous disappointment. The kids are sad and confused. So are we. Our vision of ourselves as a family had grown to include such great international dimensions and we luxuriated in those dreams. We cry now. We grieve in some entitled way for a dream that is . . . I don't know what the word is . . . stuck?

And for me, the mom and wife, this is a bitter moment. I did, after all, quit my beloved job. Life is easier without it anyway, and if Scott continues to travel as much as he is now, which is part of the firm's long-term plan for him whether we live in Europe or here, a full-time job is nearly impossible to pull off. I quit my beloved job, though, and have struggled through that decision every day, even with Brussels waiting. I also set to work learning a new language and fell headlong in love with French and my image of myself as a bilingual citizen of the world.

What I struggle to handle in my racing mind is how I fit into this changed vision of my own life. I am back where I was when I was at home with kids in school all day, fairly miserable without the challenge of a professional life. I am back in a pre-dream existence, where my children had never imagined classmates from 65 nations and field trips to World War II battle sites and the French Alps. I am back in a house in a suburb where I never really feel I have fit.

The best word I can come up with tonight is stuck.

Butter and Such

2008-11-21T11:55:00.006-05:00

I wish I could dig out my "All About Me" essay from my first weeks of graduate school. In it I talked about geographic place and food and identity. The first page and half, if I remember correctly, was a list of sublime meals from different hometowns and destinations. (I had just read Tim O'Brien for the first time -- it must have been The Things They Carried -- and I thought listing was a very cool technique.)

Come to think of it, the article I published in an educational journal during my first year of teaching began with a food reference too. I compared the art of teaching to the art of making pasta as described by Marcella Hazan, maven of Italian cuisine and publisher of my favorite cookbooks. Really, the analogy held up under peer review!

So now I am the mommy of a family obsessed with food. We each have our own spin on that. I am fussy about ingredients and buy almost nothing pre-made. Yes, there was that two year affair with Trader Joe's frozen products while I was working full-time. But that is OVER. I am especially fussy about meat and haul myself all the way to Baltimore each week to get the right organic, ground in the store, no antibiotic, no animal byproducts kind of stuff. And it's yummier, too.

Eleanor loves food, too. She is especially passionate about desserts and has meals from holidays and trips and local urban foraging expeditions filed in her head. When she was in the third grade and writing a Cinderella story set in Paris, she talked me into lunch at our favorite French bistro in Baltimore, Petit Louis, for "research" and savored the soupe à l'oignon gratinée.

Ethan is picky . . . but not picky. Meatloaf, spaghetti, pork chops -- no. Pickled jellyfish, mussels, sushi -- oh, yes. While he does appreciate my crème brulée, I fail as a cook for him because I do not make authentic pad thai at home. His favorite food story about himself is that he ate the beef with red chili at Ollie's in New York that the Zagat guide said was "unsuitably spicy for children."

Scott is a lover of great food, too. Our courtship was marked by forays into Chicago neighborhoods in search of real food. I think we bought the Chicago Magazine cheap eats issue our last year of college and sought out many of their recommended holes-in-the-wall serving authentic and handmade Polish, Greek, Indian and Thai foods. As our budget has grown, we have come to love fine food and make it a priority in our nights out.

This is a long prelude to my favorite butter story, promised in a recent post.

When we were in Paris this summer, our daily habit was to eat an extravagant lunch out and dine simply in our apartment for the first and last meals of the day. Breakfast was croissant and pain au raisin. Dinner was salad, baguette, butter, and cheese. (And wine.)

One evening, exhausted from miles of walking, we sat at our table with our humble meal before us. We broke the baguette, appreciating its crackle. We tossed the oil and vinegar through the greens. The butter sat at the center. And as we all spread the golden stuff onto hunks of still-warm bread, Eleanor asked, "Is the butter better in Paris than it is at home? I think it may be." And Ethan said, "Maybe it's because the bread is better."

In these quiet family moments, our priorities shine through.

Mon Histoire Préférée: My First Post in French

2008-11-12T19:52:00.002-05:00

C’est une de mes histoires préférées. C’est vrai. Ce n’est pas très important maintenant. Mais cette histoire était importante à ce moment là.

Quand ma fille, Eleanor, avait deux ans, elle était très malade. Elle est restée à l’hôpital pendant trois semaines. Pendant le séjour à l’hôpital, Eleanor a commencé à adorer “Thomas the Tank Engine,” un livre sur les vies des trains de l’île de Sodor. Les trains étaient drôles et faisaient beaucoup d’erreurs ce qui créait beaucoup d’ennuis. Elle les aimait. Pour un cadeau, sa grand-mère et son grand-père lui ont donné des jouets de Thomas et Jacques, deux trains. Voici Thomas! Voici Jacques!

À l’hôpital et après, chez nous, elle apportait Thomas et Jacques partout. Elle les apportait sur la table. Elle les apportait dans les toilettes. Elle les apportait dans son lit pour dormir. Thomas et Jacques sont venus avec Eleanor chez le médecin chaque fois. Ils étaient ses amis quand sa vie était difficile.

Un matin, nous sommes allés à Target pour faire du shopping. Bien sûr, Eleanor a apporté Jacques et Thomas. Mon fils, Ethan, était un bébé, de deux ou trois mois peut-être. C’était difficile pour moi de me souvenir de tout avec les deux enfants. Nous avons fait du shopping et nous sommes partis de Target.

Quand nous sommes arrivés chez nous, Eleanor a découvert que Jacques était perdu. Horreur! Elle l’adorait! Elle était malade tout le temps et Jacques était nécessaire. Très nécessaire.

J’ai dit, “Eleanor, nous allons retourner à Target cet après-midi. D’abord, vous devez manger et dormir. Après la sieste, nous allons chercher Jacques.” Les enfants ont mangé et dormi. Moi? Je me suis inquiétée.

Après la sieste, nous sommes partis pour Target. J’ai demandé à chaque vendeur, “Est-ce vous avez trouvé le train de ma fille? Il est rouge. Il est très important.” Mais chaque vendeur a dit, “Non, madame. Je suis désolé.” Puis nous avons marché dans tout Target. Nous avons cherché et cherché Jacques. Nous ne l’avons pas trouvé.
Pauvre Jacques. Pauvre Eleanor. Pauvre maman!

J’étais fatiguée et triste. Eleanor adorait Jacques et elle avait besoin de Jacques. Nous sommes partis de Target et j’ai conduit. J’ai dit à Eleanor, “Chéri, maman n’a pas trouvé Jacques. Je suis désolée. Nous allons acheter un nouveau train pour toi demain. D’accord?” Mais elle était si courageuse pendant tout les mois difficile – à l’hôpital, chez nous, chez le médecin. Je voulais lui donner son propre Jacques.

A ce moment là, j’ai vu un chariot de Target près de ma voiture. J’étais sûre qu’il n’était pas le chariot que nous avons utilisé il y a cinq heures. C’était impossible! Mais j’ai vu sur le chariot rouge un petit objet rouge. Il ne pouvait pas être Jacques. Je ne sais pas pourquoi, mais j’ai arrêté la voiture. Je suis descendue de la voiture. J’ai regardé dans le chariot. Et voila, c’était Jacques.

Je suis retournée dans la voiture et j’ai donné Jacques à Eleanor. Elle a dit, “Je savais ce que nous allions trouver Jacques!”

J’ai pleuré parce que nous avons trouvé Jacques. J’ai pleuré parce qu’Eleanor toujours avait confiance en moi. Et j’ai pleuré parce que pendant beaucoup de mois de difficultés pour Eleanor, et, bien sûr, pour mon mari et moi, c’était un petit miracle.

Self-Discipline

2008-11-12T19:24:00.002-05:00

It has been, um, many weeks since I last blogged. Make that many months. And while I have a long list of topics, I have addressed not one. The sad truth is, my blog is now a perfect reflection of me and my terrible lack of self-discipline.

I don't have so little self-discipline that I can't achieve things. I was a successful enough student. I was a successful enough teacher. And I think (some days) that I am a successful enough mother. (Future topic: What is success?)

But I do have that perfect dose of self-discipline that gets the work done eventually, but only under a deadline. This blog -- it has no deadlines.

Evidence of my procrastination skills:

For all my bravado in that "This I Believe" piece, I have not yet sorted through one corner of the disastrous basement or even one small closet. (Future topic: Having 17 months to prepare for a move is a special kind of hell for a girl like me. )

For my last two French exams I didn't complete my written and online exercises until the night before the test. (Gasp.) Panic ensued, but did I learn my lesson? No. For the record, I did learn the French enough to pass the exams. This behavior falls under the "successful enough student" moniker; I can cram at the last minute, write a paper at the last minute, and do well enough.

Oh, did I mention that I have had only three French exams? That first one, with work done well ahead of time, flashcards made and reviewed daily, etcetera, was an abberation. (Future topic: Being an adult student, carrying the successful strategies of college and graduate school into middle age.)

I write the PTA newsletter for my kids' elementary school. I won't even talk about what time I usually start it on Sunday evenings . . .

Ahh, wouldn't it be nice to meander a bit farther in this gentle shower of self-loathing?

I watch my children tending toward this bad procrastination habit, along with others of mine. The girl hates to get up in the morning. The boy has a real obsessive-compulsive streak. And both love butter way too much. (Future topic: My favorite story about bread and butter. Setting: Paris, France.) What kind of hypocrisy would it be to criticize it heavily? How much, really, do I suffer from it? How important is it to save my kids this suffering?

Suffering is too heavy a word here. What I do is procrastinate and what I do is pay the price when the deadline looms. Would my ideal self do this? No. But my ideal self wouldn't have spent minutes deciding between the Irish and the French butters at Whole Foods Market this afternoon, either.

I am not my ideal self. There is both grief and liberation in saying that in my late thirties.

But I do know that I reach for my better self when I write in this space.

Les Études Français

2008-09-18T10:47:00.004-04:00

For the perpetual student in me, the best aspect of the move to Brussels is the chance to learn a new language. And when I say that, I mean a second language. While I spent several years in high school and college studying German, Spanish, and Swedish, I have never been fluent in anything other than English. (And sometimes my fluency in English fails me, too. I have high standards.)

So I commenced my French studies the day after school let out in June. My tutor, Erin, is one of my personal heroes. She is très patient and kind and encouraging of my halting, amateur French. And she taught me enough in eight weeks this summer to give me the confidence (read: foolishness) to sign up for French 201 at our local community college.

No, eight weeks of study with a tutor are not really enough to prepare one for the SECOND YEAR OF LANGUAGE STUDY CURRICULUM. Yes, I am yelling. But the truth is, the first semester would have been a boring review, the second semester didn't fit into my schedule, and French 201 is a good challenge.

Why? First, my brain is flexing in ways it has not for quite some time. If you are my age and you have been mothering for the past ten years, ask yourself when you last learned something completely new. For me it had been eons. And it is a blast. Second, it is a beautiful language and I love seeing and hearing how it unfolds. More on that later. Perhaps my best lesson, though, will come from learning to value the process and the practice rather than the grade. I say this now, at this moment, when I am a mere nine hours from my first exam (on the student side of the room) in many years. Bon chance!

Unemployed

2008-09-08T09:27:00.002-04:00

My friends who are, like me, unemployed by choice and charged with running the household and managing the kids' schedules, don't like it when I say I'm not working this year. "You are working, just not for pay," they say. Well, that is true, but the work I do now is the same work I did last year, except I don't do a full-time job on top of it. And I really just want to use the word "working"to describe paid employment because, in the vernacular, that's what we understand working to mean.

So I am not working, and that is a challenge for me. As I've said before, there was a wholeness to my daily life when I was teaching. And now, without the students and the literature and the colleagues and the institutional insanity of a large public high school, I feel a bit, well, broken. Just as I expected this melancholy this fall, with everyone else returning to school but me, I know too that this is temporary. I will work again when it works for the whole family.

A note on that: working for the whole family does not mean that my decision to work has to have no effect on the family. It sure did change everyone's lives, especially Scott's, and it will again, and that's okay. Not everyone has the partner I have, who is willing to bend an already crazy schedule of twelve hour workdays, an hour-long commute each way, and a heavy travel load into something accomodating of another's career aspirations. But I am a lucky woman -- I do have that man.

Anyhow, I guess I have just what I thought I'd have now that Eleanor and Ethan are back in school. I have a lot of time with the dog, which is mostly good. She definitely loves me the most now. I have time to have lunch with friends. I have time to read for pleasure without falling asleep, time to blog, time to get to some old projects. I have time to cook again, which is satisfying of that mother instinct. We eat fresh vegetables every night, dessert that's never from a box, and even homemade bread. Unfortunately, there is also time for obsessing about the tidiness of the house, car, yard. These domestic things, which I take some satisfaction from, are not worthy of that much of my time, but they pull so hard on my attention. Betty Friedan had it right -- the tasks of running a home expand to fill the time available. I did them all last year while working full-time, so why do they want to take so much more time now?

So I resolve each day to resist the errands and relegate them to Fridays alone. One morning of Target, Costco, and Borders is more than enough to sustain our suburban existence. I resolve to let the floor get (just a little bit) dirty. I resolve to blog, read, walk, lunch. I expected this tension to surface when the summer ran out and the school year commenced. It is, in that way, frustratingly comfortable.

What I did not expect this fall, though, was the urge to explain my unemployedness. And yikes, is it fierce. It happened several times in the last few days. On Thursday I had lunch at school with my English department colleagues. I met a new intern and immediately launched into the "moving to Belgium, husband constantly out of town to transition into European client work, have to travel to Belgium to find a house, find a doctor for Eleanor, etc." speech. (I fear that it may sound defensive, now that I put it to paper. Or screen. Whatever.) I repeated it to a former student that afternoon, my son's teacher on Friday, my 93-year-old great grandmother on Saturday night, and to countless neighbors at our annual block party just last night.

Frankly, I am disturbed by my need to explain. It is rooted, I am certain, in my desire to be a professional woman with an identity apart from the household's. (I love our family's identity -- nothing has brought me greater joy than my family. But I like to have my own slice of selfness, too.) It also comes from the shame of the socioeconomic privilege that affords me the chance to essentially work or not without affecting the family's bottom line too much. I suppose a little bit of me wants to emphasize, too, that I did not burn out or flunk out (or get booted out of) my noble profession. It was my choice, I want to say to the neighbors. And it maybe was not my first choice for this year, either.

But if I write more about this, my dear husband, who is in Cambridge right now, will call and say for the umpteenth time, "Maybe we shouldn't move to Brussels. Maybe we should stay here so you can work." And I will have to explain to this true gentleman, this amazing man who has picked me to love, that a year of the tension of time and explanation is a small investment toward a future of adventure.

Sleeping In Strategy

2008-08-15T14:38:00.003-04:00

Ethan has always been an early riser. And since Scott and I are both natural nightowls, we suffered under his nasty five-to-six a.m. awakenings.

Until now . . .

(This sounds like an infomercial script.)

The key to getting your kid to sleep in is to take him six time zones to the east, let him stay up until eleven o'clock each night and sleep to nine in the morning, and bring him home to four more weeks of summer vacation. Finally, we sleep in.

Next week: Undoing Six Weeks of Time Readjustment for the Start of School.

I Heart Blackberry

2008-06-29T18:11:00.008-04:00

It turns out that the World Blackberry is a terrific service, even if it means that hubby can call you eight times in one morning from Brussels while you are really wanting to declutter and organize the study. Why is a device that facilitates the interruption of such domestic bliss terrific? Because I got to hear the following:

1. "The grounds are even lovelier at St. John's than they were when we visited in January!"

While I am sure he did not use the word "lovelier", it's what he meant. And loveliness matters because in next week we will be traveling to Brussels with the kids for the first time. Their number one destination is St. John's. And frankly, the better it looks, the better the kids are bound to feel about moving there.

To tell the truth, I feel an enormous amount of stress about this trip. Its raison d'etre is to get the kids on board with the move. Part of the problem with this is that vacationing someplace -- staying in a fancy hotel, eating out three meals a day, having time with parents with no work responsibilities -- is not the same as living somewhere. It's not realistic, and I guess that worries me a bit in terms of the impression it will give. But the other side of that coin is that the first experience is likely to highlight the differences between current home and new home, and addressing those differences is something I expect to be challenging. And while I love that challenge for myself (see Packing Up and Moving On), they may be among the most important maternal challenges I shall see. So . . . if St. John's looks great, and if the kids say, "Oooh, what a nice playground, what a nice building, what a nice bench to sit on and read," their optimism will soar and so will mine.

Not they aren't already optimistic. When we told them in January that we may move to Brussels, they jumped up and down and began planning our trips from Brussels to Paris and London (first day), Italy and Spain (second day), and Egypt and Tanzania (third day). We'll eat great chocolate, they said, trained to love Neuhaus from dad's frequent European business trips. We'll learn French, they realized with enthusiasm. And when I came home from my exploratory trip to Brussels and told them that the national dish is moules et frites (mussels and frites), they were delighted. (The boy loves exotic seafood and the girl could live on potatoes. I didn't tell her the frites are cooked in horse fat.)

So I guess I don't want the trip to ruin the extant enthusiasm. Is that a tall order? I don't know.

2. "The Carrefour is more like Walmart than it is like Target."

Why did hubby waste time in Belgium checking out the local supermarche when, heaven knows, there were hours to be billed? Because he knows, as I do, that this is true:

The odd thing in making a big move is the knowledge that your life will be
composed of hundreds of small things that you will arrive at only by trial
and error, and that for all the strikes and seminars you attend, the real flavor
of life will be determined, shaped, by these things. . . . Where will your hair
be cut? What kind of coffee will you buy, and where?

This is from Adam Gopnik's Paris to the Moon, a terrific tale of the New Yorker author, his wife, and their son and their relocation from New York to Paris in 1995. Gopnik is a skilled writer and, as is obvious from his chapters, a keen observer of the intricacies of human behavior. His stories make important points about the differences between French and American culture, sometimes through the lens of international events, sometimes through the eyes of a pair of American parents raising kids in a foreign land.

And he says, so succinctly, what I know to be true. That moving to Brussels won't be all about moules et frites, handmade pralines from Chocolatier Mary, and weekend trips to Paris and Amsterdam. It will mostly, in the weight of time and effort, be about moving what we do -- sleeping, eating, cooking, learning, playing, working -- from here to there. So the Carrefour and its products will matter indeed.

3. "I love you."

This is critical. No explanation needed for this one, right?

Je t'aime.

On Technology: A Recovering Luddite's Perspective

2008-06-16T21:50:00.005-04:00

Okay, I admit it. I am completely, thoroughly, totally, one-hundred percent in love with technology.

Yep, that's me, the woman who celebrated National Turn Off the TV Week in 1998 by chucking the only television we owned onto the Cambridge curb. (Reduce, reuse, recycle -- it was gone by morning. I loved that about Cambridge . . .) \

Since the start of 2007 I have personally purchased a Blackberry, four iPods, a rocking docking station for said iPods, and 47 inch LCD television. The Blackberry is awesome; my emails are rarely very important, but honestly, it rocks to sit poolside and email the babysitter about Saturday night. The iPods are great because they have brought music back into our home. And watching sports and "Planet Earth" on the new TV is just plain gorgeous.

The most recent purchase is the pair of iPod Shuffles -- purple for the girl, silver for the boy -- in preparation for the kids' first transatlantic trip next month. While I am slightly disturbed to see my enfants walking around with headphones on, I do love that they love music. I love that Ethan sings along with no inhibition, butchering the lyrics to "You Can Call Me Al" without shame. And I am most tickled because this small investment already seems to give them something they need: little spaces of their own within the context of a family on the move. In the car or on the plane, each can tune the rest of us out, make a personal choice to listen to The Sound of Music soundtrack on repeat, and offend no one. Would I want them to tune us out at the dinner table or during a game of Monopoly? No. But their need for space and boundaries and autonomy is served well by the little iPod Shuffle. Score another point for technology.

Packing Up and Moving On

2008-06-12T08:19:00.001-04:00

Growing up in a small town in rural Minnesota, my sensitive nature often chafed against the understood norms of the place. Yes, small town life was gracious and predictable. People knew how they were supposed to behave and, usually, they did it. This meant that there was a strong sense of shared purpose that led to routines that were convenient and comforting. Every local business operated on credit, so I, at the age of ten, could ride my bike “uptown” and have a donut at The Swedish Inn and pick up a roll of masking tape and a new paintbrush for my dad, charging both to his account without a fuss. Nearly everyone went to church and, although there were five different churches in the town – one Methodist, one Catholic, and three Lutheran – this affiliation neatly divided our community of five thousand into smaller, more intimate groups.

My life there was safe, comfortable, slow, easy, and set against the charming backdrop of rural American farm life. But adolescence brought me questions. What if you are not religious? What if you choose not a necessary profession – teaching, doctoring, nursing, farming, making, selling, serving – and need to act or sculpt or research? What if you are not straight? What if you are not conservative? My young suspicions didn’t match my hometown.

So when it was time to apply to colleges, I mailed off essays and transcripts to Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and Washington. The resulting move to Chicago was transformative. And since, then, I haven’t stopped moving. Yes, my continuing journeys have been inefficient, costly, and emotionally challenging. But all things considered, they have taught me to believe in the value of packing up and moving on.

Implicit in this statement is that there is value in the packing up process, and yes, I do believe there is. My obsessive-compulsive nature loves the process of sorting and prioritizing, choosing between discarding and keeping. When I empty the linen closet to pack it, I sort through the quilts from my great grandmother, my aunts, my sister-in-law, and the ladies at Project Linus, who always send my daughter home from her frequent hospitalizations with a new quilt. And in the process of sorting I hold each quilt and ask, “Will it move on with me?” Some represent such deep family love and history that the question doesn’t even pause in my mind. But some have heavy memories attached to them. And somehow, putting those quilts in the “donations” pile lets me sort those memories into the past and gives me hope that they will bring needed warmth to someone else. This process cleanses my cluttered life and clarifies the purpose of my journey.

Important in the packing up stage is the time I do without my three tons of worldly possessions as they are en route to the new home. And I love this part. Sitting in an empty house, waiting for weeks for the furniture and dishes to arrive, I relearn those dual lessons of, “Boy, I love my seven-cup food processor!” and, “Hmmm, I can live without my seven-cup food processor.” When the truck does finally arrive, it’s like Christmas to unwrap every goblet and china dish, every book and framed photograph. Only it’s my stuff, the stuff I have gathered along the way, and it’s both exciting and familiar.

The lessons of living differently, in different places, are even greater than these material lessons. In each place I find a new way to live and learn important things about myself and my world. Drawn by the crisis in the alarmingly poor and violent neighborhoods of Chicago’s south side, I chose to make public education, not academia, my career. Moved by the rich and robust ongoing intellectual debate in Cambridge, I learned to articulate and refine my political point of view. Rocked by the shocking beauty of northern California, I grew to appreciate the role of nature in my life. And when, for the first time, I moved to the suburbs of Washington, I became at once an advocate of its social togetherness and a critic of its car-dependent sprawl and franchise restaurant ubiquity. At each stop I have gathered friends, ideas, recipes, memories, that are real pieces of my identity as a wife, mother, teacher, and friend.

So now I am moving again, this time away from beloved friends and school and neighborhood, to a new continent, a new language, and a new set of expectations. My dearest neighborhood friend wondered last week why, if I am so sad to go, I am going. “Is it what you really want?” she asked. And I could enthusiastically say that yes, I want to go, because I believe in the refreshing and reinvigorating power of packing up and moving on.

NOTE: My seniors wrote This I Believe statements for their final exam. This is mine. If you are unfamiliar with this idea, please link to thisibelieve.org to read about this project and listen to essays that have appeared on NPR shows.

The End, But Not the End, at the Beginning

2008-06-12T08:00:00.000-04:00

I teach high school. Or taught high school. Today is the penultimate day of classes, which means I am sitting in front of my 23 English 10 students who are writing, with great adolescent, seven-twenty-five-in-the-morning enthusiasm, their final essay exams. Because I am not returning to work next year, it is my penultimate day as a teacher. Next year I will be free from paid employment, dedicating my efforts to volunteering both here and at my kids' elementary school, learning French, and coordinating the family move to Brussels.

But the greatest lesson I have taken from this back-to-work experience is . . . what is the greatest lesson? That being a working mother left me perpetually exhausted? That I still love and know my children intimately in spite of our crazy juggling of schedules? That it may be healthier for us all for me to have a professional identity? All important, but I don't want to talk about those (yet) because I am so not ready for this blog to enter the mommy wars. Really. No, the lesson I take is that I, even when not employed, am a teacher. Even after the eight year hiatus to be mommy-to-babes-and-toddlers, the teacher part of me was in tact. I could still do it, and do it well, (at least most of the time), and do it with passion and energy and pleasure.

So I won't be employed for the next two years, at least. These years are better spent transitioning my family from American suburbs to American expat. But I will always be a teacher. Always. It's as essential to me as being a wife or a mom or a friend.