Here’s to your health

For the past several years, I have been reading my way through the Bible from cover to cover. In December, I finally reached Revelation. Do you know which word is generally associated with Revelation?

Apocalypse. 

And that brings me to our most recent voyage. If you’ve read any of my posts over the past decade, you will know that travel and I have a very intense love/hate relationship, i.e. I love visiting new places, but I hate getting there. Disaster seems to strike every time I venture beyond my front door, yet I keep on travelling. Why? Because as soon as it’s over, I forget the bad part and retain the good ... until the next voyage-related calamity, when it’s too late to back out.

Anyway, 2021 being what it was, I probably could have guessed it would come to an unpleasant climax. Mad optimism, however, drove us to buy tickets to visit my parents in the US for Christmas, seeing as how the last time we were able to do that was in blithely ignorant 2019. 

So we bought tickets. Or, more accurately, my husband bought tickets; my travel anxiety is such that the mere thought of visiting kayak.com triples my heart rate. Anyway. We acquired tickets. And a rental car. And a taxi. And I printed out my famous, excruciatingly-detailed packing list in 9-point font. And that was that.

The day before our departure, everyone took the requisite Covid test at our least-favorite neighborhood pharmacy, where every visit means standing in line to register indoors, then standing in line again to take the test outdoors, while certain children—who shall remain nameless—run, screaming, up and down the sidewalk and/or blow raspberries against the storefront windows and/or activate (and re-activate. And re-activate. And re-activate) the pharmacy’s automatic doors. 

At least we all tested negative.

The next day, we arrived at the airport FOUR HOURS EARLY, which is what one must do now in the Pangolin Era. It went as well as could be hoped for us; we managed to actually board our plane, which was a definite improvement over our last voyage, and 12 hours or so later we landed in Los Angeles, where we promptly headed to our usual mediocre-yet-reliable airport hotel. For dinner, we had the option of either Taco Bell, where I had not set foot since age 17, or Subway, which we have in France. So we chose Taco Bell for its “exoticism.” But this was no ordinary Taco Bell; this was Pandemic Taco Bell, where the order counter is behind a wall of cellophane and the seating area is roped off with crime scene tape. Come to think of it, that might actually have been a crime scene; LA is dangerous.

The next day, we picked up our rental car in a singularly bizarre location (inside the lobby of a nearby Marriott? Why?). And off we went, despite the fact that my husband felt a bit weird. “Jet lag,” I assured him (*queue ominous music*). We didn’t want to go directly to San Diego, as that would have been too easy, so we stopped at Venice Beach. It was sunny. We took photos. We strolled up and down the sidewalk, trying to sufficiently appreciate the tackiness of the excessively-colorful commerces selling everything from healing crystals to 12-flavor corndogs to underwear with saucy quips splashed across the derrière. We saw, among other novelties, a bare-breasted woman on roller skates; we bought lunch from a dude with what looked like a golf ball in his left eye socket; our son attacked some seagulls with a giant Snoopy glow stick that he found outside the public toilets; and everyone (but me) got covered in sand and seawater. Then we climbed into the car and drove straight into LA Friday afternoon traffic, thus taking five hours to reach my parents’ house instead of three. 

Maybe next time we’ll skip Venice Beach.

Oh, but then we’d miss out on this.

The actual visit was great. We celebrated Christmas as only the Holts can; we hiked all over the place, went shopping, visited friends, went to church, sang carols, lit a whole lot of candles, drank many gin & tonics, ate a ton of Mexican food (which is always my #2 reason to visit home anyway) and agreed once again that there’s no one quite like Paul Simon. Check it out:

Oh yeah, and we all caught Covid-19. 

Turns out my husband felt under the weather because he quite simply had been infected with Omicron. Oops. “But wait!” I can hear you saying. “You said everyone tested negative!” Indeed, we did test negative. But that was only because my husband had caught the virus mere hours before getting tested. He caught it at his company’s Christmas luncheon, and we know this because we later found out that EVERYONE who attended it also caught the virus. They actually had to close and disinfect the entire office. 

But hey, on the upside, our symptoms were mild. In fact, I didn’t even know I had it until I took a home test the day before our scheduled return date “just to be sure” and it came up positive: Two bright blue lines appeared with the same speed and certitude as a pregnancy test taken when you’re already three months along. 

The folks at Air France, to their credit, were very understanding. We changed our dates, extended our car rental, emailed a few folks and added four days to our vacation. After that, I took another test. STILL POSITIVE. My husband couldn’t take any more time off from work, and since HE was negative, he and our son headed back to France while I remained with our daughter at my parents’ home for another three days (which was fun, don’t get me wrong). Ultimately, my immune system dispensed of the accursed virus and we too were able to board a flight back to Paris. Whew!

So that was the 2021 season finale. Shall we call it “challenging” for lack of a non-four-letter synonym? It was challenging. But what is it we’re supposed to always say about challenges? That they conceal opportunities! And sometimes, they conceal said opportunities so well that they are completely undetectable! Actually, one opportunity made itself abundantly clear throughout this particular challenge: wine. More, more wine.

It’s 5 o’clock somewhere.

And that, as they say, is all she wrote. Until next time!

The waiting game

 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of time lately. For instance, it’s March. One year ago, as France entered its first major nationwide lockdown, I remember muttering something to myself like, “Beware the Ides of March indeed!” And behold—here we are again. That was the fastest 100 years ever. 

So much about how I personally have experienced these past 12 months has revolved around time—facing time, grappling with time, hating time, accepting time—that I feel it warrants a closer look. Because what do I have on my hands for once? Time.

First of all, time and I are not pals; I am chronically late—or was, when I used to have things to be late for. Ever seeking to rectify this, yet knowing that I probably can’t, the very thought of having to be somewhere for something at a given hour and no later (school, for example, or any form of public transportation) invariably plunges me into a state of stress that less eccentric people reserve for auditions or blind dates.

But time, like so many other things, has been turned on its head in the Covid Era. Rather than chasing after time, wishing we had more of it, time has now become the prison guard smiling cruelly at us as we ask how long our sentence is. As the pandemic has evolved, my temporal concerns have evolved alongside it. What began as “How long will this last?,” “When will masks be available?,” and “When IN GOD’S NAME will my children’s activity books show up?” became “When can we go back to real classes?,” “When can we fly to the US again?,” and “When can we get vaccinated?” Now, one year later, the questions have taken on a certain resignation; optimistic whens have been replaced by melancholy wills: “Will this ever end?,” “Will we ever get our lives back?,” or to quote Dave Matthews, “Will it [ever] be the same again?” But regardless of the question, time’s unsympathetic response remains ever the same: I. Don’t. Know. *snicker*

I’ve often joked that Covid has been a spiritual exercise unlike any other. The noble ideals of being present in the moment, of finding small pleasures in the everyday, and of living life as it comes have all become almost required learning if one is to survive the waves of cancelled plans, thwarted goals, and absolute powerlessness that this past year has brought. For a society in which the virtue of patience is as antiquated as a brass bedwarmer, being forced to wait for absolutely everything—INDEFINITELY—has been excruciating.

To stem the frustration, I’ve learned to simply stop planning to have or see or do anything outside my immediate reach. I suppose a certain freedom lies therein; for those of us who tend to be on the anxious side, not having to think about the future means not having to worry about it. But it’s also a way of life that seems to be perpetually on hold. While we watch and wait, the world continues to spin. The seasons change. Birthdays and anniversaries come and go. We are both in reality and weirdly outside of it. 

All of us humans lead dual lives. I know from experience that the inner, contemplative life can absolutely benefit from the spiritual lessons of lockdown and social distancing. But even an introvert such as myself can see that the outer life—the one that has been wholly sacrificed this past year—is quite simply indispensable to our well-being. Activities, ceremonies, traditions. School, office, church. Restaurants, theaters, museums. Dance lessons, Boy Scouts, play dates. Brunches, after-work drinks, dinner parties … all of these things matter. They aren’t banal. They aren’t expendable. They are part of what makes us human. Without them, we’re all a bit diminished. 

For some reason, I have always hated the saying “this won’t last forever.” I find it to be both condescending and oddly bleak. But in the age of Covid-19, it suddenly doesn’t feel so depressing anymore. Probably because it’s better than “I don’t know.” I mean, at least it recognizes the existence of an end point, even if it doesn’t specify where the end point lies. All jokes aside, though, I am hopeful. Truly. This won’t last forever. We will be vaccinated sooner or later. The masks will come off one day. And in the meantime, we just have to continue to seek the joy residing within our own little worlds, to do our best to keep holding on, to remember that the time we have is borrowed—and that no one is preventing us from dancing.

Dave Matthews: “Shadows on the Wall”

(aka “Singing from the Windows”)

When the war is over 
and we go back to everyday, everyday 
will it be the same again 
when you've been turned inside out and outside in? 

Singing from the windows 
shadow on the wall, the way they dance 
not much of nothing 
and look at this fire burning bright 

Look at how the children play 
none of us know what's to come tomorrow 
but I'm not going out today 
so dance with me like the time we've got is borrowed 

Singing from the windows 
sirens in the dark, where are you going? 
pretend that it's nothing 
but look at this fire burning wild 

Well this is how we keep holding on 
every day, all day long 
but sometimes things just fall apart 
no matter how you try, they won't stop 

Singing from the windows 
something outside and I don't know

When the storm is over 
and picking up the pieces of everyday 
memories in picture frames 
trying to put the inside out and the outside in

 
Singing from the windows 
walking down the hall, nowhere to go 
(it'd) be good to see you, but 
suppose when it's all said and done 

This is how we keep holding on 
all the days, all day long 
but sometimes things just fall apart 
no matter how we try, they can't stop 

Singing from the windows 
voices outside and no one knows 
singing from the windows 
we'll get going again 

When the war is over

Gone viral: part II

Welcome to part II of my lockdown diaries. Part I is available here. To set the tone, let us conjugate the expression être confiné (to be on lockdown):

Je suis confiné(e) : I am on lockdown 
Tu es confiné(e) : You are on lockdown
Il/Elle est confiné(e) : He/She is on lockdown
Nous sommes confiné(e)s : We are on lockdown
Vous êtes confiné(e)s : You are on lockdown
Ils/Elles sont confiné(e)s : They are on lockdown

AND IT MAY LAST FOREVERRRRRRR.

March 30
With the entire country being ordered to #RestezChezVous, work has been a tad slooow for the past few weeks. But that does not stop me from ordering 250 euros’ worth of clothing from stores that are naturally closed due to the epidemic and won’t be able to deliver a damn thing until June. My husband, who loves statistics, really loves the one about how men still do most of the earning while women still do most of the spending, but what he doesn’t realize is that in my world, e-shopping is a highly effective form of self-medication with calming powers akin to those of Hatha yoga or, say, hiding in the garage with a shot glass and a bottle of triple sec. Buying stuff has always done great good to my nerves, and this is ESPECIALLY true when they have been frayed into oblivion by these very loud, very needy little creatures we live with who, the way things are going, may never go back to school again, ever.

March 31
One of the very first cultural lessons I was taught about the French, even before I first arrived in Paris waaaay back in 1999, was that direct eye contact with total strangers is a big no-no. Smiling while engaging in wanton eye contact is even worse. Far too forward. Far too direct. Far too intimate. But over time this has, at least in my experience, relaxed somewhat. A smile and a bonjour, when directed at the right passer-by, may be returned—without the recipient taking you for a wacko, a nympho, or a tourist. And as lockdown drags on, I find myself searching the face of everyone with whom I cross paths, hoping to find a kindred sparkle in their eye and perhaps even a little smile of solidarity. Alas, people are so freaked out by the risk of contagion that not only do they avoid eye contact at all costs, but they CROSS THE STREET when I come within 10 meters of them. I know it isn’t personal, but it still feels undeservedly cruel.

April 1
I’m out on another mind-clearing run, feeling more unnerved than ever by the deserted park avenues and grassy esplanades that in a parallel universe would have been brimming with families, teenagers playing soccer, and sweet elderly couples out for an evening stroll. But the voices and laughter are gone now, and in their place is an eerie silence that hangs heavy in the air, making it somehow harder to breathe. I think of an article a friend of mine recently posted on Facebook entitled “That Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief,” and  before I can stop myself, tears are sliding down my cheeks.

I want to sit down and weep. Weep for this town, for this country, for this world. To surrender just for a moment to the fear I feel for my brother, working on the front lines of this horror show in the emergency room of a New York City hospital, or for my siblings-in-law who are both physicians just south of Paris, or for my parents and so many other people I love who are “over 65” and live halfway around the world. For ourselves, too, and the uncertainty that has replaced the familiar and the safe. But I can’t allow myself to fall apart; not now, not ever. So instead I run faster, wondering how many people are hanging by a thread, doing their best to smile when what they really want to do is scream.

April 2
It’s Thursday. Thursday is D-Day for food shopping. We’ve been told again and again to avoid the grocery store, but we gotta eat, especially with all four of us here all day, every day. So online shopping it is—along with the entire Paris region, bien sûr. Result: in addition to the physical lines on the streets, there are now virtual lines just to access the largest online grocery stores. Plus, no sooner do you manage to enter these websites than you realize with dismay that the earliest you can be delivered (if you can be delivered at all) is in 10 days. Hmm. Pigeons are edible; shall we pursue that?

Never being one to give up, I ultimately find a trick that works: go to chronodrive.fr, open a browser window, and leave it open for 48 hours, at which point some algorithm or other must take pity on you because around 3:30 p.m., a magical free spot appears for pick-up the following day. Dude, I’ll take it. Actually, virtual grocery shopping in itself is kind of fun. What is not fun is when you choose a time slot, only to be informed that half your cart is now out of stock. Each week has its own “out of stock” theme. After the Great Toilet Paper Famine of mid-March, now the country is out of flour. No flour anywhere. Not in the stores. Not on the internet. Nowhere. No yeast, either. What in God’s name are people doing? Trying to bake themselves a time machine? IT WON’T WORK.

April 3
My son’s teacher sends a group email wishing us all good luck for the upcoming holidays. What? Oh riiiiight, tomorrow is the start of spring vacation! Two weeks of enjoying an all-inclusive resort in Majorca hanging out right here in the living room. She adds that she’s planning to put together a children’s Coronavirus recipe book filled with the delicious cakes and whatnot that her little students have surely been concocting with their newly-unemployed parents during lockdown. Two thoughts come immediately to my mind: 1. As a communication professional, believe me when I say that “The Children’s Coronavirus Cookbook” is not a well-thought-out title. 2. “The Flour-Free, Yeast-Free Children’s Coronavirus Cookbook” is infinitely worse.

April 4
Since the only thing I seem to have any control over these days is the cleanliness of our home, I have taken to somewhat obsessive-compulsive vacuuming. In a moment of stupendous foresight, we invested in a handheld Dyson a few months back and it has since become, perhaps not my best friend—that title is reserved for the corkscrew—but at the very least my close friend. However, today I am temporarily out of things to clean, so I decide to tidy up my travel laptop, which my husband says is woefully low on available disk space. I can’t even install the latest upgrade, Windows 10 version “1903” (because nothing makes sense anymore).

April 5
Seeking to free up my hard drive, I delete a bunch of stuff. I get a little overzealous and end up uninstalling Microsoft Office 2010, which is surprisingly easy to do, actually. Only now I can’t reinstall it because the license belongs to my husband’s former boss. All the little blue and white Word document file icons on my desktop transform into “blank page” icons.

I AM AN IDIOT.

April 6
I find Office 2016 selling for €20 on Amazon. Sounds shady, but the reviews look legit. I download it, install it, and it works. The little blank pages become comforting “W” icons once more.

I AM A GENIUS.

To be continued!

Gone viral: part I

I’ll probably never cough again without thinking about this period in time, when Covid-19 brought normal life to a grinding halt and we were all ordered to #StayAtHome until further notice. France has been under lockdown since mid-March, with all comings and goings requiring paperwork, ID, and a properly-founded explanation. School is out. Everything’s closed. Work is forcément from home (SEE? NOT SO EASY, IS IT?). This new social experiment, which consists in forcing families to spend roughly every second of every minute of every hour of every day together, has me vacillating between “I think this obligatory bonding time is doing us some real good!” and “So this is what a mental breakdown actually feels like.”

Here are a few anecdotes from the past few weeks. A growing number of you may relate:

March 12
President Macron addresses the nation and for once, we as a family gather around the television to listen together. I know what’s coming. I know he’s going to say it. And then he does: out of an abundance of caution, all schools nation-wide will close Monday morning and remain so until further notice. “Well,” I say to myself, “it’ll be like any other school holiday. I’ll lose 50% of my work productivity, but it’ll be OK.”

March 16
It’s Monday morning and my inbox is crammed with messages. My three-year-old daughter has a long list of projects to make and online resources to discover. My six-year-old son has a 10-page chart of lessons to learn, exercises to complete, links to visit, experiments to conduct, songs to learn, and poetry to memorize. The kids’ English school has also sent me the week’s curriculum for both classes. My husband has redirected all his calls to our home and has been Skyping with his boss for the past two hours. I start to wonder how viable any of this is.

March 17
Time to give this home schooling thing a whirl. I gather the mountain of paperwork and supplies we need, and the kids and I sit cross-legged in a pool of sunlight on the floor of my son’s room. I explain to each child what his and her respective activity is, and they go to it. My daughter intently sticks her little magnetic numbers onto the black board I am suddenly so glad we bought years ago, while my son unconsciously bites his upper lip as he focuses on his math exercises. I look at them working away and for a split-second think, “God, maybe I can do this.”

The rest of the week is not quite so easy, though. I realize after much trial and error that the children both need my undivided attention while doing their school work because otherwise they get frustrated, or space out, or squabble, or decide they’re too tired despite having slept for 12 hours straight. So the problem then becomes how to occupy child A while teaching child B. Both of them would happily spend every free second glued to a screen of any size or shape, but we can’t do that, now, can we? Wait … can we? Do rules still exist?

March 21
The first lockdown weekend arrives and it feels almost normal. We engage in our usual traditions of jogging, which is still allowed, and grocery shopping, which is also still allowed. Granted, grocery shopping in an actual physical store has morphed into an extreme sport in which one races about with a radioactive shopping cart, literally risking life and limb for things as trivial as pasta and toilet paper. So I do what any sane person would: I send my husband out to sacrifice himself for the family. He returns a few hours later, triumphant, and I ask how the store vibes were. “Post-Apocalyptic,” he says.

March 23
We survive the weekend and begin a new week. After nine solid days together, everyone is feeling a little cabin feverish—in addition to feeling actually feverish: my son is running a temperature, I have a nagging dry cough, and my daughter has a runny nose. How we managed to get sick while stuck at home all day is a mystery, but none of our symptoms seems especially serious and in my case nothing a glass of wine (or four) won’t fix. My husband informs me that several recent studies are reporting a jump in alcohol consumption since the start of lockdown. Funny he should mention it, since I was about to suggest we move cocktail hour up to 3 p.m.

March 24
Back when life was normal, I used to enjoy jogging for purely physical reasons. But lately, I have come to depend on it not just for physical health but for mental health as it’s literally the only moment of the entire day wherein I am alone. I have always been a loner. And by “loner” I mean someone who needs time alone each day just in order to remain sane. That is a highly Cancerian trait, by the way: rapid social exhaustion—I still think I would have made a fantastic hermit. But thanks to our pal Corona, the only way I can find any quiet time these days is by locking myself in the bathroom or by going for a jog. Unfortunately, Corona has also managed to complicate that, since jogging—jogging!—is suddenly the object of controversy. I’ll sum it up in a conversation that is only somewhat fictional:

• Non-jogger: you joggers are selfish jerks, spreading your germs without a care in the world. I bet you just learned to jog this week anyway, because it gives you an excuse to go outside and INFECT EVERYBODY WITH YOUR BREATHING AND YOUR SWEAT DROPS AND YOUR GROSS, GROSS SHOES.

• Jogger: but you’re cool with my going grocery shopping while breathing and wearing shoes IN ADDITION to touching products AND exposing myself to other people’s germs?

• Non-jogger: you’re still a selfish jerk.

• Jogger: and you are being a judgmental asshat more Catholic than the Pope! Jogging is not only legal but also the only thing standing between me and outright insanity so BACK OFF.

March 25
I realize something: my children’s behavior is actually better than it has been in a long time. Usually, Wednesdays fall somewhere between “crappy” and “horrendous,” but this Wednesday everyone is in good spirits and I wrangle the kids into bed without anybody shouting, swearing, or sobbing, which is a straight-up miracle. I give my son a last squeeze before turning out the light and he asks quietly, “Mom, why was my friend’s birthday party cancelled?” “Because everything’s been cancelled, sweetie,” I answer. “Remember all the stuff we used to do, and how we never really stopped to think about how cool it was that we could do it?” “You’re right, Mom,” he says. “We should have been more grateful.” 
See? Something new is happening here.

March 26
I receive a fresh mountain of homework to print out for the kids. This proves to be the final blow to our printer, which gives up the ghost once and for all and decides to turn itself off for good. I have always disliked this printer. It and I have never seen eye to eye, and this latest betrayal in the midst of WAR is just typical. Well never mind. I will order a new, far superior one, and WE’LL SEE WHO’S LAUGHING THEN!!!

March 27
The French government announces that lockdown will be extended through mid-April. Welp, there goes Easter with the grandparents in the South of France. This will be the first time that we spend Easter here at home, which means the egg hunt now falls squarely in my lap. Maybe that’s a good thing. Time to do it American-style. I race to Amazon, which thankfully is still up and running, and order 48 plastic eggs and two baskets. This will be fun. Plus, I WON’T HAVE TO EAT GREAT GRANDMA’S LAMB! So help me, I hate the very idea of eating lamb. It’s barbaric. You know it is. I don’t understand the tradition, especially from a Christian perspective. “Christ is the lamb of God, so we should go massacre an actual lamb and serve it with flageolets”? Seems arbitrary. And mean. 

March 28
Our washing machine starts to make strange noises. I wonder what exactly the protocol is when one’s appliance breaks down in the middle of a national quarantine and very quickly decide that that’s one thing I really don’t want to learn more about. I add “washing machine” to my prayer list.

March 29
I’ve been having strange dreams that leave me even more disoriented upon awakening than I usually am. In the pre-Corona days, my first thought used to be how can my alarm be ringing already? But that has been replaced by where the hell am I and what’s my name again? Anyway, my latest dream is an old favorite, right up there with missing a flight or falling into a bottomless pit: I’m in some kind of major trouble or am trying to warn somebody about something terrible, except that when I try to scream I realize I’ve lost my voice. I try again, and nothing comes out but a whisper. I try again, and usually at that point I’m so truly distressed that I do scream and thus wake myself up. According to Google, the bottom line in such dreams is a “loss of control.” GOSH I DON’T SEE WHERE MY SUBCONSCIOUS GETS THAT IDEA FROM.

To be continued!

And a little child shall lead them

One of the things that I love the most about living in France is its proximity to other countries, which makes international travel a breeze. Thus, we do a lot of it. Our latest trip took us to Bavaria, a very reasonable 6-hour drive from Paris. Le Mot Juste is not an adventure blog, so I won’t delve into the delights of the region (which are many). Instead, I’d like to focus on one particular aspect of travel that has been part of our experience since 2013 and will continue to be part of our experience until we lose our minds and give up altogether: travelling with small children.

Now, I will admit that I once used to be somewhat child-intolerant, but a) that was pretty much limited to screaming babies on public transportation, and even then they had to REALLY be screamy, and b) as the French say, il n’y a que les cons qui ne changent pas d’avis (only idiots never change their minds). I am not an idiot, generally speaking; therefore, I am not averse to changing my mind. With regard to children, I have definitely changed—for now I am on the other side of the aisle, as it were, and find myself frequently confronted with varying degrees of child intolerance.

But this most recent trip took it to a whole other level.

I was not prepared for the amount of blatant anti-child nastiness we encountered on our journey. Blank stares, outright glaring, impromptu lecturing, knocking on our hotel room door to tell us to pipe down…. At one point, we had just arrived in a crowded restaurant whose decibel level was off the charts, and yet we STILL managed to piss off a couple seated at a table next to ours, simply by our encroachment on “their” sphere of existence.

Are we unnaturally obnoxious? We make more noise than a couple, that’s for sure. But we are not insane, shrieking, out-of-control freaks, either. We’re what one might call a “family,” with these things called “children,” which, contrary to what many folks apparently believe, are not in fact miniature adults whose primary goal in life is to conform to other people’s unrealistic expectations. They make noise, and cannot understand why everyone keeps telling them to shut up—or better yet, go away—in a more or less aggressive fashion. 

My little girl, who is three, was “shhh’d” at with irritation in a church in Munich, simply because she was running. Not racing around screeching and knocking statues over, mind you. Just pitter-pattering her little feet as three-year-olds are wont to do. You know, because she was feeling joyful. Did Jesus not say, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these”? I should have said as much to the shhh-er, except my German is limited to dankeschön—and this was not a dankeschön kind of moment.

But lest anyone think that I am singling out Germans, don’t worry; our ability to aggravate is truly without borders.

We have been scolded and scoffed at on the TGV in France on many occasions, simply because our kids were existing too loudly in the library-like silence of the “family” coach.

We travelled to Scotland two summers ago and were dismayed at the number of cozy, welcoming-looking bed and breakfasts that formally refused families. 

Italy is the exception that proves the rule: our kids are treated to a chorus of Che bello! Che bella! at every corner and so UNUSED are we to warm smiles and spontaneous displays of affection from perfect strangers that it often takes us a few days to acclimate. Do Italians have bigger hearts than everyone else? I think they just might!

Contrast that attitude with all the “anti-stroller” restaurants (I’m looking at you, NYC), kid-free zones on trains, and the very real demand for childless flights. Never mind how demonstrably loud modern living is; apparently the sound of a disgruntled baby is so disturbing to some that they would happily pay a premium, just to shield their delicate senses from the nuisance. 

What does it say about our civilization as a whole that we are ready to go to such lengths to exclude entire swaths of it, simply because we find something about “them” insufferable? If we had any sense left in us, we would recognize and cherish the very old and the very young for what they are—our greatest treasure and our greatest hope. Instead, we have turned them into pariahs. The elderly, the sick, the weak: we don’t want to see them. The young, the high-spirited, the willful: we might be okay with seeing them, but we sure as hell don’t want to hear them. We’d rather embrace the insanity of imagining that it was never and will never be our turn—that “they” are nothing like “us.”

How many so-called woke people who pride themselves on their open-mindedness and inclusive attitude toward other cultures, ethnicities, and religions see no hypocrisy what-so-ever in turning up their noses at children? Today, being blatantly intolerant is uncool—unless your intolerance is directed at a child, that is. Then it’s justifiable, for how dare that child not comply with your idea of what she should be? 

You do realize that hating someone because he has ancestry that you don’t like is EVERY BIT AS LUDICROUS as hating someone because she’s a child acting how normal children act, right? Saying “I don’t like children” is NO BETTER than saying “I don’t like short people” or “I don’t like foreigners” or “I don’t like redheads.” All of it is intolerance, and all of it is unacceptable.

How does this even need to be said? And yet clearly it does.

Meanwhile, look around you the next time you’re out. How many couples and even entire families sit together in absolute silence, eyes glued to their telephone screens? The art of human interaction is rapidly fading away; we appear to be more at ease with Siri than we are with one another. And yet we find that normal.

We invite dogs into our restaurants and no one bats an eye. Quite the contrary! Oh, how sweet. Can I pet him? But a child—or worse, a baby? Immediate wariness. Nine times out of ten, when my husband and I enter any restaurant other than a fast food joint with our kids and are shuffling around getting ourselves situated, there are multiple pairs of eyes staring disapprovingly at us. I swear I can feel the judgement like hot coals on my skin. C’est in-sup-por-ta-ble.

How bad is it for you really, childless person? Is someone else’s kid (mine, for example) doing a tap dance in the middle of your dinner plate? Knocking over your cocktail? Setting your hair on fire? Probably not. His PARENTS, on the other hand, are undoubtedly exhausted in every sense of the term. Why? Because nothing—NOTHING—is harder than parenting. It is, to quote Jerry Maguire, “an up-at-dawn, pride-swallowing siege that I will NEVER fully tell you about.” 

On behalf of all parents, try to have some empathy. We are fully aware of the disturbance that our kid(s) can cause, and are trying our best to keep things as calm as possible. We do not need your dark looks, your audible sighs, your eye-rolling, or any of your other insensitive, self-superior, and frankly childish theatrics. You don’t like kids? By all means feel free not to have any. But leave your reverse ageism at home. Better yet, stay at home yourself: it is guaranteed to be quiet and totally free of those small creatures you seem to loathe so much—who, incidentally, also represent the survival of your own foolhardy species.

I was on a plane not that long ago from New York to Paris. A baby cried intermittently throughout the 7-hour flight. It wasn’t fun for anybody—but do you know who it really wasn’t fun for? The mother. She spent the entire time rocking her clearly suffering child, singing to him, and trying to soothe him as best she could while also caring for his sibling seated next to her. When the plane finally began to descend toward the runway, and the ill child’s whimpering intensified, one woman seated two rows up distinctly said, without a shred of irony, “Decapitate him.” 

Decapitate him.

That’s where we are today. And we should be absolutely ASHAMED to have let our “enlightened” values sink so low as to justify pointing our finger at a beleaguered single mother and her sick baby instead of pulling our heads out of our own cold, disdainful asses and going over to ask her what we can do to be helpful.

Naturally, no one took the mother’s defense. So I did. And my husband did. And together we told that passenger and her bloated ego to STFU or go buy herself a spot in first class instead of on a low-cost red-eye that only the heavily drugged would ever have managed to sleep through in the first place.

Tell me this: is it the child whose behavior is truly destructive? Or is it yours, the so-called adult who refuses to accept the nature of children and would rather condemn them for somehow offending your over-privileged sense of decorum?

As we head into the Christmas season, a season that still smiles fondly on children, let us remember why we celebrate it in the first place: because God so loved the world that He took the form of a tiny child in order to save us from ourselves.

But we’d rather smirk at such a notion and write it off as myth, all the better to justify our refusal to love one another in return, whether adult or child—even when deep down, we know better.

Visions of sugarplums

I’m not really a dessert person. Oh, I love tarte Tatin (it’s like an upside-down apple pie and I’m from the apple pie capital of America, so no surprise there). And macarons. And I can be coaxed into the occasional moelleux au chocolat. But I cannot *make* any of these things. I can make pumpkin pie. And banana bread. That’s about it. Everything else turns out either too thin, too flat, too dry, too crumbly, too dark, or some unfortunate combination thereof.

Lacking any kind of talent in this area never particularly bothered me until I became a mom. Living in France and all, where children’s 4 p.m. snack-time is straight up sacrosanct, I kind of feel obligated to provide mine with a warm home that smells of sugar and spice—which is why I buy scented candles.

But this is Christmas. Christmas is different. Christmas means turning on the oven and baking sweet things. More specifically, my American psyche says that Christmas means baking COOKIES. I suck at baking cookies. However, this year I felt like family cookie time would be a nice festive bonding opportunity that we could all share, while listening to carols and smiling. I have these moments of suspended sanity sometimes, where I forget all past experience or indeed common sense and just dive, head-long, into guaranteed failure. This would be one such moment.

It doesn’t help matters that my Christmas cookie culture is more inferential than empirical; my mom being an enthusiastic devotee of the full organic SoCal lifestyle, my brother and I did not grow up eating chocolate chip cookies; we grew up gnawing on whole wheat-sesame-raisin-honey-nut thingies with an involuntarily blackened underside (I’ve inherited this trait, so no criticism here). Actual Christmas cookies—the kind made out of white flour and white sugar—were something the neighbors gave us once a year, probably out of pity.

I obviously don’t own any cookie recipes—because why would I?—but that is why we have the internet. So I hunted down some Better Homes-worthy candidates, printed them out, made a shopping list, and figured I was off to a good start. What I neglected to factor into the equation was that THIS IS FRANCE. One would think that after 20+ years of living here, I’d stop assuming anything, especially when it comes to Christmas (there are no candy canes! NO. CANDY. CANES.), but alas.

Now, in my defense, we do our shopping at what the French call an hypermarché, which supposedly translates as a “big box store,” although I’ve never used this particular term in my entire life, and I get the feeling that if I went and tried to sneak it into an English conversation, people would imagine I was talking about a cardboard specialty shop. In any case, “big box store” is a moronic translation for the hypermarché, which is where you go when you want to buy large quantities of multiple types of stuff, all in one place. Oodles of groceries, tons of toys, mountains of clothing, piles of housewares, etc. etc. etc. It’s like Walmart but way better (duh, it’s French). Ours is a Carrefour Planet, which I call “the Vortex,” because time seems to mysteriously speed up as soon as we’re inside; instead of taking 1-2 hours, the average visit takes us 5. So I figured, foolishly, that the Vortex would cover all of my cookie-baking needs.

Ah, but this is France, mes chéris. And France does things its own way.

Let’s start with molasses. Seems simple enough. The word exists in French—mélasse—and is a known ingredient (at least in the French West Indies); therefore, it should be a supermarket item like any other, according to me. Except that no, it isn’t. I scoured the (very large) baking aisle, the jams and jellies aisle, the organic aisle, and even the imports aisle (lost time: 30 minutes). Nothing. As my dad pointed out, France’s colonial past would indeed lead one to believe molasses to be a readily available commodity. Plus, France has quite a few overseas territories that grow what? SUGAR CANE. Rum, for instance, is not lacking here; the Vortex has all the rum anyone could need. No molasses, though. The same can be said of whole turkeys, but don’t get me started on that.

Fine. I scratched molasses off my list and figured I’d find a workaround. All the basics were there aplenty: butter, sugar, eggs, flour. No ready-made frosting, but who cares? I’d rather make my own (you heard me). However, things got tricky again when I reached the “decorations” part of my list: red and green sugar, holiday M&Ms, and Hershey’s Kisses. Oh yeah, and cookie cutters.

Red and green sugar: did the Vortex have it? No. In fact, the entire baking aisle looked much like it does the rest of the year, i.e., nothing particularly Christmassy about it. Thus, the only decorations available were the usual confetti sprinkles, chopped nuts, chocolate chips, vanilla extract, almond powder, etc. I looked, believe me. Up the aisle and down again. Crouched. Stood on my toes. NOTHING. Oh, there was colored sugar all right: gold sugar, pink sugar, pearled sugar. I even found candied fruit, but only YELLOW candied fruit. They must be doing this on purpose.

On to M&Ms. Do you think that the French stock holiday M&M’s (considering they do stock brownie M&Ms, mini M&Ms, and caramel M&Ms)? No, I’m sure you would never think anything so patently absurd. Anyway, they don’t. So I bought a normal bag and figured I’d PICK OUT the red and green ones. Hershey’s Kisses I pretty much expected not to find; they may stock miniature candy bars like Snickers, Mars, Milky Way, etc., but the so-called City of Love does not carry Hershey’s Kisses.

By this point my bitch-o-meter was at about a 6 out of 10, so it was time to move along. Cookie cutters—dammit. I had to backtrack to the “house and kitchen” section of the Vortex. And what did I find there? NO GINGERBREAD MEN is what. Not one. I found tree shapes (yay!) and lots of festive cake molds, but no good old-fashioned gingerbread man cookie cutters. WHY THE HELL NOT? French Christmas decorations often feature gingerbread men! So where do they keep the corresponding cookie cutters? My bitch-o-meter inched up to a 7. I needed a drink. Spiked eggnog would have been nice, except eggnog is ANOTHER CHRISTMAS THING YOU CAN’T GET IN FRANCE.

In the end, I had to go to an arts and crafts store on the other side of town the next day for my gingerbread man. Obviously, the cutters weren’t sold separately; I had to buy a pack of three in various sizes. Oh well. I ALSO found green and red colored sugar! Granted, the red was definitely fuchsia, but it was labelled rouge, so I took it. Total cost for sugar and cookie cutters: 19 euros. Yeah.

When cookie baking day rolled around, I pulled out my recipes, organized my ingredients, summoned my children, and got to work.

It took six hours. SIX HOURS.

First of all, we only have one cookie tray (technically two if you count the pizza tray, but it’s “not optimal” and I mean that in the Benghazi sense). Second, our oven can only handle two racks. Also, whatever one is supposed to use as a surface for rolling out and cutting up cookie dough, we clearly don’t have that. Doing it directly on the countertop seemed weird, so I used a cutting board. The cutting board is not big. Anyway, our limited production capacity meant that our productivity level was destined to be mediocre from the get-go. That did not stop us. We rolled out portions of dough, the kids obviously fought over who got to do the cutting, I managed to get the cookies off the cutting board and onto the various trays without completely destroying their shapes, and into the oven they went.

Decorating the cookies was another romp through the fields of wholesome-family-moments-gone-terribly-awry. Have you ever made icing? I hadn’t. The recipe called for powdered sugar and water. Do you know what happens when you mix powdered sugar and water using an electrical hand mixer? Clouds of powdered sugar rising into your face is what happens. My kids thought this was hilarious. Spooning said icing onto the cookies was rather messier than I’d imagined as well, but we got through it. The kids THOROUGHLY enjoyed decorating the iced cookies, and for a few moments there I really did catch a glimpse of the “holiday moment” I’d been aiming for all along.

Alas, it was short-lived. The decorating committee soon began to squabble over supplies, which rapidly degenerated into mutual accusations of ineptitude, followed by insults and verbal attacks, physical aggression, and ultimately eviction of the committee from the premises. The committee was reconvened after a 10-minute break and told in no uncertain terms that such behavior was not reflective of the Christmas spirit and would not be tolerated.

Did that help? Not really, but we (I) gritted our (my) teeth and got through it. In the end, the house smelled Christmassy and the cookies were actually pretty tasty. The kitchen, however, took about an hour to put back into order, and seeing as how I’d had quite enough “help” from my children for one day, I thought it wiser to limit the clean-up committee to those above the age of 10. This obviously gave me ample time to mutter under my breath about holding Hallmark and its holiday propaganda (in particular that ca. 1990s Oh Holy Night commercial) FULLY RESPONSIBLE for guilt-tripping me into believing that family Christmas baking is a thing, when in truth I’m pretty sure that all those beautiful sugary cookies our neighbors used to give us when I was a kid were MADE BY ADULTS, WHILE LISTENING TO NAT KING COLE AND SIPPING BRANDY.

Oh well, there’s always next year. 

A life uncommon: part V

I followed my bliss all the way to Paris on September 7, 2001, arriving with an overstuffed suitcase and a heart full of hopes, dreams, unavowed fears, and the inexplicable assurance that I was where I was meant to be. In honor of the 17th anniversary of that leap of faith, I have decided to write a short series of posts recounting the little-known tale of my love affair with France. 

Read part I here, part II here, part III here, and part IV here.

Fraternité

When I think back on those first few years in Paris, I remember feeling as though I were walking on air, buoyed by the delight of seeing my dreams materialize ... but I also remember the deep and incessant anxiety that those dreams would be torn away from me. I used to fear that I was nothing more than a stowaway aboard a luxury liner, a kid who’d managed to sneak inside Disneyland after hours, a lottery winner with an erroneous ticket—it was all too good to be true; someone was bound to find out sooner or later and that would be the end. Every immigration-related trip to the Préfecture de Police, appropriately situated within the complex of the Palais de Justice-Conciergerie—where thousands of prisoners under the Reign of Terror, including Marie Antoinette herself, spent their last moments before meeting their fate at the foot of the guillotine—left me quaking in my faux leather boots. Each visa renewal, each request for a status change, each interaction with an immigration officer engendered an icy knot of dread in my chest that seemed to be the price to pay for waking up in paradise.

As the years passed, I learned to combat that truly existential fear—the fear of losing the existence I so cherished—by carefully stringing together little pieces of legitimacy like so many precious pearls: a job, a renewed visa, a successful status change, a Master’s degree, a husband, a baby, a business, another baby ... until at long last, nearly 20 years after the soft autumn breeze of Paris first caressed my face, carrying the whispered promise of a life uncommon, I no longer question my right to live it; I no longer question my right to live here. 

As for feeling accepted—my other bugaboo—I ultimately gave up trying to perfectly emulate the French, figuring that any sense of being an outsider was mostly in my head, and deciding not to care about the part that wasn’t. And yet, when it came to seeking French citizenship, I long remained surprisingly ambivalent. After all, was I French? Would I ever be? And then the tragedy of November 13, 2015 happened, and with it came the realization that living among the French was no longer a question of “them” and of “me,” for the unmistakable feeling that flooded my heart that day was one of unity, of family, of … fraternité. These were my people. Period. It was a wake-up call if ever there was one: stop agonizing over where you belong. I began filling out my request for citizenship three days later.

When it came, the news that my request had been accepted struck me not as it would have in previous years—as a blessed relief—but rather as a formality whose smoothness and rapidity left the distinct impression that France had been expecting me to ask all along, and had been wondering what on earth I was waiting for. Citizenship was the last pearl on my strand of legitimacy and, as such, it prompted me to wonder whether I had reached the end of the road. Was that really it? Was I at last bona fide? The citizenship ceremony came and went, and as irony would have it, my only memento is an out-of-focus photo of myself flanked by two blurry officials, snapped in haste by a fellow new citizen. Something about it felt strangely anticlimactic, as though I’d just crossed the finish line of a marathon—only to turn around and realize that I was alone. The world went on as before; I remained for the most part unchanged. Perhaps the full significance of the moment was too much to wrap my mind around. But I suspect the truth to be somewhat more poetic: despite my latent sentiment of eternal otherness, France had wholly accepted me long before that ceremony. For all intents and purposes, I had been French for years.

I used to wander through my neighborhood Monoprix, just for the pleasure of looking at the things on the shelves. Everyday things. Shampoo bottles (their shapes and colors are so much prettier than American ones!), hair clips (look at the beadwork!), scarves (such elegance!), the produce aisle (is this a grocery store or is it Babette’s Feast come to life?). Even in its humblest incarnation, the French aesthetic contains something of the sublime, something of the fundamentally beautiful. Beauty. Beauty is perhaps what resonated the most with me upon my arrival here. Beauty was everywhere, woven throughout everything. It shone forth from the mundane as well as the marvelous, allowing me to see the world in a new light. Joy found me in France. Love found me. Grace found me. And yes, while it may sound hackneyed, I found myself. I didn’t come here expecting a revelation, but a revelation is what I received. France introduced me to a sensory universe I had never imagined; France filled me to the brim with history, art, and art history; France spoke to me in the language of the soul. The awe, the pure wonder of those first few years was so overwhelming, so intoxicating, that it formed the bedrock of my determination to make this country my permanent home. I have tried not to lose touch with that sense of wonder—which is never far off if I’m only willing to pay attention. 

France and I have not always been on the same wavelength, and I do recall threatening on a few occasions to “LEAVE and be done with it!” But, as in any marriage of love, we have worked through our difficulties and our differences, and matured hand-in-hand along the way. Today, I am a proud French citizen, wife to a Frenchman, and mother to two beautiful little Franco-Americans who skip from English to French and back again with delight. I will always be an American, and will probably be handed the English menu by well-meaning French waiters for the rest of my life, but in the end, my goal in moving to France was never to cease being myself—it was to be my best self.

FIN.

A life uncommon: part IV

I followed my bliss all the way to Paris on September 7, 2001, arriving with an overstuffed suitcase and a heart full of hopes, dreams, unavowed fears, and the inexplicable assurance that I was where I was meant to be. In honor of the 17th anniversary of that leap of faith, I have decided to write a short series of posts recounting the little-known tale of my love affair with France. 

Read part I here, part II here, and part III here.

The long and winding road

Business school it would be. Ever the perfectionist, I buckled down and gave the admissions process all I had. I asked a couple of alumni to hook me up with some advice; I read several books on culture générale, which is key to French exams of all stripes (realizing in the process that my education had some rather large holes in it); I bought a severe-looking suit and practiced my “business voice.” In the end, I wasn’t accepted by one Grande Ecole—but by two. So I said a fond farewell to my boss, who had done everything in his power to help me gain admission, and went off to buy some cool French school supplies, including plenty of that liney lined paper (why ever does it have so many lines?), certain that this would finally be my big break.

I suppose disappointment was inevitable. My undergraduate years remained decidedly rose-tinted; there was little chance I could ever relive them. I had imagined that this elite French institution would be the equivalent of Harvard, that I’d be rubbing elbows with the intellectual aristocracy, that classes would be as fascinating as they were inspiring.... In short, I wanted graduate school to be more than a means to an end; I wanted it to be an end in itself. Alas, non. My classmates were indeed brilliant, but the reigning atmosphere was hardly scholarly. The first week, I stepped into the school’s stately cobblestone courtyard only to be met with a scene worthy of a carnival. An inflatable fun house crowded the entrance; music blasted over loudspeakers; students in giant chicken costumes waddled about, distributing rolls of toilet paper. I feared that I’d unintentionally slipped into a parallel universe.

Unfortunately, that was only an introduction; the carefree attitude that reigned in the courtyard seemed to reign in the lecture hall as well. Students would meander into class oftentimes well past its start, strolling right beneath the professor’s nose without eliciting so much as a grumble. Many of those seated were hardly any better: some blatantly perused the morning newspapers; others texted sweet nothings on their phones; still others surfed the web on their newfangled laptops. Many didn’t show up at all. Yet the lecturer would continue lecturing, not seeming to care one iota. If anything, the lack of respect appeared to be mutual: one professor quite simply fell asleep during a series of (clearly unimportant) student presentations. I know that turnabout is fair play and all, but COME ON. What is actually happening here? I wondered, unable to shake the sense that somehow, somewhere, somebody had made a mistake.

In hindsight, it’s obvious that the mistake was mine. I embarked on the graduate school adventure believing that I had an open mind, when in truth I had a very fixed notion of what the experience should be like, and was profoundly disappointed when reality did not live up to my lofty expectations. That’s on me. But in my defense, I know what superior education looks like—and that wasn’t it. Anyway, things kept on keeping on for months, and then suddenly coursework was over. We took a whirlwind trip to India, zeroed in on a thesis topic, and poof! We were granted the right to brandish the school’s hallowed name and watch the internship offers roll in. By that point, I’d set my heart on going into wine and spirits marketing, but in light of all that I had witnessed that year, I was highly skeptical of the school’s reputation, however illustrious, being able to work its magic and land me an internship … until it worked its magic and landed me an internship—in marketing; in the wine industry. Mind. Blown.

As it turned out, I rather enjoyed wine marketing. Plus, the start-up I went to work for decided it rather liked me back and, heaven be praised, after proving my mettle as an intern, I was offered a full-time position—and along with it A NEW EMPLOYEE VISA! Betting everything on a business degree had actually paid off; I couldn’t believe it. My graduate school had not given me what I wanted, but ultimately, it gave me what I needed. Perhaps I had been too quick to criticize (I said perhaps). In any case, I ended up remaining in wine marketing for a little over three years. The company met a sad fate, but it taught me invaluable lessons about management, mismanagement, wine, and most importantly, copywriting. My boss—and I will forever be indebted to him for this—recognized a certain affinity I had for the written word, and often gave me copywriting projects. With time, I couldn’t help but think that perhaps I was meant to take up my pen and make a living out of it. Hmm.

Meanwhile, that other quest of mine, l’amour, remained frustratingly out of reach. Then, in the autumn of 2007, just when I was beginning to think that the love of my life might actually literally be France, and was imagining what kinds of crazy hats I would wear as a spinster, it happened—I met someone. A human! Who liked me! And whom I liked back! I’d been single for 95% of my six and a half years in the so-called city of “love,” and then all of a sudden, here was this tall, handsome, French guy with beautiful eyes and really nice shoes, who was neither a sociopath nor dating someone else nor related to any of my bosses in any way. I pounced (and by that I mean I batted my lashes a lot and hoped for the best). And lo and behold, sparks flew. We moved in together the following year, were engaged a year and a half after that, and married in a picture perfect Franco-American ceremony in my hometown in the spring of 2011. What is it they say about good things coming to those who wait (and wait, and wait, and wait...)?

After jumping ship from the by then rapidly sinking wine company, I switched gears and joined a mid-sized design and communication agency. Over the next several years, I put my newly acquired managerial skills to the test—and realized I just didn’t have it in me to be a manager. In fact, I seemed to be singularly ill-suited to the entire open-plan paradigm. It was a sobering realization, but it was unavoidable. Much soul-searching ensued. And in the end, I came to the conclusion that while each stepping stone in my professional journey thus far had served a purpose, if I ever wanted to find the Holy Grail, I couldn’t simply take another step—I would have to take a leap. 

So I quit my day job, moved to the suburbs, opened a copywriting business, and had two children. 

TO BE CONCLUDED...