daughters

Drooping Blue Tents

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we have a car
but are now so accustomed
to walking
that it sits in front of our building

we move across town,
the streets as familiar
as the smiles on their faces.
we order beer, wine,
and a baklava-like mirengue-topped
pastry that tastes like s’mores
and is gobbled up in two minutes

they stand in front of the circus sign
and we make our way across the bridge,
Reina Victoria in our back pocket,
coupons ready

for the first time we witness
the financial crisis
that weighs heavily on
the drooping blue tents,
kids as young as five performing,
throwing in camels, pythons,
and even Monster High,
holding up a sign at the end,
¡Viva El Circo!
while two-thirds of the seats
are vacuous reminders
of where people are
on a Saturday night

best. circus. ever.
is what my girls say,
never complaining once
about the long walk home

but all i can hear,
all i can see
as we move along rain-washed sidewalks,
their tiles as slippery as death,
is the American song,
“Unbreak My Heart”
whose Spanish rendition
and brightly-lit acrobatic act
brought tears to my eyes

the words
though they didn’t belong
the seats
though mostly empty
trampled out the desperation
that sits unspotlighted
in the back of every
slightly drooping circus tent

Costs

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“Why must you work every night?” Mythili asks, her ever-proper English bleeding through, even in Spain. “So we have money to buy food and go to fun places on the weekends,” I reply as quickly and brightly as I can manage, wondering the same thing, her words tugging my heart in every direction. “Oh yes, because we wasted 55€ on gas that one weekend?”

Yes, Mythili, my maker of details, my memorizer of moments filled with groaning parents and frantic disappointment, where a simple trip to the beach cost more than I earn in a day (gas, tolls, parking, ice cream… we didn’t even buy real food!).

I am making this work, is what I want to say. I have to work every night because I am determined to make this work. I want to see this country, I want you to experience it, and we cannot stay if I don’t work, we cannot take a weekend in Barcelona, drive to Portugal at Christmas, or go to the Spanish circus if I don’t work.

Instead I gather her up in my arms and hold back the tears that have been absent for weeks (a miracle! After months of ever-present pain and ever-ready tears, it’s been weeks since I have felt them on my cheeks). One day you will understand, I almost say, but I know she won’t. She will be like me, thinking back on my childhood, wishing I had more time with my always-working parents. And she’ll remember these long evenings without her mother and wonder why I brought us here.

Just like me, cycling across town, entering one Spanish home after another where children scream at me, where people cancel on me whenever they see fit, cutting my paycheck for the week but leaving me with random gaps of time that I can’t quite fill, I will look back, I just might look back, and wonder why I brought us here.

But she can’t hear these doubts that sit like acrid lemon juice on the tip of my tongue. Instead, I breathe in the smell of her hair, whisper, “I love you,” and ask her to make an amazing plan for our weekend, no matter what it might cost. After all, it has already cost us enough.

Beach Love

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three girls on the beach
a small photo for camera
forever in heart

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Home

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It’s been six weeks. They’ve had some bitter arguments, teary-eyed, face-slapping, pinching arguments. They’ve fought over toys, bread, milk. They’ve had fleeting comments about one place, friend, family member, or taste that they miss from back home.

But they have not once said, “I wish we didn’t come.”

Instead they have filled their time with: week one–decorating their rooms with paper torn from one of the notebooks we brought, colored pencils from Wal-mart, drawing pictures of flowers, pretty little girls, rainbows, and taping them up all over the white walls. Week two–preparing for school and getting their feet ready to walk miles in a day, gushing about the beauty of the harbor, trying out different kinds of foods, commenting on all the similarities and differences between this country and theirs. Week three–adjusting to school, crying a bit, laughing a bit, bragging over short hours, casual clothes, a variety of subjects that they’ve never experienced before. Week four–perfecting their hideouts in the park, being chased after by boys and girls, loving the festival’s parade, carnival, and ginormous cotton candies. Week five–wanting only uniforms to conform, they asked for nothing else, not more money, a desire to own a car, be free, to speak better Spanish. Week six–curling in their rooms with books in the iPad, playing games with Zoobles and the cars they spent six euros on today, blowing bubbles and living in a world that is completely different from home, a world in which they are completely at home.

How I love my girls. How amazing they are, to come here, to do this with me, and never for one moment think this is not where we should be. They are my strength, my dream, my hope for wherever we go in this life.

Direct Translation

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I set my alarm for just after 8. It is almost laughable. 8!! I used to get up at 4:16. It is surreal to me now, not even in the realm of possibility. I need to finish grading these papers on Saturday morning (the real morning, not the Spaniard version) before we pick up our “free” weekend car.

The girls pop out of their rooms just after 9 (how I love these Persian blinds that block out all light). I am not finished yet, and they meander in and out of the living room eating Nutella-ridden bread, crumbs dripping onto the couch we’ll never be able to vacuum. Such a simple idea, isn’t it? A vacuum?

My world back home is seven hours away from waking, and I put sloppy grades on a few last papers for the job they pay me next to nothing for while they send emails about their latest advertising campaign and take money from the federal government to finance loans for students who will neither graduate nor pay them back, but that’s OK. Thank you, Phoenix, for funding the 54€ in gas, the uniforms that cost more than they’re worth at Corte Inglés, the place that wouldn’t take my American credit card when everywhere else it works just fine? The store that doesn’t have adjustable waist bands for my too-skinny girls, that doesn’t offer hangers but includes a post office, a ferreteria, a price that doubles for the same exact brand, same exact fucking skirt, so be sure you’re paying attention or you’ll get screwed? Oh… yes. THIS must be the store my Spaniards were talking about when they said clothes were expensive in Spain. I mean, Pepe Jeans and DKNY for toddlers???

But I digress. What is the point of this post? Ahh, yes. My suitcase. My bicycle. The items I paid a pretty penny for, the things I brought from America that I either regret or am forever thankful for. (Duh, the bike is on the forever thankful for list).

Why did I bring soap? Sweaters? Endless pairs of pants? Will I ever see anything but summer? We spent the day in our “free” car at the beach on October 6th!! Am I ever going to pull onto my legs the seven pairs of pants, the fall-to-the-floor skirts, the winter coat whose presence in my wardrobe is nothing but a harsh reminder of the snow in Denver that people keep posting about today?

Why did I not bring what I would need? Books for my girls. My LCD projector. My electric teapot. A driver’s license that works anywhere in the world? (oops… impossible) And today? Monistat.

To tag onto my realm of reality, yesterday’s post: Wal-mart, I miss you. Your $5.97 price for a three-day cure, your place on the shelf in the pharmacy section (holy fuck, I almost started typing that with an F! Spanglish is destroying my mind!!)

But no. It’s OK, I can do this. I can walk the two blocks to the Farmacia, green cross flashing almost every hour of the day (not Sunday, nor between 3-6, of course!!). I have iPhone translator ready! Am prepared to look for what it tells me. The phrase is memorized before I enter the tiny store, where I’m inundated with condoms, sex creams, and baby bottles, multivitamins for toddlers, all in the same section, of course. After a quick review of the this-is-no-Walgreens store, I face the facts: it’s going up to the counter or suffering weeks with an uncomfortable itch.

Wow. This blog is getting brutal.

It’s so simple, really! The phrase! Levadura crema anti hongos. She is young, just out of college, in her pretty white coat.”For your feet, or for your body?”

Shit. I’m screwed. There’s a possibility she thinks I have Athlete’s Foot. “Body!” I almost shout. (Do we need to specify which part?) She goes to the back and emerges with a small box of cream. Begins to announce the topical use on all parts of the body, and I hold my hand up. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think this is it. I need… I don’t know how to say it.” Some fast fingers later, Mr. iPhone translator fucks me over again. Is there no word for yeast in Spanish???

I type in yeast infection and all I get is a translation that basically says, infection of the cream to cure the infection?? I show her the screen, feeling sheepish. (It is only hours later, examining the Spanish directions for the cream, that I remember the Latin root, Candidas. Yay for etymology that doesn’t come through in moments of trepidation!). “Su traducción…” she begins, and, as I do as an ESL teacher, as I do every day in Spain, I think of a simpler way to say it. I type in vaginal infection, and… of course!! It comes right up, a direct translation, same fucking words and all??? “Infección vaginal?” Wow.

A grin on her face as she examines the screen I hold up in front of her, she pops in and out of the back, and I have two weeks of torture in front of me, no sex, no simple cure, no pulling off the shelf in Wal-mart my one night stand, my freedom handed over in less than six dollars. But at least I can say that I faced my fear, walked into the pharmacy, and translated all my doubts via iPhone into the everyday reality of my life. I am lost in translation, out for the count, ready to cash in my chips for all I didn’t pack, all the money I have taken advantage of for so long, that is now poured into the Spanish economy like blood bringing new life to a newborn, one I hold within my arms and nurse as I think of a new beginning to my life in this home that is my home and not my home.

What I Miss

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There are things I miss so fiercely that my heart aches. A good long, cold and isolated bike ride, breath steaming out of my lungs, coming across the deer along the fence, the perfect mountain view tinted by rays of morning sun, everything just coming into the dawn of a new day. My mornings, solitude and strength building me up for whatever I might face, knowing that I could face the world after that ride.

My recliner. Chosen by me, ridiculed for being too large, but so thick, soft, a perfect armrest I once used to nurse all my babies, it leaned back perfectly, laptop in lap, movie on screen, book in hand, the perfect piece of furniture for every situation.

My Hyundai. Not the car itself, its junky no-lights-on-interior nothing to brag about. Just the freedom it provided, piling the kids in on our latest adventure, trekking across town to the museum, the zoo, the reservoir… how I miss the ability to go anywhere, anytime, for them to share that freedom with me, to be able to explore the world without limitations of bus schedules, car rental fees, and finances.

The telephone. Being able to pick it up and call my friends, my parents, my sister, anyone, without having to worry about an eight-hour time difference, without thinking, what a fucking shitty day, I need to talk, and knowing that I can’t talk to anyone, any time, about all the things in life I need to talk about. That it really is just us, the five of us, and we have to figure out a way to be everything for each other in every moment, whether it’s my girls’ fierce insistence on me spending my last dollar on school uniforms I can’t afford because they already stand out enough, and they need to fit in, or Bruce hating his inability to communicate anything, or me running into one problem after another with the principal (what IS it with me and principals???).

Wal-mart. God, I never thought I’d say that. Wal-mart, I miss you! I know I cursed you every time I walked in, ridiculed your inability to keep items in stock, criticized your exploitation of Chinese products, your destruction of the natural environment. But I wish you were here to save me when I can’t find a decent store to buy what my girls need, to be open when I need to print out a bus ticket or make copies for lessons, to take back all my items without a receipt!! TO BE OPEN ALL THE TIME!! Even Sundays!

Microbrews. I don’t think any description needs to follow the smooth taste of a home-brewed Hefeweizen straight out of the tap from Dry Dock.

My oven!! AN oven. No homemade pizzas. No baking chicken or potatoes. No broiling steak. But above all and everything, never a chance, for a whole year, to make a single batch of brownies. I can almost feel the melted chips sticking to my tongue, the tiny crumbs at the bottom of the pan pinched between my fingers, the smell that filled the house for hours…

Again, my words, my beautiful words. Trapped here in this blog, lost to everyone here who thinks I’m just some stupid American who’s timid and speechless. Oh, how I miss my words.

He Perdido Mis Palabras

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And do you know what I hate the most? I am a wordsmith. OK, maybe not the most amazing worker of words the world has ever seen, but I can say what I need to say, and what anyone else might be thinking as well, in a way that is genuine, that people can understand.

Do you know how difficult it is to go through each day and NOT be able to say what you want to say? To barely understand what those around you say in order to come up with an appropriate response? I am no longer witty. I am no longer audacious. I am just an ignorant fuck who sounds like a bumbling idiot.

If you were me, if you were the one whose parents and teachers told her at age eight, “You have a gift for words, you should be a writer,” do you know how difficult each waking moment would be? To know that your words were gone, stripped, tossed away? That your children’s words, the social butterfly oldest’s especially, the one who finds a friend in every circumstance, but has fear and anxiety now due to her language barrier, are all taken away??

And I ask myself, why am I here? Why have I demeaned myself to this extent that I will sit here crying for hours because my principal hates me so much that he told the department head that I deserved to be on my own, to travel to Murcia alone and figure out how to do my job because I have been so COLD to him???

I have met him twice, briefly, and I didn’t say much. I don’t talk much here. I am not myself. And now I am hated for not being myself, just like I am hated in other places for using my mouth too fucking much.

Why would I do this? Why would I turn down a viable job with a decent salary to become a teacher assistant in a foreign country where I CLEARLY don’t fit in, where the language burns my tongue, limits my every movement, where we are paupers with kids in a shitty school, where I have pulled myself ten notches down from my earned position in life?

The irony of it all: to learn a language. To find a new set of words, a new way of describing the world, to take on and imbed the words somewhere deep down, plant them in my soul for the hope of a different, better, view of this world.

Por favor. Ayúdame. He perdido mis palabras!

Carthagineses y Romanos

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We walked the four miles it takes to make it down to the harbor and back. So easy of a commute for adult legs, so arduous with three girls in tow. No one who ever wrote an expatriate web site, who ever published an expatriate book, who offers advice for traveling across Europe, who romanticizes the reality of everyday life, gave up a steady job, a home with a yard, and a debt-free life for one year in Spain with an English-only husband and three daughters in tow.

Let me write the blog post for you. The book for you. It will begin with staying up late and sleeping in, like all Spaniards do. We might throw in a siesta strewn with screaming girls who are today fighting over the fort they are wholly incapable of completing without our assistance, who beg to go on a bike ride, to go to the park where the three small boys in matching outfits will chase them and call them “ingleses“.

We will have a Spanish tortilla for dinner, made in our newly-purchased 10€ sarten, and eat at the usual hour of Americans after our four-mile journey to the center of town where we thought we were witnessing a children’s festival and came across, instead, a Lion King-esque display of Roman dressed tribes holding up babes in togas, presentations to the emperor and empress, the formal announcement of each family like a baptism of a new generation that we can’t quite understand or be a part of.

There were no bouncy castles. No face painting. Just women presenting gift baskets of fruit, throwing candy that my nine-year-old snatched up and filled her pockets with, asking me later how to say candy in Spanish so she could offer it to the four-year-old boy on the playground. We are reminded, again, that we don’t have a car, that we can’t pile in and own our weekend, but must give in to what this city has to offer us, whether it be a strange historical reenactment, a walk that six small legs no longer endear to endure, or an evening where we settle in, once again, to the solitude of this life we have chosen, no friends, no family outside the small circle we create for ourselves in the midst of a language none of us wholly understand.

This is my Spanish Sunday. It ends with me listening to a book so descriptive of a white Christmas that I ache for this endless summer to be over, the hot drought of Colorado bleeding through to palm trees and no breeze on a late September Spain, the beach like a taunting ghost, hovering before us but not quite within our reach as we stand before the replica of the first ship to circumnavigate the world, our feet foreign, our faces, hands, mouths foreign, in a place we have chosen to make our home.

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Our Latest Spain Adventure

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With handlebars barely within her reach, a bike seat that doesn’t allow her feet to touch the ground like she’s used to, and hand brakes only (also new), it is a bumpy one-mile ride to the beginning of our latest Spain adventure. Isabella, nine, is anxious to be a part of something here, both with me and the people of this city. She lives to belong.

This is the cheap bicycle we bought for Bruce at Carrefour, the one with crooked handlebars and a pedal that already fell off and is now on somewhat crookedly as well, its bearings stripped after a single repair. We move along side streets until we reach the bike lane, having to stop only a few times for hazard-lit cars whose drivers are greeting friends, delivering fruit, or just not in a hurry.

No one here is ever in a hurry. After a fall and a few precarious turns by Isabella, we are ten minutes late to the park. However, as cyclists of all ages continue to stream in, it becomes clear to me, once again, that this is not America. There is no liability form to sign, no registration fee, no separate event for kids and adults. And there is certainly no reason we should begin on time!

After another twenty-five minutes of waiting, we begin, five hundred or more, to stream out of the park. We fill the street with trailers, tagalongs, training wheels, baby bike seats, and a speed slow enough to walk. North to the first roundabout, over to the main Alameda, where we move along the palm trees toward the harbor, our safety enforced by neon-green uniformed policemen who stand at each corner. “It’s like being in a parade, just like the one last night!” Isabella announces, reminiscing the 11:00 p.m. march across town of people dressed in B.C.E. Roman and Carthagenian robes, kilts, skins, helmets, and furs. (Yes, I said 11 PM, where every age from little Roman toga-bearing babies and seventy-year-old crowned queens lit up the streets with their drums and song).

I am a cyclist. I have ridden three thousand miles in eight months, regularly ride my bike twenty-five miles to and from work each day, and have participated in a cycling event that took me over two mountain passes in the depths of the San Juans. But I certainly have never seen anything like this.

Like a slow-motion mob, we “ride” across town, weaving in and out of kids ranging in age from two to seventy (kind of like the parade!). There is no finish line, no lineup of booths promoting muscle milk or the latest carbon bike, no giant banners bragging about sponsorship. There are freestyle cyclists showing off, juegos tadicionales like hopskotch and jump rope, and all the families in Cartagena, gathered here at the city center to cycle their way to a sacred Saturday of family time.

I watch my daughter, who has mastered control of her handlebars, who leads me along what she calls “the Italian street” into and out of narrow “alleys”, who rides in circles with the other kids on the concrete at the center of a park, who asks to ride the long way home. We weave in and out of pedestrians, meander along the bike path past all the now-dispersed cyclists, and make our way back.

She has completed her first cycling event. I have completed my first cycling event in Spain. In our latest Spain adventure, where nothing is the same and everything is the same, we arrive home, unscathed, barely sweating, eight miles behind us, and all the miles ahead of us paved in love, in beauty, in the connectedness of belonging to a culture that cherishes their children far more than riding a bike over two mountain passes.

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A Little Walk

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I walked four miles today. That seems to be the average, if I’m not cycling to save time (certainly not for any velocity or muscle improvement, always having to weave through crowds on sidewalks or stop at a crosswalk to let pedestrians pass). More importantly, my girls walked over two miles, mostly between ten and eleven at night, from the crowded downtown area where we stopped to take pictures of the city hall and the giant flag of Spain, where we tried sardines and anchovies and lamb chops, where we celebrated our new-found freedom of me having gainful employment, where I carried my grandmother’s spirit at the back of every thought.

Classic poses to match the classic architecture.

My girls’ faces in the picture? Classic. More classic to me than the Roman architecture so proudly lit up behind us. The center of downtown feels like the true Europe to me. Reminds me of Italy, where I visited when I was fourteen, so anxious to see my grandmother’s homeland. I wish I had been able to go with her on one of her trips to visit her relatives. I think about these things now as I stop to take a picture of the Virgin Mary on my walk through downtown early this morning, as I look at all the families doting on their children here, so openly affectionate. I feel embraced by the warmth of the culture here, so at home with who I am as I walk down these streets.

I can’t pinpoint exactly what it is that led me to this point in my life. The easiest culprit would be the Spaniards who stayed with us for a year in our home, their exuberance for life so contagious that none of my friends could get enough of them, that their absence left a hollow mark in the shadows of our house.

But it’s so much deeper than that. What leads one to follow impossible dreams, to sacrifice almost everything in order to fulfill them? I think about these things as I take snapshots of this enchanted place, as my girls jump in joy at coming across a playground with a bouncy seesaw well into the night, as they see friends walking down the street when all Americans would be in bed by this hour. I think about my experiences as a child, my journeys to Europe, my grandmother, the Spanish exchange student who lived with us for a summer… everything comes together in my mind as I take a little walk, as I become a part of a new Old World.