Summer bliss

It’s that time of the year again, when those of us fortunate enough to live in France get to go on vacation. Now, depending on your definition of “vacation,” this may or may not be a good thing, for there are some who insist that vacation with children is no vacation at all. And for the record, those people are correct. That has never stopped us, though—nor did it this year when it came time to choose where to go. “Croatia!” we decided. “By car!” we decided. Who’s crazy enough to travel from France to Croatia (≈1,000 miles) by car? 

WE ARE.

YAY!

But first, we stopped in Italy—Padua, to be exact. Its Arena Chapel is home to some of Giotto’s most important frescoes, which I had been hankering to visit ever since my blithely innocent days as an art history undergrad back in whenever that was. In any case, the frescoes were awesome. The kids’ behavior, on the other hand, was grotesque. Do you think that stopped us? NOOOO. After over a decade of parenting, potential embarrassment is no longer a deterrent to engaging in full-blown public displays of dysfunction. Did I chase my son around a Renaissance-era marble fountain, threatening to grab the city map that he had turned into a giant paper airplane out of his hands and rip it into 1,000 shreds while fellow tourists looked on, silently thanking God that they had sent their children to stay with grandma and grandpa for the summer? Maybe.

Happy traveller.

Padua on the whole was cool. And by cool I mean hot (mid-90s). But no matter! I stuffed my backpack with water, sunglasses, sun hats, sunscreen, and a USB-rechargeable mini fan, and off we went. We stayed at a really cute boutique hotel, which I heartily recommend to anyone planning to visit Padua anytime soon. Their breakfast in a flowery outdoor courtyard was lovely, plus I have noticed on multiple occasions over the years that Italians are truly tolerant of child antics, which is a BIG BONUS in my book. Actually, can I just say how much I love Italy, full stop? I love it. I love its food (obviously—everyone loves its food). But that’s not all. I love its art and architecture. I love its aesthetics. I love its Aperol spritzes. I love its reasonable prices. I love its language, even if my Italian vocabulary is pretty much limited to menu items and, thanks to a few weeks of Duolingo, observations concerning people’s age groups and genders (as un-woke as such observations may be these days). I love its HISTORY, especially its Roman and early Christian history. That’s my intellectual sweet spot. Oh, and its vegetation. Olive trees, vineyards, umbrella pines! Is there anything better? No—no there is not. I even love that you get to eat cookies for breakfast in Italy. Cookies! For breakfast! France remains my true love, but Italy is a close second. Had I participated in SMU-in-Rome instead of SMU-in-Paris back in 1999, who knows what could have happened?

I mean come on.

After several days of taking photos of bricks, stones, and umbrella pines, we piled back into the car and drove many, many hours through the Fréjus tunnel (50 euros, folks) and on into Slovenia. Do many Americans go to Slovenia? No. Do many Americans know where Slovenia is? No. And I would count myself among them, so no offense. We stopped for lunch in Piran. It was really nice! It had a big beautiful church on a big beautiful hill. Did we march the kids up there? You bet we did.

You’ll thank me one day, kids.

Then, on to our first destination in Croatia—Rovinj. Gorgeous! We swam in the Adriatic; we visited more old churches; we climbed more stone stairs; we drank more spritzes; we continued to engage in the merciless cat-herding that is parenting while on vacation. I found a dress and belt ensemble that makes me look like I just stepped out of a Greek myth—THAT’S A WIN. Also, our digs were awesome. There was an amazing central garden space with turtles just wandering around amid the grass. Yes, turtles.

Gardens: the one thing we can all agree on.

After a week or so, off we went to our second destination in Croatia—Trogir. Again, gorgeous! Swimming in turquoise waters (what’s a sea urchin or two?); visiting ancient Roman cities; drinking more spritzes. Also, dragging our children multiple times out of this insane rubber duck store, which for some reason I cannot fathom is not a local quirk at all but a full-on CHAIN. A chain! Devoted to rubber ducks in costume! And people say we aren’t in the End Times (I’m pretty sure the Book of Revelation includes something about rubber ducks).

Just, why?

Our rental in Trogir was a little stone apartment tucked away amid ambling pathways, a pleasant 10-minute stroll from a pristine beach. Very cute. There was just one problem though…

I’d like to congratulate the local city planners for building an international airport three miles outside of town. I mean how hard did they think about this? Regular bombing runs notwithstanding, we had a wonderful stay. And an all-too-short week later, it was time to head home. Naively assuming we could simply drive back into Italy, we tried to do it in one shot. Little did we know that the rest of civilization had chosen that very same day to do that very same thing. Thus, what should have taken us 7 hours in fact took us 11, so by the time we reached our next stop—fair Verona—we were fried. And here I would like to add a slight caveat to my Italian ode above: roads. Roads in Italy need work. More specifically, they seem to have been designed for only the narrowest modes of transportation, e.g. horses. Thin horses. Why are there so many Vespas in Italy? This probably has something to do with it. Getting our car through a mini-tunnel and into its allotted parking space without sacrificing both side mirrors was not really a challenge we were thrilled to face upon pulling up to our rental at 10:00 p.m., but such is life. What’s a battle scar or two (or way more than two)?

Totally worth it.

As for the city of Verona, ahhhhh—positively enchanting. Italy in all its glory (and by that I mean ancient ruins, umbrella pines, and spritzes, in that order). Plus, after over two weeks on the road, our kids were finally starting to behave. Alas, it was soon time to leave. But nary you fret, Italy. 

Torneremo presto!

A Roman road! Even my feet are smiling.

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 III

Welcome to part III of my lockdown diaries. If you have a little oh, I don’t know, FREE TIME on your hands, part II is available here and part I is available here.

April 6

Amazon delivers a box. This is the highlight of my day—a box! With stuff in it! Stuff for me! Actually, it’s stuff to occupy my kids, but no matter; I bought it, so it’s sort of for me. Deliveries these days are bizarre. When UPS came with our new printer last week, the delivery dude basically threw the box at me and ran off before I could contaminate him or whatever he was so worried about. *cough* 

April 7

In an abundance of completely misguided wisdom, the government decides that there are entirely too many people strolling about during the one hour of exercise we are allowed outside of our homes per day. So they limit exercise to before 10 a.m. or after 7 p.m., which as any common idiot can imagine is ABSOLUTELY going to worsen the problem.

April 8

I go running at 7:01 p.m., along with what feels like half the town. WTF was the government thinking? I do my best to steer clear of everyone, even leaving the trail and running in the middle of the road (“Thanks for the asphalt,” say my knees and ankles). An older woman leaning on a walker glares at me, as though I were the Grim Reaper in the flesh, despite my respecting about 2x the recommended social distance AND holding my breath. Sigh.

April 10

Oh look! Our local authorities have noticed that the whole 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. restriction thing was an epic failure. But have they recanted? Not a chance! Instead they have doubled down, and now my entire neighborhood is encircled in barricade tape to keep folks off the most popular running paths, i.e. the ones that aren’t full of roots, leaves, and rocks. Speaking of barricades, I kind of feel like climbing one. Where’d I put my French flag?

April 12

Christos Anesti! I slip outside early in the morning and hide the 48 plastic eggs that I ordered online last month and spent 30 minutes filling with chocolates before going to bed a few hours ago. I sit in the garden and enjoy the silence. Having an apartment with a garden is an absolute lifesaver and I am incredibly grateful to be able to do this. The kids soon wake up and have a fantastic time racing about collecting the eggs. This feels like a solid win.

Easter Covid-style turns out quite nicely, actually. I tell the children that I am going to church, which these days means disappearing into my bedroom with my laptop and the online worship service of the American Church in Paris, virtual communion included. It’s alternative, but kind of fun! I like the fact that I can hit “pause” to go to the ladies’ room instead of slinking out of the sanctuary through the back door like I would if I were at a physical church.

Later, we go out for our daily stroll, which lo and behold takes us to the very neighborhood where I have an invitation to a “through the fence” wine tasting. We meet a very nice wine merchant, who lets us into his front yard where he introduces us to his wife and two children, who seem elated to meet our two children and the four of them R-U-N-N-O-F-T together immediately, which makes me realize how lonely my kids probably are, and I’m about to start feeling guilty but I can’t because there is a glass of chilled rosé being handed to me and before I know it the four of us are laughing and telling stories and GOOD LORD IT IS SO NICE TO JUST TALK TO ACTUAL PEOPLE! Like not on FaceTime or Zoom or whatever. Actual people. We buy six bottles and I stop just shy of asking them if we can be friends IRL. Come to think of it, I still might.

We head home, where I make a fairly elaborate Easter dinner, complete with hard boiled eggs sculpted into little chickens and again, I feel pretty proud of myself. My son says, “Mom, this is the best Easter I’ve ever had.” Remembering this simple affirmation is the primary reason for my writing this entire post. Our Easter is full of hope indeed. 

April 13

Macron addresses the nation wearing his furrowed, “empathetic” look. No wonder he’s trying to look empathetic—he announces FOUR MORE WEEKS of lockdown. I’m about to go look for anything I can make into a noose when he adds that after these next four weeks, schools will reopen. WADHESAY? So help me, there IS a light at the end of this long-ass tunnel. And that light is called “public school.” 

This really won’t last forever. Imagine that.

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.

We don’t need no education

Ah, September. Its sweet blend of nostalgia and anxiety, guilt and deliverance, foreboding and euphoria … no other time of the year can quite compare.

Personally, I love September. Not only is it the one month of the entire year in which I am neither too hot nor too cold, but it carries with it a sense of infinite possibility akin to that of the New Year, only without the bleakness, darkness, and freezing rain of January. Also, Paris in the autumn is one of my great joys, perhaps because it was autumn when I first arrived here many moons ago.

As a mother, my fondness for September has been exponentially amplified, for it also heralds the end of summer’s reign of terror and the restoration of civilized routine. In France, this time of the year is known as la rentrée, when the vacationing season winds down and French adults return to their jobs, tanned and rejuvenated, while French children return to school, where they resume being psychologically pummeled into obedience by the national education system.

Mandatory schooling in this well-educated country begins at age three with maternelle, which is roughly the equivalent of the preschool, pre-K, and kindergarten years. Maternelle takes place on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays from 8:30 am to 4:30 pm. That’s a long day (says my mom), yet somehow not long enough (says every parent I know).

When our son began maternelle, I was an emotional wreck. On his first day, we trotted him off to class wearing his little orange penguin backpack, and I proceeded to spend the entire week crying harder than our two-month-old daughter. However, by the time it was said daughter’s turn to enter school three years later, believe you me I did not spend more than 10 minutes wiping my eyes—a substantial improvement. I have come to embrace, nay, ADORE French school.

 

I mean look, over the course of maternelle alone, our son has learned more than I think I knew when I was twice his age: The kid can count past 100 in two languages, write the alphabet in print and in cursive, read short words, and do basic mathematics. He knows about the solar system, the life cycle of trees, the music of Mozart, and the art of M.C. Escher. He’s been on field trips to several châteaux, the zoo, and multiple artsy movies. He’s even learned how to swim. At school. Oh, and table manners! He’s learned how to hold his silverware, how to eat multi-course meals properly, and how to get along with his peers—sort of.

School is fabulous.

Now, it’s not all a bed of roses. Certain teachers can be quite strict with the rules, which does not necessarily mesh well with the whole positive parenting philosophy. However, for children who tend to be among the more obedience-challenged (eh-hem), it’s a damn panacea. In fact, the school system is one of the keys to that oft-noted good behavior demonstrated by French kids that Americans find so fascinating: Right about the time when a child is reaching his maximum exasperation-inducing capacity, i.e., age three, in swoops public school to iron that right out. It has been relatively successful in our home; I figure his American heredity is what’s keeping our son a tad naughty, but then maybe that’s part of his charm? I guess?

Also, potty training—yikes. If your child is not propre (literally “clean”) then he is not allowed at school. The end. This is a major stress factor for parents desperately awaiting their child’s turn to be tamed educated. Try as we might, our little guy was not quite ready on time; when we picked him up at the end of that first day, he had a tell-tale plastic bag tied to his backpack. Its contents were wet clothing that reeked to high heaven: “WTF IS THIS?” I believe were my exact words. I suspect the unspoken goal of the exercise is to shame the child into obedience, or rather, shame the child’s parents into stepping up their potty training game. In any case, it may be cruel and unusual, but it worked—he was 95% potty trained by the end of the week, as were his other reluctant classmates.

This year, we are discovering the next step in the French educational adventure, which is to say first grade. In first grade, they mean business. This was immediately evident to us on our son’s last day of kindergarten, when we received a page-long list of supplies to be provided on Day One of the following year, along with a note specifying that every last item, right down to each individual crayon, would need to be labelled. It took me roughly three hours to create, print, cut out, and label everything—and an additional hour to Scotch tape it all when my lovingly-made labels began to peel off. 

Then there’s the backpack. For years, I had noticed French children dragging theirs along the ground on little wheels, suitcase-style, and kicking up an insane amount of dust in the process. What is the point of that? I often wondered. Now I know. Normal-sized children’s backpacks simply cannot contain all the crap that French schoolchildren are expected to haul around with them. So we had to go out and buy our son a backpack twice his size, just like everybody else. At least he can wear the thing—I draw the line at wheels. I mean come on, the kid is in FIRST GRADE. What happens when he reaches middle school? I see trunkfuls of office supplies in our future, along with a full range of personalized luggage in which to carry it all.

This is not to say that there is no room for fun in the French curriculum. Anyone who lives in proximity to a schoolyard will tell you that the kids have ample time to (loudly) ram around outdoors, play sports, and blow off steam. Honestly, French public school is the gift that just keeps on giving. My kids are receiving a high-quality education for free, and are bringing home the artwork, reading, writing, and arithmetic to prove it. Most importantly, they seem to honestly be enjoying themselves; they’re happy when I drop them off in the morning and happy when I pick them up in the afternoon.

Which means I have 8 hours per day sans kids, and that, my friends, is the true beauty of French schooling.

Let us cultivate our garden

Today a tree was delivered to my front door. I bought it online for 24 euros and had it shipped to me from across France for an additional 27 euros. You might be thinking, “Wait, you paid more in shipping than you did for the tree? Are you some kind of moron?” To which I would reply, “Perhaps I’m a moron, but I’m a moron with a pretty bitchin’ tree.”

Let me back up about 40 years. I was raised in a house with a garden. I fully expected to one day have a house with a garden of my own. But then I moved to Paris, and began a long period of renting decidedly garden-less apartments. I thus contented myself with decorating the balconies of my various abodes with potted plants, realizing along the way that I’m pretty bad at keeping green things alive. Huh.

Many years later, when I had acquired a husband and birthed a couple of tiny people, the day came when we decided to empty our bank accounts into a place of our very own—obviously an apartment, because this is the Paris region and we are not Bill Gates. But apartment or not, I wanted a real garden. First, a garden means that one is on the ground floor, and that means no balconies or windows to worry about one’s children falling off/out/through. Second, a garden means outdoor space for one’s children to ram around in without the risk of getting lost/kidnapped/run over. (I’m not unnecessarily anxious; YOU’RE unnecessarily anxious.)

A garden is also an end in itself—a garden! Yay! At last a chance to plant more exciting things than doomed-to-die-in-August €3.99 specials! I made lists of plants, did sketches (indeed), and read up on local species. We hired a gardener, for Pete’s sake. He came this close to covering half the surface area in gravel, but we don’t talk about that.

With time, effort, and many trips to nurseries across the northwest Ile-de-France, we now have quite a cute little garden. I have managed to cram every kind of pretty flowering plant I can think of into it somewhere, while leaving enough grass for our kids and the occasional hedgehog to scamper about in.

Also, and this is very exciting: I haven’t really killed anything so far. I was semi-convinced after years of desiccating/drowning vast quantities of potted plants that I was hopeless as a gardener. I remember saying as much to a few people I’d just met at an expat gathering a few years back. I believe my exact words were, “I don’t have a green thumb; I have a black thumb!” One of the folks I was talking to happened to be African American. She gave me an odd look; I turned beet red. And that is another reason to have a garden, i.e. a hiding place for the socially inept.

It being March now, our garden is beginning to awaken. This makes me happy. I spent all last Tuesday yanking out weeds, snipping dead branches, planting seeds, and lobbing snail shells as far as I could get them. You might say, “That’s cruel!” To which I would reply, “No; eating my plants is cruel.” I’m a pacifist, except when it comes to nasty little creatures nibbling on my plants or on my children—then I am merciless. Show me a slug sliming its way toward my tender green shoots and I will show you a kitchen knife that has no moral compass.

My new tree is a Coralcole dwarf ornamental crab apple. You heard me. Finding it was a pain in the ass, which is why I ultimately shrugged at that hefty delivery fee. I mean, I could have DRIVEN for several hours to the like one place in France that seems to stock these things, but would that have been time, energy, or cost-efficient? Clearly not. Anyway, it is now here, and I will plant it this weekend, and my husband will eye me warily and wonder why I’m so hell bent on filling up the garden with such highly specific plant life.

WHY? Because God is in the details, damn it, which is about as close to my entire life philosophy as one pithy saying can get.

Watercolor by yours truly.

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.