repatriation

Eight weeks, three relocations, several home improvements, one storage delivery of more crap than I thought it was humanly possible for us to own and leave lying dormant for two years, and a stealth gastrointestinal virus later, I’m back. To anyone who still checks in here occasionally, thanks, and I’m sorry.

I can report that the disorientation has receded, but not completely. I’m still startled by the voices of strangers talking to me, though as a consequence I’ve rediscovered the pleasure of unplanned and unrehearsed chatting. Even more fun has been watching G adjust to this very un-French volubility. It tracks well with his natural gregariousness, but he can’t quite handle it being the norm rather than the exception. It’s like being forced to eat ice cream every day. The pinnacle was when a strange woman stopped him mid-tantrum in line at Costco and said “That’s not the way you treat your mama, honey. Here’s the way you treat your mama.” And then she gave me a big hug. He was speechless.

Cars and roads are big. Even our urban grocery store is the size of a city block, with the dairy and the deli at opposite mileposts, and I often find myself exhausted in the middle, trying to remember where the peanut butter is (at the dairy end, next to the yogurt, go figure), and wondering if I should just give up and go home. I haven’t yet, even though we’re at that stage of larder-stocking where every trip to the store involves locating the invisible but essential staple item without which you cannot make X for dinner -- only to come home and find that you don’t have a big enough pot. Even with the load of storage items delivered, there are still big gaps in what we need for everyday use, and I find it increasingly hard to remember where anything is. The response to approximately 78.5% of G’s questions is “It’s on the boat, honey” (the response to the other 11.5% is, “No, you might kill yourself.” Welcome to the world of the almost three-year-old boy. There are many wonders here.).

And, of course, as we try to configure our lives into something more stable and predictable, the boys are changing every day. B is crawling and pulling himself up to standing; any minute we’ll have to install a gate on the stairs. He has a two-toothed smile to rule the world. G speaks more and more in complete paragraphs, and has mastered an elocutionary hand-gesture (we’ve been watching the debates) that he uses for emphasis to define his place in the world (“I have a problem, mommy,” he says, making the gesture Obama uses to mark a place in the air for middle-class misfortunes. “I can’t eat the big oatmeal because my mouth is too small.”).

The thing that’s happening fastest is that G is losing his Frenchness, a thing so elusive I didn’t realize he had it until we returned to the states. The first weeks of our return, he was dismayed every time we went to a park that didn’t have a fountain; he was also fascinated by garden squirrels, which in France are exotic woodland creatures and do not inhabit city parks. These things made me realize that G’s first conscious impressions of the world, his mind’s eye Rolodex for the important nouns of childhood, are completely different from my own, sounded out with a distinct image and accent. He’s already adapted to the new realities of Washington with the cheerful pragmatism of a toddler – he never feels at sea in the supermarket – but I hope that, little as he is, somewhere those images will hold, a dissonant echo to remind him, and me, where we’ve been.