A quiet moment

I sat for an hour this afternoon on the porch in my big white circular chair that is so deep and so wide, that guests look warily at its gaping mouth before opting for the safety of the sofa from which they know they will be able to rise after a glass of wine. All but a few leaves from the big oak tree in front of the house have fallen to the ground, leaving a crisp crunchy carpet, and the sun hovers a few degrees above the horizon. But it is as warm as a summer day and the sky a pale watercolour blue and I find time to stop and sit and relax for an hour whilst my three-year-old sleeps. All but the most resilient of the mosquitos are dead, and I am suddenly reminded of what it is like to live in a country with a clement climate – sitting out here on my porch unbitten and warm. I try to stop thinking, or at least stop thinking about all the things which have been turning round in my head for days: what we are going to do; where we are going to live; what course our lives might take; all the things we need to decide; all the things I might have done differently. It feels good to let that drain away and to enjoy a few moments of peace.

Worse and worse

I should have saved the volcanic eruption for this week. E’s company came up with a package for our move to Mozambique, but being so wholly incompetent and with zero international experience they apparently have no idea of what they are talking about. We calculate that, once the high cost of housing is taken into account in Maputo, E’s salary will be $181 per month. The offer is so incredible it would be laughable if it weren’t so bad. E says he’s so sad he can’t even cry.

My bike or his?

I know a fair amount about bicycles because, in the distant haze that is my youth, I used to cause my mother endless angst and worry by disappearing for hours (and later weeks) at a time on two-wheeled pilgrimages. The complementary hours spent in a drafty hallway greasing, aligning and spannering my steed now stand me in trusty stead, and it’s not too easy to pull the oily rag over my eyes when it comes to bike maintenance. So last week, when E needed to call the bike shop to see about getting a repair done, he felt the easiest thing would be to get me to do it instead.

Now, I seem to spend a moderate amount of time being E’s domestic secretary, which is not a job I generally begrudge, but it does make me squirm a little when I need to say, “I’m calling about husband’s prescription/doctor’s appointment/driving licence/tax return.” I think the squirming is all to do with the perception of being allocated a lower-status job: the cleaning, the secretary stuff, it all implies that you are sitting at home gossiping in between cleaning and doing little errands for your man which he himself is far too busy to find time for.

Anyway, whenever I can, I try to avoid sounding like I’m my husband’s run around, so on the phone about the bicycle, through no conscious decision on my part, the words, “My bicycle,” immediately slipped out. It all seem so much simpler to say, “The front derailleur won’t shift and the bottom bracket needs adjusting,” than, “He says he can’t get it to go up when he wants it to.”

As soon as I started speaking to Bill the Mechanic about hubs and cranks, I knew I was on to a winner. Suddenly we went from, “Oh we can’t fit you in for a service until next week,” to, “I’ve had a couple of cancellations, bring it in this morning and I’ll try to get it back to you by tonight.” Now, I knew, I knew immediately that any mention that this was not, in fact, my own bicycle but that of my husband would instantly jeopardise all that I had just achieved. So I decided to play the game. I duly took the bicycle to Bill, got him to lift it out of the car (my interest in bicycle maintenance no longer goes as far as wishing to get oily) and string it up on the rack, and then went through the minutia of the bicycle’s wear and tear with him: how I did and didn’t clean it, how much I loved it, what kind of lubricant I wanted to use and so on.  And of course when Bill asked me how far my commute to work was, there was nothing I could do but fall into E’s cleated shoes and describe the daily trip.  And the organisation for which I worked. And how I ended up working them. At which point I felt that the ice was getting rather thin and I’d better retreat to dry land post haste.

That evening, Bill was as good as his word, giving me a winning smile and strong handshake when I returned to compliment his handiwork. “All ready for your commute tomorrow morning,” he said warmly. I thanked him profusely and skated off.

I described this little excursion into falsedom with a friend later that day, not exactly with guilt but with a certain twinge of je ne sais pais that I had used my feminine guiles so effectively to get the result I wanted. And although perhaps I hadn’t set out to do it that way, as soon as it was clear that the approach would work, I jumped on the bandwagon and gave it my best. But my friend instantly banished any reproach I might have given myself and suggest I look up the Mark Twain quotation that says something like, lying is OK as long as you don’t get caught. I couldn’t find that one but I did find another from, On the Decay of the Art of Lying:

“The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of graceful and gilded forms of charitable and unselfish lying”.

Volcanic eruption

This weekend did not start well. In fact, the bad started on Friday evening when E came home from work with the news that yet again, his company had failed to come up with a definite offer regarding our move to Mozambique. It has been over five months since the idea was first put forward, and last Friday, it seemed, was going to be E’s final meeting with the HR department (from hell) to make a decision and come up with an offer. But no, all they wanted to do was tell E that they had identified  a moving company to use. E was able to point out that a moving company was rather premature, given they had yet to offer him a salaried position, to which they apparently pouted a little then moved on.

Psychologists say that uncertainty is one of the most difficult and stressful states for a brain to deal with. And to this I can now attest.  Here’s a list of decisions, which have been hovering over us for the last three months, made impossible by not knowing on which continent we are going to be living in two months’ time.

The car. It needed new tyres in August. It needs them even more so now, and am getting unhappy about driving it, but, I thought, it was going to be sold by now.

The house. Shall I spend a lot of effort and frustration trying to get the landlady to deal with the heating issue before winter sets in, or shall I assume we are not going to be here?

Shall I replace the electric beater I broke or shall I need to give it away the moment I buy it as it’s the wrong voltage for where I live? Ditto the electric kettle (I’ve been doing a lot of breaking recently).

Shall I buy three litres of olive oil or one?

Clothes. Way back in the summer, I invested in a pair of sandals for my two-year old, believing she’d need them in October when they would be hard to find. Known as the Mozambican Sandals, her feet almost fit them now but Mozambique is nowhere on the horizon. Likewise, all through September, as trousers and long-sleeves hit the rails, I hesitated about buying winter clothes, but purchased a nice range of light-weight dresses on sale.  As the weeks trickle by, the dresses remain on their hangers and I dash out sporadically to buy ever warmer wear, culminating today with a full winter jacket.

Work. Shall I apply for a job with a lovely small company I used to work for, when the job starts in January and I may be flying to a new land with no house, car, phone or internet connection? I don’t want to waste their time or mine.

Family. My brother is marrying in January 2010 and I still don’t know which continent I need to fly from.

School. Should I get involved in the PTO or assume, as I have been doing, that it is not worthwhile this year.

Pets. Had I know in June, that I be thinking of travelling to the UK for Christmas on my way to Africa, the dogs could have been vaccinated and joined me in the UK. Now, any moving plans to Mozambique via the UK will have to involve hugely expensive kennelling costs in any one of three continents.

It may sound trivial but the mental stress of not being able to plan things, big or little, two months into the future is huge. So this weekend, when I thought I was holding it all together so nicely, the bubble finally burst; the uncertainty, the stress, and the inability on my part to do anything about it all got too much. I think psychologists call it learned helplessness. When you are put in a very stressful situation but there is nothing you can do to get out of it. Rather like an impending volcano, adrenaline levels rise, but there is nowhere to send them and pressure builds. Another deadline passes with no outlet, and suddenly it is all too much and the volcano explodes.

Poor E. He did the only thing he could and dragged me out for a walk, which partially worked. At least for a while. But the same questions still churn over in my mind: what will I do with the dogs, where will I be for Christmas, should I invest in new winter boots, when will I know? As psychologists say happens when the brain is face with uncertainty, it constantly looks for a stable solution and when it cannot find one, it runs round and round and round, getting more tired and more worried.

On a more positive note, whilst browsing the internet for something about learned helplessness, I came across a helpful piece of research, suggesting that religious belief may be a good way of warding off stress and anxiety. So watch out all ye who thought you knew me, next time we meet I may be out to convert you too.

Autumn colours

Arkansas has finally come up trumps with its autumnal weather, if a little belatedly, and today we hiked in sun and clear skies under blazing scarlet and burnt sienna foliage. If we do every manage to leave this place (more on that later if blood pressures allows), today will be one of those days to remember. For the good reasons.

Hot tea

The electrician came. Jimmy is a delight. A true southerner with an accent so broad you could bridge the River Arkansas with it and drive a ten-ton truck straight over. We discuss my (German) landlady’s name, which admittedly, by ending in ‘tanz’ is difficult to pronounce. I give him a demonstration, ‘tanse’ and he looks bewildered and stumbles on it, clearly not hearing the vowel sound I am making. After a few more goes I say, “OK, let’s try it your way.” Drawing back the corners of my mouth as far as I can to make a big Cheshire cat grin, and closing the back of my throat like a crocodile about to dive, I sound, “taeense”. His face lightens in instant recognition, “Oh, taeense,” he beams and turns it over in his mouth a few times.

This morning, Jimmy returns to give us the two new sockets that mean we won’t have to hurdle the cables that have been straddling the kitchen for the past fortnight, and I offer tea or coffee. “D’yuw drink hot tea? Hey, Jamie, she drinks hot tea. I haven’t had a hot tea in a long time. Sure, I’ll have a cup of hot tea.” Jamie sensibly declines hot tea in favour of more trustworthy coffee, but comments with delight on my use of the word ‘bit’, as in, “Can you pass me the bit underneath.”  Well, that a new one to me too: I certainly hadn’t realised that ‘bit’ was a rare word round here. I shall try it out on some other locals and see if it gives them as much pleasure and surprise.

In the meantime, Jimmy relishes his hot tea served in a real porcelain mug (“Thank you Mae’aem”) and then asks how it is made. He leaves a few hours later furnished with some tea bags and detailed written instructions regarding boiling water, mugs, milk and sugar.

Chain of knowledge

A friend of mine is reading a book set in London. “It always seems to be raining and grey in this book,” she commented last week. I agreed that grey was an overwhelming feature of much of British winter weather, a fact that, until last week, I had conveniently misplaced in my own personal library of Scottish recollections. All of the things that I found unpleasantly frustrating, annoying, tiring and down-right enraging whilst living there seem to have been cleared to leave a happy canvas of efficiency, warmth and familiarity.

The truth is, since being in Scotland over the summer, the draw to return home has been surprisingly strong. And it’s not the case of being repelled from where I am: me and my current country of residence pushing  each other apart like two toy trains with opposing magnetic buffers: each time we try to make contact the repulsion grows so strong that the smaller one is thrown away to some far off land. Oh no, it is something far more subtle, more esoteric and more primal than that. It is the lure of homeland, the call of the routine, the seduction of the familiar stomping ground.

On my summer sojourn, I sat on a rocky headland, surveying the great, grey, frigid North Sea and felt a supreme contentment flood over me. To my right a pair of canoeists washed up in full dry suit, skull cap and booties gear, and to my left, overweight sun seekers cowered in bathing suits, hunkering down behind palm-adorned wind-breakers, with the hopeless expectation that complete immobility would avert the stiff sea breeze whisking over their prostrate forms so leaving them free to soak up the sun’s feeble rays without fear of hypothermia. I myself, uselessly pathetic in cooler climates, sported a thick sweater and boots.

So why was this so attractive to me? I have lazed, scantily clad, on numerous beaches, gazing out at turquoise seas as warm as a baby’s bath, where coconuts fall with a satisfying thud that signals a timely slaking of thirst, and pink, ruby, and azure corals tempt the idle snorkeler to linger a few minutes more. Yet, none of that, extremely pleasurable as it has undoubtedly been, has brought the heightened feeling of ease and serenity, the feeling of belonging, that the slate sea, with its verdigris dunes and sharp, salt-laden tang did last July.

Of course, the answer is two-fold. First there are the memories. Like a salmon returning to its spawning stream, the beaches of the east coast of Scotland bring sights and smells engraved in the mind from earliest childhood: of Sunday afternoon walks with dogs, when dropping back behind the dunes after an hour on the beach brought unsought relief from the tangles of wind and salt; of pristine teenage kisses, coddled by the moon, and the swirling shingle; and of early adulthood walks with close family, and tea and crumpets to follow.

And now, with a daughter of my own, those memories of childhood are seen in a different light, of those of a mother too. The link from grandmother to mother to child forms. I see myself as my mother was. I see my daughter as I was. I feel the need to draw on the flow of maternal knowledge. Yet with such a great physical distance between myself and my family, that current of information is curbed.

In the supermarket this week, I was looking for a good hand-washing liquid. I shrank several expensive-enough jumpers in my first winter here by using the wrong wash powder. I asked a store assistant.

“My grandmother always used that one,” she says, “so you can be sure it’ll be a good one. She hands me one from the top shelf and I grab it, thanking her. That handed down information, which we rarely even realise that we have, is the thing I miss. Of course, back home, I know what kind of washing powder to use: the one my mother does; and of course, here I can and do ask friends and store keepers. All the time. But still, I am often at a loss. After two years in the living in the New World rather than the Old, I am only scratching the surface: sewing thread – the girl in the department store to which I make a special trip tells me you can never buy thread in a department store, try the hobby store a ten-mile drive away;  clothes labels – I still haven’t a desire strong enough to ask teachers at school where to purchase these seemingly innocuous items; soap powder – I have to thank the Grandma X now, who I imagine used to wash her delicates on her porch listening to Martin Luther King on the wireless; soap – don’t laugh, but I stock up in the U.K. or E buys it in Africa (you can only buy the stuff here that dissolves to a liquid smear after two baths); stamps – the mailman tells me last week that you can get them in stores as well as Mail Rooms; narrow-fitting shoes – the store assistant tells me I won’t find a pair in the whole city, try online; toddler shoes of a shape and style I approve – my poor mother still has the stressful task of buying shoes for a grand-daughter’s feet she hasn’t seen in months.

And then there’s all the mummy stuff I need to know (when should I worry about a pronating foot, when is a fever a concern, where is the children’s clinic) and share (look she’s drawing aeroplanes today not heaps of spaghetti; look, she remembered the book she was looking for yesterday and was over-joyed to find it today).

So perhaps is was not such a bad thing that last week the weather was cold, wet, grey and foul. The horrible feeling of night followed by iron grey day followed by night felt unnervingly familiar, Scottish and unpleasant. A good reminder that not all things back home are rainbows and roses.

A triumph for ME

There is one subject I have never blogged about, which in some ways make me feel like the picture I paint here is an imperfect one. But taking about illness is difficult, and talking about my own, nigh on impossible.  However, last week, after almost eight long years of suffering from M.E. or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, something miraculous happened that deserves a mention: I walked up and down a mountain. Admittedly it wasn’t a huge mountain, but nor was it just a mere hummock; more of a steep angular protuberance. In fact I walked it twice. On the way down, the path, more of a scramble than a walk, plummets through a boulder field and requires lots of bottom shuffling and dropping of rocks, and it was half way down there the first time that my thighs were trembling so much I felt sure I was in for an M.E. relapse and few of days of enforced bed rest. But despite very sore legs, no relapse ensued. So I did it again, and the second time, one bright fresh morning last week, as I walked back through the woods to my awaiting car, dogs skipping alongside me, I felt on top of the world. I realised I had actually done it. I had been for a hill walk, a climb, a scramble, call it what you might, and I was fine. For the first time in almost a decade, I had achieved something I thought I might never be able to do again. I had walked a mountain. I had gone up, I had gone down, and I had gone all the way round, and the day still lay ahead of me, uninterrupted by headaches, confusion, exhaustion and pain. It was a triumph. A day of celebration. A day to surpass all other days. It was a day of great beauty. Now if only it could stop raining I would do it again.

Pat a cake, pat a cake, baker’s man

Ok, I need to come clean. Having just written that long eulogy about never missing a moment of my child’s development, I need to confess that I am, in fact, luxuriating in a week of singledom: no child, no husband, the first such experience such motherhood enveloped me. And, for anyone out there who hasn’t had the opportunity to sample such pleasures, I highly recommend it. I am having a ball.

However, as this pleasurable period of lounging and liberty draws to an end, the imminent arrival of my two-year-old’s birthday looms large, and with it the need to provide a cake. So, this afternoon, I need to bake a trial one, or at least a half.

You see, it’s been a good long while since I turned my hand to the production of baked goods, a lot longer than it ought given my assumed role as loving mother and wife, but there you have it. And this isn’t any ordinary cake. Well, ordinary, yes, in the sense that it’s a sponge cake containing eggs and flour (though, in fact, in the US that immediately hurls it into the category of extra-ordinary), but less ordinary in that it needs to be a tad larger than normal to satiate the capacious stomachs of ten small girls, not to mention their mummies, at Sunday’s birthday fest. My, well Delia’s, recipe is for an eight-inch tin, but I am scaling up to the ten incher. Doing the math has not been a problem: at last, after twenty-five years of taking up storage space that could have been utilised for something much more pertinent such as, where did I put the car keys?, the fact that The Area of a Circle Equals Pi R Squared has finally served its purpose. Now I know that a ten inch tin is fifty percent bigger than its eight-inch counterpart, and what with the shrinkage in brain storage space meaning I need every extra neuron I can get, I hope that, like a pair of worn out shoes, the Area of a Circle thing can be quietly discarded to make room for something else.

Unfortunately, they didn’t tell me in my chemistry class, or if they did, that information has been forfeited for Johnny Depp’s phone number, what the effects of increasing volume on temperature and cooking time are. Come to think of it, cakes didn’t feature highly in any chemistry class though they surely should have as that knowledge would have been truly helpful now, in the real world, in a way that knowing that a mole is the number of particles found in exactly 12 grams of carbon-12 (i.e. 6.023 x 10²³) never will be. Notwithstanding chemistry’s shortcomings, where cakes should undoubtedly have made an appearance, but according to my mental capacity, did not, was in the aptly named Home Economics class. This class, which  I believe has now, sadly, been extirpated from school curricula, was designed to equip young lasses with the know-how to produce such culinary delights as boiled eggs and cheese on toast. I distinctively remember it taking a double period – a full hour and 40 minutes – to prepare a cup of hot chocolate. Presumably any aspiring suitor contentedly warming his feet at the hearth whilst awaiting his bedtime beverage would have been driven in search of a more culinarily fecund maiden at the culmination of such a prolonged effort, and, as such, the class was deemed unprofitable and cut from the curriculum.

All this leads me to say that I just daren’t dive in on Saturday night and risk producing a cake that resembles more a collapsed volcano than firmly strung trampoline. I am off to buy the eggs now. Wish me luck…

Flying the nest

The problem with not blogging for a while is that you begin to think that you have nothing interesting to say that anyone will want to hear. I stopped because there were so many entertainments on holiday, and somehow, conversing to my family seemed much nicer than chatting to a computer screen. And now, after months of sloth, even the thought of having to write something creative has made me flee to the kitchen in search of a big tub of ice-cream.

My two-year old is delighted to be back at school and was even more pleased to be moved from the toddlers’ class to the upstairs class with the big kids. For the first time since she was born, I felt a wrench of sadness at seeing her growing up. Gruesomeness aside, whenever a Mum has mentioned to me a desire to bind their baby’s feet to arrest their development into a toddler, a wave of incomprehension has washed over me. Why would anyone want to hold onto a hefty incoherent ball of squidge when it will shortly metamorphose into a bounty of self-propelling humorous conversation?

But now I see.  Whilst peeking round the corner of the school wall the other day in a manner befitting Peter Rabbit in Mr MacGregor’s garden, I caught a glimpse of my two-year-old, eating her packed lunch and chatting to her girlfriend. It wasn’t so much what she was doing but how she was doing it. Chewing on cheese, she was quite self-contained and completely self-sufficient, and I saw in a flash a girl ten, twenty, thirty years from now, doing exactly the same thing. Only in those images I wasn’t able to hover in the background, waiting to be greeted with an ecstatic embrace.

For brief months, this little thing needed me so much that writing one email could only be achieved if elevated to red alert status. Leaving her side was tricky, leaving the room, a feat of extraordinary skill, and leaving the house alone, a distant memory of another life.

But now I can leave. I can shower, email, walk and talk on the phone. She has gained a level of independence that will let her play alone and play with friends. That hair width of time that I was so desperate to grab has grown from the thirty seconds for brushing my teeth, through half an hour to cook a meal, to a whole morning to work or play as I please.

However, that independence, for which I so craved and obsessed, equates not only to space for myself, but also to time that my child doesn’t need me. For months my daughter’s favourite phrase has been, “No, no no, I can do it myself.” And every hour that we are not together is one of lost opportunity. I am no longer the first person to hear a new word or see a new thing. And pardon me if I get a little sentimental here, but witnessing your child perform a new deed is akin to how Adam must have felt when he first dropped into the Garden of Eden. No matter that 6.2 billion people are already able to say, “So I told her I wasn’t very happy about it,” without turning a hair, when your very own offspring does it, winning Italy’s E148m lottery pales to nothing in comparison. And everyday there is something new. Most, undetectable by anyone other than myself, but each bringing a swelling to the heart and an incalculable joy to the mind.

The hard and unexpected result of seeing my two-year-old composedly eating lunch with Lucy was the realisation that she will not be the-little-girl-who-needs-me forever. In tiny increments, day by day, my input will be required a little less, until, before I realise what has hit me, my girl will be walking out the door and down the street, saying (if I am lucky), “Thanks Mum, I can manage on my own from now on.” She is already half way there: I don’t see a toddler any more, but a little girl, about to be a big girl, all grown up and flown from the nest.