My Premiere French Haircut!

Getting my hair done in France requires the use of my translator, AKA my French hubby, who doesn't even know the French word for "layers" let alone "highlights." I'm going up end up with a purple mullet.

It's kind of cool that they separate the "processing"section from the cutting section. It's a good kind of segregation thereby keeping the fumes concentrated in one place. Score one for the French!

Update: No purple mullet! I love my new do and the women at Italo Coiffeur Visagiste in St. Germaine are great. Merci!

Embracing the "Blah"

Life is a lot about taking chances, but certain perceived risks, like walking up to a complete stranger and starting a conversation seem less scary here. It's like there is less to lose. No, it is BECAUSE there is less to lose. And by that I mean there is nothing to lose. Leaving all you know and what once was means a chance to start all over again. In essence it means a complete overhaul of what you knew versus what is NOW. And there is nothing more present than now.

I did this last weekend at a party. It was as though all of the strange insecurities that may have blighted me before vacated the atmosphere and I was left with the perfectness that comes from the pure honesty of what remains. What is that? Carelessness? Openness? An emptiness, a void, that lets the rest through? It happens. And when you are at your most vulnerable, you allow it to filter through the things that may have stopped you in the past.

So, there is none of the usual awkardness. I have met some remarkable people here this way and I plan to continue. The often uncomfortable rawness I feel is serving me in good ways by giving me access to a truthful part of me I haven't seen in a long time.

Am I finally letting go of Los Angeles and the expectations I had of that strange city of angels? Am I finally letting go of the person I thought I needed to BE there? Crap. Maybe I am. Maybe the awkwardness of moving here is not just the place but also my painful shift into the reality of who I really am without all of the subterfuge. It's the letting go again. This time, of my expectations.

One of the very same women I approached with no misgivings was the one who later told me that you cannot hold on to what you knew before you came here. She is an American like myself and she has been here for over a year. She told me that the best you can do is not to hold expectations, to go with the flow, to realize that nothing will be like you knew it and to, yes, let it go. The best preparation is to be unprepared and open to what comes. This was during a phone conversation about getting her crock pot to me because she's leaving and kindly wanted to pass it on. A crock pot! And then the passing on of a wisdom I was meant to hear from a person who knows. And by the way, this lovely woman is the kind of enviable Supermom who bakes lots of cookies and dresses all of her three beautiful young girls in matching outfits, every day! I think it's adorable, actually, but I'm lucky if I can find matching pajamas on any given night for my one and only. So, if she can give up her perceived expectations and go with the flow, there is hope for me.

I am grateful for her insight but the true lesson only comes with time and the actual physical release of the "blah." The feeling of utter blah and void and trepidation. The acceptance comes when you embrace the blah, live with it and like I said...finally...let. it. go.

I am not an ugly American!

So last Saturday I was in a "mood." Frankly, I’m often in a “mood” lately. I have heard about the semi-depression that can accompany the first couple of months after a move to a new country. I haven’t been immune to that, for sure. This is tough, people! In ways I never could have imagined before we left the security and familiarity of what was once (very recently) the place we called HOME. The reality is it's a little like landing on the moon. There is so much strangeness, newness, weirdness that takes a long time to get used to, if ever. When you vacation to anther country you relish the differences, the oddities of the locals can even seem quaint and it's easy to ignore the things that may rub us the wrong way or make us feel uncomfortable because it's all part of the "experience" of travel. But when you live in it, when you know you aren't going back home in a week or so, when you know it's a more permanent arrangement, it's much harder to wrap your head around the foreignness of another civilization. For better or for worse, France is not a service oriented culture. Last weekend we were at Castorama waiting and waiting to ask a clerk where to find a hook for E's swing set. A salesperson was helping someone else and they rarely say, "I'll be with you in a minute" or see if anyone else has a quick question like we had. Apparently this customer was interested in the intricacies of several drills which required many phone calls and trips to the computer. It was taking a long time. There was an old man waiting behind us. I saw another salesperson who had just finished with a customer so I went over to him and called JC over because I still don't know how to say "Where are the swing set hooks" in French (among many other things). While JC was making his way to us, the old guy scurried over (I didn't know he could move so fast) and proceeded to stand in front of me! He had somehow managed to squeeze himself into the little space between me and the salesperson. From what I've seen, this is typical of French behavior. It's happened to me many times. People will literally get in front of you in line and act oblivious when you point it out. So I was onto his game. I moved in front of him, gave him a LOOK and, like I was scolding an errant pet, said "NON!" and put my hand out to stop him from continuing his intrusion. I swear, it's like dog eat dog here in many respects. It's really a different mentality from what I'm familiar with. They don't pull their cars over when there's an ambulance or fire truck on the way to an emergency. And they park anywhere they damn well please. Let's just say the Los Angeles Parking Bureau would have a field day here. But they won't use the handicapped stall in the bathroom, even if there's a line. Such an odd dichotomy and it's all very hard to get used to. In the hypermarché, there's always a bottlenecking of carts because no one lets anyone through. And the cashiers have no problem making a line-full of people wait for ten minutes while they chat it up with a customer. Maybe it's because they're so comfortable, sitting in their chairs. Perhaps some would say I sound like an ugly American but it's more the reverse. Not to sound like a bitter berry but I have no illusions about the French mentality at this point. I tried to act decently, to be polite and follow the social norms I am used to, to say hello on occasion to a passerby, but I ended up losing my place in line, getting run over by seemingly oblivious people pushing enormous shopping carts and being ignored when I looked at someone. So, I have learned not to attempt to make eye contact at any time, to keep my head down and my senses sharp so as not to get trampled or cut in front of. I'm no Pollyanna (maybe I was, a long time ago) but I do believe in the decency of human kindness and the occasional smile or nod to a stranger.  I think part of what has been so confronting about living here is being cut off from all of that and having to deny my intrinsic nature in order to say, go grocery shopping. This is not to say I haven’t also met some pretty great French people. Hey, I married one! And, by default, this makes our little turnip French as well. She is a very lucky little girl to have dual citizenship and to reap the benefits of being a real part of the European Union. She'll be able to live and work in all of the countries represented by the EU. And being a bilingual person born in the States is, sadly, a rarity but obviously gives her an advantage.   For the record, I hate to make blanket statements about an entire culture because that’s just not fair and smells of bigotry. And the aforementioned is only my opinion, although I know I am not alone in my perceptions of the culture here. I am only pointing out the very different way in which the French seem to behave compared to what I perceive as the more open nature of Americans. And I lived in Los Angeles!

Empty Houses

There's something about an empty house that's really unlike anything else. Most of us don't see empty houses very often. Our houses or apartments are empty twice to us, when we arrive and when we leave. In between they are full of our things, our possessions, the clutter and accumulation of our lives. And we live amongst those things, forgetting that it was once just an empty set of rooms and echoes. An empty house sounds different than a full one. When you're in a house without things, the walls reverberate and the floors are louder. We hear our footsteps more and our voices boom against the naked walls.

The echoes also remain from memories and a life lived between those walls. When we leave a house these echoes are our own. An empty house reverberates with the past. When we said good-bye to our empty house we left behind the echoes of our daughter's newborn cries, the echo of her first word (dog) and the faintest little echo of her first steps, padding quietly and awkwardly across the wooden floor. We left behind the first "I love you's" shared between my husband and myself. We left behind the conversations of the expectations for our life together, the phone calls made to plan our wedding, the  calls to my best friend that lasted well into the night. We left behind the much louder echoes of arguments and bickering and sad confusion that a marriage can contain when faced with a frustrating, unfixable past and seemingly uncertain future. We left the echoes of laughter that often filled those rooms, of silly inside jokes that really wouldn't be funny to anyone else but could leave us in stitches. The tiny voices of babies and, later, the sound of running feet and the warmth of comraderie and affection, the quenched need of in-commonness of a group of new mothers and their children from my special mommy group. Those echoes are some of my fondest because they contained everything I needed at the time.

We left behind the warm echoes of friendship and family around the dinner table for Thanksgiving and Easter and the ring of the doorbell on Halloween.

We lost our beloved cat, Franny, in that house. Her place to rest her beleaguered, tumor-filled body (a soft pillow on the corner of the couch) is now just a memory. Really, all of it becomes just that, a memory, even if you don't leave. But when you lose the physicalness of it, the actual placement of those memories, it feels like you're leaving it even farther behind. All of the spaces must be conjured up in your mind, or through pictures. The photos we took in that house have become more like relics from the past than ever before. They have become all the more precious, little time-capsules of a place we will never see again.

And you can't help but wish to be there again sometimes. The ache is often unbearable. But change, as they say, is inevitable. Life soldiers on and moves happen and the process begins anew.

We have been in France for over a month and a half. Most of this time has been spent in an empty house. The echoes of our footsteps have been our own but the others are not. I know a little bit about the people who were here before us. Ex-pats like ourselves but not from the States. Belgium, I think. I know it was a family with two little girls. I wonder what they left behind, what it meant for them to leave here, if they were happy to go or if circumstances beyond their control forced them to leave. They left their echoes here, regardless. I imagine it was pretty noisy here with two little ones running around. There are some traces of them; faint chalk marks on the stones beside the kitchen door, the remnants of a princess sticker on one of the windows. There isn't much else, since even the light fixtures where taken and the patches on the walls from pictures have been covered and painted over. They left it as we first saw it, an empty house with only their echoes in their wake.

As with many moves to other countries you have to make the choice to live in your own empty house for several weeks or live in your new empty house for that period, because it takes a long time for your furniture and the rest of your belongings to travel by cargo ship. We chose the latter because our daughter kept getting upset and crying whenever we, say, sold a television. We felt like we wanted to keep things as normal as we could for as long as possible while we were still in Los Angeles. We figured everything else at our next place would be new too, so it wouldn't be as weird for her and for us. In retrospect I'm not sure I would make the same choice. It may have been best to rip off the band-aid all at once and not parcel out the strangeness and the moving pains so much.

But because we made that choice, we lived here in an empty house for five weeks. For five long weeks we lived in the emptiness and with the echoes of someone else's past. For sure, there is a peacefulness that comes with a very minimal lifestyle. I came to enjoy the uncluttered, unfilled rooms, the ease of sweeping and cleaning an empty floor, the calmness and stillness that can eminate from empty rooms, despite who lived there before us. What was unsettling was it didn't feel like it was ours yet. When you leave the moorings of a house and the things in it you leave behind something of yourself. We all have an attachment to these things that, for right or wrong, we associate as extensions of ourselves, part and parcel of what defines us. So what was on that boat, moving ever closer to us, was a physical manifestation of our lives, our past lives to be sure, but part of who we still are and will remain. To know it's all coming, to realize you will soon be faced with unpacking things what once lived there and now must live here, to know you will open boxes that represent part of a life that no longer exists, in a different country, with a different language, a different soul...well, I realized it wasn't something I was looking forward to. The logistics have been hard. We had more places for things back then. We had created an order for this chaos, because so much of the things we have came with time. When it all comes at once and you must assimilate it all to a new environment, that's the tricky part. And you realize very quickly just how much utter crap you have. I mentioned before that I am a pack rat of sorts. I consider myself a bit of a reformed packrat because I've gotten a lot better at getting rid of stuff and not holding on to so much. I'm learning. But being confronted with so many THINGS all at once gives me pause and makes me want to get even better at separating my need to have so many things to define me. In other words, I can learn to let go.

Moving is nothing if it's not a lesson in letting go. Of our pasts, the former pattern of our lives, the safety of our old routine, familiar friendships, a beloved neighborhood we called our own and the network of support we fostered there. That the objects and artifacts once important to us now become a burden seems to be just another part of the courage it takes to move.

My familiarity with our empty house has given me a better appreciation for the stillness that comes with something so devoid of the things we often associate with who we are. The truth is those things do not define us. They do however sometimes anchor us to a past that, for better or worse, is ours. I'm glad to have a couch to sit on, to have the furniture I so lovingly selected for my daughters room, to have our old picture frames and special paintings we've collected through the years. I'm truly glad to have these things to hold onto and pass down to my daughter someday. But I realize now how much I need to get rid of as well. And there is nothing like a move that forces you to think about those things.

Our once empty house no longer echoes when we talk, our footsteps don't sound as loud. Our past has finally caught up with us and it came via a large cargo ship, traveling slowly through the Atlantic.

Now this house will be full of new noises, new memories will be made here, new milestones achieved, more tears and laughter will fill these once empty rooms. And when we leave here, and I know we will one day leave, we will take our things with us and the house will be empty once again. But this time, when we see the empty rooms, they will be filled with our memories, our echoes of the past. A new family will move here and find some traces of the life we left behind.

And then we'll go on to a new empty house, full of its own strange echoes, and start it all again.

Blech!

Yes, the French DO have a sense of humor. But does that mean I have to eat it?!

My Lucky Day

FOUND IT!!!!

In Carrefour, another mega monstrosity of shopping mayhem, in the American section of the International food aisle...there is was. All 6 ounces of it. For roughly 8 bucks. I bought 3. That's about 25 dollars for 24 ounces. Holy merde! It's worth it.

Now I must divvy it out until I can get my hands on more of this precious crack, I mean Coffee Mate.

I also scored some Marshmallow Fluff so I can expose my daughter to one of the finer delicacies of American cuisine, a Fluff n' Nutter sandwich.

I want my Coffee Mate!!

One month ago yesterday, we landed in Paris, lock stock and 1 tired toddler, 3 crates of confused animals, 6 huge suitcases, a car seat and an awful lot of carry ons.

A month ago? Seems like a year! Funny, I don't think you can ever really prepare yourself for a move like this. You do the things you need to do and you keep checking them off your ever expanding list and that gets you through until...a month later and suddenly it hits you. This is no vacation. It's REAL. You live in FRANCE. And there is no going back.

Over the weekend we were making yet another sojourn to the land of giant stores (hey, just like home!) and our weekly trek to Ikea (the grand-daddy of time-sucks). We don't have a car (sold 'em) so we have to rent the biggest car we can get from the little rental car place up the street. It's a Ford station wagon. Not really so big by American standards but the largest one available here. Since we had to get rid of (give away) all of our appliances and lamps, we needed to replace them, STAT. Plus we have a big space to decorate in our kitchen area and we don't have any furniture for that, which is all coming in our big shipment on June 15 (that's another post entirely).

So, after spending waaaaaaay too much time (and $$) at Ikea, we had very little time to get the rest of the stuff we needed. And our little turnip, Elena, was getting grumpy and tired, which always makes shopping a bit more difficult. Scratch that, it makes it nearly impossible. So after a quick stop to Castorama (France's answer to Home Depot) I had a half an hour to dash into the big, scary hypermarket so we could run back and return the rental car before it turned into a pumpkin. E was sleeping so I took my first solo shopping trip in France. It didn't go well. I think I found like 3 things on my list, just barely. Granted it's an ENORMOUS store and would be hard to navigate, even if it was in the states. But I couldn't read the helpful signs above the aisles so I was really just winging it.

Many French stores have a small International section where you can get things like tortillas, salsas and soy sauce and Suzi Wan Puree de Piments (chili paste). You can also get traditional American faire like an exotic jar of PEANUT BUTTER. The last time we were there, I thought I'd spotted a jar of salad dressing, like Miracle Whip (hey, I'm from the South, we love our Miracle Whip). For some reason, I didn't grab it, so I was hoping to find it again. No such luck. And I just ran out of my favorite coffee condiment, Coffee Mate so I was hoping against hope to find that there, too. No go. And I have tried and tried to find a god damn cracker that E likes here. She loves Cheez-Its, Goldfish Crackers and the perennial fave, Pirate's Booty, but there is nothing here even remotely like any of them. I even Googled Cheez-Its and checked to see if there were any around here and it said something like, "Ha ha! No way, you stoopide American!" but I can't help but keep looking. I also wanted to get JC an ice-cream cake for our 5th wedding anniversary, which happened to be that day. JC loves ice cream cakes. I was so overwhelmed and pressed for time, I grabbed the only thing I could find: a Dora the Explorer cake. How romantic. It turns out it wasn't even ice cream. Then why was it in the freezer section!?! Or, more to the point, I need to learn to read.

And then, it happened. The moment I had been waiting for, the moment I knew would come eventually. I realized, without a shadow of a doubt, that I was very, very far away from home. It took everything I could do to keep from losing it then and there. The headlines would read, "Crazy American Woman has Nervous Breakdown in Store, Screaming 'I Just Want Coffee Mate and Cheez-Its!'"

I made it through the check-out, which was awkward at best and got back to the car, my sweet daughter sleeping peacefully in her carseat. And I thought, what have I done to you? What kind of mother do you have who can't find you the snacks you like, who can't even find her way around a freaking grocery store? I love to cook and I'm one of those weirdos who also likes to go grocery shopping. E and I spent many happy hours going up and down the aisles at my favorite Vons when she was a baby. She enjoyed being ogled by the sweet old ladies and I loved having her there, close in the cart, and taking much longer than needed to puruse the produce. It's harder to do that now of course, or it was, before we moved. But those will be some of my favorite memories of her babyhood. It was hard to think it would never be quite the same again and not just because she's older, but because we don't live in LA anymore.

So I had a big fat cry in the car ride back. Men are funny when a woman cries. JC kept asking me what was wrong and looked a little terrified. I didn't want to tell him or try to explain. I just wanted my Miracle Whip and Coffee Mate and Cheez-Its for my daughter and to not feel like my legs where sawed off, and not to feel so helpless, so unlike the powerful mommy, wife, woman I knew I used to be.

I don't think you can really digest the wholeness of a move like this. The entirety of it is possibly too beyond our grasp to truly understand or "process." That's a corny word but it kind of works here. So, what happens is you hold on to/freak out about the smaller things as a way to access what is really happening, meaning I've left my friends, my family, my mommy group, my acting life, my past life and my country and I'm here in this strange new world where I barely speak the language. I'm no therapist but that's my take on it. Like I said, I was anticipating the moment it would all hit me. I just never knew it would be over a jar of Miracle Whip.

Happy Anniversary!