parenting

The Sky Breaks Free

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i share your words,
i listen to happiness,
to discontent that carries
across the ocean.
but you, but i,
am interrupted

four days of clouds,
towels and pants
making hallway maneuvering unmanageable,
the sky breaks free
and we have ourselves a sunny day

we walk along our crowded street,
stop at the museum
that creeps Isabella out,
that brings out
your Byzantine God
(i take pictures of all but the mummy)

the store beckons
our grumbling stomachs
where we find cheap pastries
and German beer,
making everyone happy enough
for a quick bar stop

my girls play in trees,
scattering flowers along the
“aisle” of their wedding,
become petulant when
boys from their class arrive
and beg to play futbol
on their perfectly decorated locale

your words follow me through the day,
so long lost over weeks, months,
the venting disgruntlement,
the loving goodbye,
just as if i stood in that
hotel hallway holding your hand,
as if i weren’t here
hearing only the Spanish version
of everything i needed to say

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Every Day is a New Day

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I ride home through day three of rain-soaked streets, a three hour gap of impertinent design in my impossible-to-manage schedule. Should I be enjoying this time, sifting through chapters of the book I’ve been trying to listen to for three months, with never enough time to complete it? Should I be watching television, feeding myself on Spanish versions of family board games or documentaries on subjects I can barely understand in English?

Here I sit, finding solace in the words I write. On Monday, I did something unfathomable–I missed a class!! This is pretty much one of the greatest fears of my life: to not show up to work, to be absent, tardy, or incompetent at what I do. How could I have missed yet another change to my schedule? I had iPhone calendar ready, in hand on Monday morning, and it promised me that I didn’t have to return to school that day.

The old saying, every day is a new day, has a new meaning for me in this space I fit myself into. I am, perhaps more than anyone I know, a person whose life is embedded with routines. There is a reason I love teaching, and it’s not just reaching out to students and summers off. It is the consistency of the same routine day in and day out, both in the schedules of my classes and the way that I set up a classroom–begin first with a warmup, engage the students, write things out for them under the document camera, cycle through the room to check for understanding, call on students who may not know the answer and pry it out of them. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Also: rising at 4:18 each day. My solitary breakfasts of checking on my University of Phoenix classes, sipping hot tea, and making some smart-ass comment on Facebook. Then pulling on layers of cycling gear, packing up my saddlebag, and enjoying that ride across town, where I could change clothes and keep my bike inside my pod, its seat, helmet, and chains protected from the evils of nature and society. Seeing the same familiar faces of colleagues, chatting about the stupid Broncos game or asking me what would work best for this lesson today. Going to the same six classes, planning for the next day, then cycling home, to arrive at the same time as my daughters, and to be able to enjoy every moment of their fit-pitching, homework-groaning, shower-whining fights, their I-love-yous, hugs, and snuggling up on the couch at bed time reading stories. Bed time for me two hours later, after writing, reading, chatting with friends, relaxing in my recliner and piling high mint chocolate chip ice cream to top off the simplicity of my everyday life.

It’s so funny how the mundane routine of life could be desirable. On top of everything else I have had to adjust to in Spain, I think my schedule will bear down on me more than the words I think I’ll never learn, the cultural nuances I’ll miss, and the absence of adequate teaching tools (chalk dust is embedded in my fingerprints). While I only work twelve hours a week at the school, the times vary each day, and are constantly being switched around, cancelled, or augmented. No matter how many times I’ve copied the printed calendar into my iPhone, I can guarantee I’ve missed at least one change. I never quite know if I will see my girls off to school or be able to meet them at the last siren. And at the school? I attend twelve different classes every week, have to work with seven different teachers, have no time to plan anything in advance with any of them, and must walk into each classroom not knowing a single name of any student (all of whom are together all day, sit next to their best friends, and have been in the same class together for years). So when the teachers step out or simply do not care about classroom management? I can’t call out José or Patricia and tell them, in words they will understand, to be respectful and pay attention. I am just a substitute to them, swirling around in a world of chaos.

And to top off the inconsistency of that, my tutoring schedule varies with such extremes that I have become the worst clockwatcher of all time. I even bought a watch!! Working five to six hours every evening, with random gaps between, I have actually had to make a calendar for Bruce to know when to fix dinner every night (there are some things I will NOT let go, and one is dinner with my family). I have to rush between tutoring appointments to the extent that it is no longer possible to walk; I must carry my bike up and down the six flights of stairs all day and all night long. I rush between four or five clients a day, trying to plan activities for preschoolers, fifty-year-old men, mostly-fluent adults, and apathetic teenagers.

When I arrive home some time between 9:30 and 9:45 each night, I wish I could stay up late, relax, watch a movie and know that I can sleep in the next day. But I can’t. I have to rise before dawn each morning to work with the girls on their homework, learning the Spanish words I will never need to use, such as the parts of a snail, the inner ear, or synonyms.

How is it that I am only working forty hours a week? It feels like sixty. The loneliness of such an oppressive schedule chokes me, as I can never talk to anyone back home during the week, since they are all just rising right when I begin my second cycle of work. Here in Spain, every day is a new day, literally. I never know just where I need to be, whose class I might lose control over, or exactly the right materials to bring with me as I pedal across town. All I can hope is that I will learn to adjust to this as I have adjusted to everything else that I have flipped upside down during the past six months of my life.

Unpredictability

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You can’t predict this. That your day will begin before dawn and end later than most people in America would consider working. Hell, in Spain, too, though they sure as hell don’t mind hiring me to work that late!

There was no way of knowing, before I came here, how much homework my daughters would have. How intimidating and complex it could be, while I sit with my translate app ready to look up the English version of words like slither, spinal, and homonym. How much time this would take out of the exceedingly brief time I have with them each day. How I could lose sleep over how early I need to set the alarm, because what if Mythili fails her science test or Riona doesn’t have a chance to read aloud to me or Isabella can’t retell the story of Jesus saving all and bringing his followers to the kingdom of heaven when she’s never heard these stories in English to compare them to??

This isn’t my singular problem. I have come up with a new theory (yet again) about Spain. Since I spend most of my day not with my family but with Spaniards, I hear all kinds of stories and details about their culture. Students commonly spend 4-5 hours a night completing homework, and parents often take classes themselves, for professional development, French, English, you name it. Not because they’re looking forward to a salary increase, mind you. Because they want to learn. Week nights are essential to their incremental increase of knowledge.

Studying and working so intensely, especially between the days of Monday through Thursday, are as much a part of this culture as sacred meal times, siesta, and family-only weekends. Yes, they may live for vacations, but they work their asses off in between times so that they can enjoy them!

So when I had a few clients tonight mention to me that next Thursday is (yet another) fiesta, and “will you be working?” I almost answered no. But I’m just too damn American. I want to say, “You do realize that if I don’t work, I don’t get paid, right? And that I have a family?” But I just tell them, “Yes, I’m working,” to which they respond with, “OK… well it is a holiday, so we’ll call you next Wednesday to let you know if we’re taking a trip or not.”

It’s almost laughable! I can’t imagine planning a trip the day before I take it! Just like I can’t imagine allowing Isabella to put off her religion homework till Sunday night, or letting Mythili get by with just a 7 on her lengua exam (that will never happen again!), or allowing Riona to skip out on circling all the letters her teacher wants her to focus on enunciating this week (though this is not required).

I couldn’t have predicted how complicated our lives would be here. The impossibility of presumptions that I could have made, most of which would have been untrue, would have made a long tail that followed me across the sea and would have been chopped slowly away with each new day. Fortunately, I was too busy giving up my previous life one heartbreak at a time before boarding that plane, so I didn’t have any time to predict anything at all. And that is why I am still able to set my alarm for the exact right minute and suck the marrow out of every brief moment of life that does not involve a frenzied cycle across town, trying to explain an overly-litigate society to Spaniards whose schools don’t have proper fire alarms, or translating food wheels for a seven-year-old. Instead, I can look forward to next week’s fiesta in Benidorm, a trip I planned weeks ago, have already booked and paid for, and beats out all predictions–impossible to make–about how intensely I would love my vacations!!

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.

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.

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.

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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Blinded

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they move through the day
laughter of love on their lips
why can’t you see it?

June (2012) Daughters

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Riona

we walk Venice Beach
we’re offered everything
from CD ash trays,
a strip-tease picture with a dog
in a pink bikini,
and endlessly legal marijuana
(doctor on premises!)

mostly oblivious,
you trot alongside
and point to the homeless man
sitting in the lawn, complete
with office chair and
sleeping bag

i explain. you respond:
he lives outside?
in ALL that grass?
well that’s bigger than our house!

and your five-year-old wisdom
has made this beach day better.

Mythili

the conversations
in the 2000-mile backseat drive
are circular and cute

none cuter than
sisters, learning about the Gold Rush
from historical mama, declare,
We want to dig for gold in these mountains!

with your usual no-nonsense logic,
you casually reply,
You’re going to need a drill.

Isabella

for you,
a trip to California
is no more than an excuse
for a brand new story
to share with all your friends
upon your happy return

that’s my girl