The doorbell rang again.
“Hello,” said a young woman when I opened the door. “I don’t mean to disturb, but there’s a little boy leaning out of your top window up there.” She pointed above her head. “And he doesn’t appear to be dressed for the weather?”
Dressed for the—?
I leapt the stairs three at a time to the second-floor bedroom, where my three-year-old, unclothed and ready for bath time, had shimmied up the side of a bunk bed, opened a window, and begun grabbing at snowflakes and calling out merry greetings to neighbors.
“We don’t stick our bodies out of windows, we don’t talk to strangers, and we don’t stick our bodies out of windows and talk to strangers without our clothes on,” I told him as I cranked the window closed.
Everyone had told us it never snowed in Dublin.
I went back to the oven and pushed the picture of a comb hiding behind the sun. Nothing.
* * *
I had not prepared for this trip adequately.
If I could hop in that time machine and give my young-parent self some advice, this is what I might say:
When you are dropped off at your new front door by the airport cab with all your luggage at your feet and two small children clinging to your jacket and wailing, in the blinding sideways rain, you should already know where the nearest market, restaurant, pub, or food establishment of any kind is and how you’re going to get there without a car. (Perhaps you were thinking you’d just yell, “Siri, bring me a dozen apple muffins!” But what if your phone died hours ago?)
Children who haven’t eaten anything since the stale airplane dinner roll from the night before are no longer human. They are animals, driven purely by their hunger, ready to gnaw off each other’s limbs and/or your face. And when you realize that you have nothing but three Goldfish crackers and some cracker dust left in a plastic baggie, and that the landlord who was supposed to show up with your key is nowhere to be found, you may begin to cry.
Focus, you’ll think. Don’t cry.
You may heave one big sob anyway. Because although you know you have absolutely no right to despair or exhaustion considering the world’s spectrum of true despair and exhaustion—the wars, the famines, the plight of the animals nearing extinction—you also know now that you should have packed more granola bars. No one here is starving-starving, but your kids are starving, and no one here is dying-dying, but you are dying, and everything’s soaked and there’s no umbrella and the house is right there and you can’t get into it.
STOP CRYING.
You will stop, but you won’t notice that you’ve still got tears and snot and rain all over your face, plus blood streaming down your chin now from where the baby you’re jiggling has just head-butted you and split your lip open. So it won’t occur to you that you can’t just knock on a neighbor’s door and summon the last flickering twinkle of your Southern charm to smile and ask where the nearest grocery is. Because the neighbor might take one look at your bloody grin, mumble something you can’t hear, and close the door.
But there’s no time machine, so I can’t go back and tell myself any of this. Nor can I ask my then-self: Girl, what were you expecting from this trip?
* * *
A smart thing to do before going somewhere like this would be to connect with some people who live there—find a few friends-of-friends to show you the ropes. I didn’t. In retrospect, I think it’s partly because I was too busy trying to figure out whether a Pack ’n Play counted as a piece of carry-on luggage and if my baby could sleep in it every night for a period of several weeks without developing a bad back or whether babies even could get “bad backs” or if that’s just an old-person thing. But I also have to admit I didn’t think about needing friends.
Back home in Atlanta, I used to sit out in my little front yard under the shade of an oak tree in the mornings, just me and my little ones on blankets, watching cars and people and pets pass by. In the afternoons we headed to the park with other mothers and babies from the neighborhood playgroup. Most of those new moms had taken indefinite leave from work to stay home with their kids, and I, too, had quit my full-time job and switched to writing freelance at home. We’d had a couple of years of this routine before the opportunity arose to go to Dublin for a few months, and the idea of a change made it particularly alluring.
I knew this time of life wouldn’t last forever, and sometimes I wanted it to slow down. Children of my own, time to raise them and know them—that’s what I’d been waiting for, trying for, making deals with the universe for. When I held my baby to my shoulder after a bath, her warm, damp body wrapped in a towel, I thought, I can’t believe I get to do this. I can’t believe she is mine. When I attempted to snap pajamas around her roly-poly torso and found that they no longer fit, that she had moved out of nine-month-size clothes and into twelve-month sizes, I sniffled. I wanted, often, to freeze time, so I could hold my kids forever and soak up their babyness until it saturated me.
But this was true also: Our lives had a repetitive Groundhog Day quality to them lately. Wake up; feed baby; feed toddler; clean dirty dishes, dirty faces, dirty hands, dirty clothes, dirty diapers. Cut the same food into little pieces on high-chair trays, watch the same episodes of Sesame Street, play the same game of lining up stuffed animals across the den floor, every day the same, the same, the same.
I longed to mix things up a bit. I imagined, instead of sitting on our front steps, sitting on unfamiliar museum benches or in pubs, absorbing the conversation of our Irish neighbors, a world of train schedules instead of nap schedules. Wouldn’t it be fun to have all the babyness and none of the boredom? A change of scenery always helps, I knew that, and although I couldn’t picture exactly what the new scenery would look like, at least it would be different.
* * *
In Dublin, our rental stood in a row of identical old townhomes lined up like teeth on a cluster of streets rounded up behind a gate. Beyond our gate were more residential streets and, if you walked a little farther, a main road that stretched from one end of Dublin to the other. I knew we had neighbors, but I rarely saw them and had no idea where they went during the day. I never heard children, other than my own.
As the weeks passed, I began to venture out a bit more with the kids. I signed my son up for a toddler yoga class so that we’d have somewhere to go twice a week. While he ommmmmed with Irish kids, my daughter and I sat at an outdoor café—me sipping coffee, her mashing pieces of cookie between her fingers. We found a park within walking distance.
Once, I saw a flyer for an American women’s mother-and-baby group. Ah! I thought. Other parents. Fellow expats. Someone to talk to! I took down the information about their next gathering and decided to go.
I had just started pushing my daughter’s stroller into the loose pebbles of the hostess’s driveway when a possibly rabid, definitely pissed-off Doberman came galloping toward us. My son, who had been walking at my side, screeched and climbed me like a tree.
“You should socialize him better around dogs,” the lady yelled from her back door. “If you pick him up like that, you’re just enabling his fear.”
Her words enabled my fear. But I forged ahead, plowing the stroller through the gravel with my son perched on my shoulder like a baby monkey, the dog slobbering and pacing at our side. I introduced myself to a couple of people, and they nodded and turned back to their conversations already in progress. In the woman’s living room, everyone was talking about a parade happening downtown later that week. One mother asked another beside me, “Should we meet there? Maybe get lunch first?”
That was my opening. I could have said, “Hey, can we join you?” Maybe it was the run-in with the dog, or the fact that other than yelling at me across her driveway, this woman and her friends had mostly ignored us, as if we were strangers walking past their private party, but shyness overtook me.
We stayed for about an hour. I stood at the edge of a few groups as my daughter sat at my feet and my son hovered at my knee. If
I’d mustered a bit more extroversion I’d have gotten up the courage to ask a question or two. But the questions I wanted to ask seemed too big and unwieldy to inject into their conversations. I couldn’t seem to get out, How old is your baby?—much less, How are you different here? What will you do when it’s time to go back? Will you go? Are you afraid?
We didn’t go to any more group meetings.
* * *
Babies need sleep no matter which side of the ocean they’re on, so our existence in Ireland still revolved around naps, and the kids and I didn’t stray far from the house for long. Because I’d put all my freelance work on hold while we were abroad, there was little distraction from the basic tasks of caretaking: making meals, reading stories, playing with toys, bathing, dressing, rocking. While—don’t get me wrong—that sweet, loving contact is precisely what I wish I could get back for just five minutes now that my kids are teenagers who refuse to curl up in footie pajamas on my lap and let me read to them, it wasn’t exactly a shake-up from what we’d been doing back in Atlanta.
And although it was a fun change of pace to see John more in the evenings (back in the States, he’d traveled so much that we often didn’t see him for days at a time), he still traveled a good bit from our Irish home base. He woke early and went to work, sometimes hopping a train or a plane, and there I was, back home with the kids.
Our daily lives had not transformed with our relocation, except perhaps to get a bit lonelier.
I had not transformed, either. And I didn’t realize, until that thought dawned on me with some disappointment, that I’d wanted to. I’d thought I might become someone a little more glamorous, a tad more interesting. But this time, a change of scene didn’t change the whole movie. I was still pretty much the same character in the same film.
Looking back, I can see that when I had envisioned our life in Dublin before we left, it was just a concept, not a life. It included adorable vignettes like my baby tasting corned beef for the first time, my preschooler gazing contentedly out a train window at cows grazing in pastures, all four of us holding hands and skipping through fields of four-leafed clovers. It was photo ops, scrapbook entries, Facebook posts.
* * *
I want to fit into whatever culture I find myself visiting, whether that’s a place or a group of people. And this desire isn’t just about wanting to be liked—it’s about wanting to show that I know the culture, that I’ve succeeded at passing as an insider. I have a new identity. This means that when I travel, I research the conventions where I’m going: What do people wear? How do they greet each other? Do they hold their forks this way or that? I can’t stand the idea of standing out as a gauche American. It’s just so lazy and rude—and wrong—not to at least try to do as the Romans do. Right? Unfortunately, sometimes I get so distracted by trying to mimic the culture correctly that I miss the forest for the trees.
John and I went to Italy once, years before Dublin, with two other couples. One of the first things we did after arriving in Florence was take a car out to an olive grove in Tuscany. We got to taste thick green olive oil on little shingles of country bread. I ate it up and memorized every fact our guides taught us. That way, at every dinner afterward, I could discuss olive oil brilliantly with waiters and enjoy it in an educated way. (“Mmm, definitely cold-pressed. They must be keeping it in dark glass. Great soil.” What an asshole.)
One night we stumbled into a trattoria and were seated at a table in a crowded room. The waiter brought a bottle of olive oil and a hunk of bread. Noticing a little empty bowl on the table, we poured some oil into it and began dipping our bread. Mmmm, nutty? Fruity? When we polished it off, our waiter came back, chuckling, and offered us more.
We ate and ate, sopping up every last drop, wiping the bowl clean with our crusts. You don’t want to waste that stuff. It’s liquid gold.
It was then, as we sat back with bellies full of bread and oil, that I looked around the dining room and commented on how funny it was that in Italy people could still smoke in restaurants. We’d gotten used to dining in a haze. And then I noticed the smokers in the room—all at one time, seemingly—tapping their cigarettes into little bowls in the center of their tables.
We’d been eating out of an ashtray.
* * *
I’m not proud of this, but here it is: I put more time into planning my wardrobe for Ireland than I did into figuring out how we would eat. It was, in some ways, my first office job all over again—100 percent prepared on the clothing front, zero percent prepared otherwise. Okay, maybe I’m a little proud—I packed such good outfits for Ireland. Dark brown corduroy skirt with a jaunty kick pleat in the back. Knee-high brown leather boots with a low heel and a zip up the inner calf. Cream cowl-neck sweater, a thick, luscious wool blend. (I felt wool would be an important component of my Irish wardrobe, what with all the sheep we’d surely see roaming around.) In this outfit, I’d become a chocolate-and-vanilla-swirl, multilayered, luxuriously textured, cosmopolitan-yet-cozy quasi-Irish woman of casual elegance. I’d look the part.
I never wore it.
I never had the occasion. When I took the kids out on mini-explorations while John was at work, I pushed a stroller, wearing two layers of coats and an itchy beanie hat that kept my brain from freezing but mashed my hair into a sweaty mat upon my forehead. We stayed warm and had a good time, but we didn’t look like a fashion spread. For the occasional big outing—to the Dublin Zoo, say—I had to swaddle my daughter so many layers deep in fleece stroller blankets that only her eyes and nostrils were visible. No one could see her parade of adorable ensembles, all color-coded to go with her big brother’s sweaters, chosen in shades that would look great against a green backdrop, because of course, in the cartoon Ireland of my mind, everything was shamrock green. I’m not entirely sure I didn’t see a little leprechaun dancing in the background of these visions.
It was not green in Ireland.
We got there in early spring, but it looked and felt like winter. Dublin was gray upon gray upon gray. Sidewalks and leafless trees and puddles on frigid streets. The air gushing out of the tunnels at the train stations even smelled gray. It left gray residue inside my nostrils that I blew out into a tissue every night. It tasted gray.
* * *
I sent email dispatches back to the States, telling rollicking stories about our adventures. Here we are toddling down Grafton Street to St. Stephen’s Green! Here we are on the windy beach at Sandymount Strand! Here we are in Howth outside a castle! Here we are celebrating Mother’s Day with tea at Bewley’s!
These concept-life snapshots did happen. I was that expat American-in-Ireland adventuress, but only for moments at a time. “Look at this whole other life I have,” I seemed to be saying to my friends and family, but I was back to being same-old-me by the time I sat down to email the pictures. I hadn’t actually opened up a portal in time and space and entered a parallel life where I was someone else. This wasn’t like that old Gwyneth Paltrow movie Sliding Doors, in which one person’s life happens two different ways in alternating scenes. I’m a sucker for movies and books like that, because it’s such a delicious idea—that each of us has enough potential to populate more than one life story. Somewhere deep in my twisted little brain is the desire to be so good at so many things that I earn the chance to be multiple people. It seems so unfair that we only get to read the choose-your-own-adventure book of our own lives once, that we can’t pick a point and go, “Okay, this time flip to page 102 and do the rest another way.” But no, I didn’t have two lives unfolding side by side: Atlantan front-yard life, Irish train-station life. There was still only one me.
A special occasion, or location, or outfit, can give you something to remember and show off, but it’s the everyday that makes up real life. The everyday is where we really exist, just the once, in chronological order. If you want to experience multiple lives, you have to cram them into that one timeline.
Our spring in Ireland had no denouement—no climactic event that shifted
everything in our lives from one gear to another. I did, eventually, learn how to use the oven. I found my way around our end of town and signed up for Tesco’s grocery delivery service. We discovered a neighborhood bookshop. We took a lot of walks. We loved each other on different ground, under the same sun.
That was it.
A couple of months later, John’s job changed again and we went back to Atlanta, where the seasons had changed and it was too warm to wear wool.
The Pros and Cons of Joining the Ruby Committee
I did it for the right reasons. And I did it for the wrong reasons. Both. Multiple things can be true about someone at the same time.
Did I want to do some good for the world? Sure. But also, I had been feeling invisible for too long. Really, it was that, as much as any do-gooder urge, that made volunteering sound so appealing.
What I wanted, after several years of staying at home, alternating freelance proofreading jobs with trips to the toddler playground, was a little more structure, a little more sense of purpose, and some acknowledgment from somewhere that I was important. I had not ceased to be a member of society just because I no longer applied a swoop of eyeliner each morning before I went out into the world and sat around conference tables where other people could see me. I could still make an impact.
When I went to parents’ orientation on the first morning of my son’s preschool, I listened to the instructions about book bags (“No roller bags, please”—which, seriously, who is sending their four-year-old to preschool with a suitcase on wheels?) and the rules about snacks (no nuts), but what really caught my eye was the woman who stood up and talked about the parents’ association. All eyes were on her, in her shirtdress and flats, holding a clipboard full of sign-up sheets for various committees, smiling widely and introducing herself as “your point of contact if there’s anything you need this year.”
I Miss You When I Blink Page 10