Transitioning

Wow. The change-over from Small Boy waking up around 8 and being dressed at some time in the general neighborhood of 9 to Small Boy waking up at 7:25 and being out the door for Kindergarten at 8 kicked our asses last week. Fortunately the transition to Kindergarten itself has gone smoothly. It’s his second year, he’s in the same room with the same teachers, and about half the kids in the class are his classmates from last year so all of that is familiar. But getting out the door on time? That’s been quite the transition after our lazy summer mornings. 

If you’ve got kids going back to school, how’s that going? And whether you’ve got kids or not, what’s the hardest part about summer drawing to a close for you? And what’s the best part? (Yes, I dread the grey days of winter here in the flatlands, but winter vacation skiing and sledding in the Swiss Alps? Bring it on!)

The same, but different

Small Boy started his second year of Kindergarten yesterday; he’s excited to be a Hirte this year. His Kindergarten class is mixed between five/will turn five year olds in the optional first year of Kindergarten and six/will turn six year olds in the required second year. The older kids in the group act as Hirte – “shepherds” who help the new kids learn the ropes, help enforce classroom rules, and sometimes separate kids whose playing is spilling over into fighting. Last year, as one of the new, young kids, Small Boy was a Schaf (a sheep – yeah, don’t get me started) but now he’s one of the Big Kids.

The first day was a breeze yesterday; he’s an old hand at this Kindergarten thing. When I think back to last year and the tears that were involved in my parting, to the fact that I had to stay nearly an hour that first morning and was the second-to-last parent allowed to say goodbye and leave the room, I see how much he’s grown up in the past year. Yesterday I stayed through the standard introduction and parent information session, then Small Boy ran off to the art table and started drawing pictures of butterflies and I said I could go. (His drawing has developed by leaps and bounds over the past year as well and he often dashes off to the “art project table” we have at home to draw a picture. Have I shared his pictures of Fabian Cancellara that he drew during this year’s Tour de France? No? Well, here’s one: 

It may seem childish for a five and a half year old, but I never really did much drawing with him before he started kindy, so he went from literally scribbling like a toddler to drawing people on bicycles in the course of the Kindergarten year and I am very proud of him and his pictures. And that he comes up with the ideas himself, and just runs off to draw them.)

This morning I dropped Small Boy at Kindergarten – I’ve gone through the whole how-long-do-I-keep-bringing-him-all-the-way-to-the-school-house-door drama here, and for now I’m still going all the way to the building with him and picking him up at the door – and saw the clutch of new moms going into the building with their kids or peeking through the window into the changing room. The new moms are so cute; that was me last year, hovering outside the window making sure he got out of the changing room and into the classroom. This morning I simply kissed Small Boy goodbye in the school yard and called out “Tschuss!” (bye-bye) as he went running off to the building. He likes Kindergarten. He’s good at it. He’s not the most popular boy in the class, but he’s not the outsider and that’s all I could wish for. He knows how to try to play with other kids and he’s got his best buddy who he has regular out-of-school play dates with. He has even, clearly, learned a lot.

I’m curious to see what this second year brings. He is in the same classroom with the same teachers, but now that he is one of the older kids I’m curious to see how the teachers change what they expect of him. They must slowly expect more of the six year olds; these are the kids who will go to school next year. I would think they will expect ever longer periods of attention, even greater pencil control, closer attention to detail, more precise following of instructions. This year will be the same, but different, and I wonder what that will look like.

Still life with thresher

Agricultural workers are exempt from the fairly strict Sunday work and noise regulations in Switzerland. If the crop is ready to come in, the crop is ready to come in; if the weather is fine for threshing, the weather is fine for threshing; and if somebody is threshing on a Sunday – a Sunday that is also the national day of Switzerland – complaints about it will go unanswered. In the farming village we lived in when I first moved to Switzerland, the people who bought the houses that had been newly constructed on the border of a farm had to sign a covenant stating that they were aware that they were buying a house in an active agricultural zone and they could not complain about the routine necessities of farming life: sheep and/or cow bells, the smell of manure, tractors driving on Sunday, the threshing going at all hours of the day when it’s time to get the wheat in. I wouldn’t be surprised if the owners of the houses that border J’s fields – houses built on farm land my in-laws sold as construction land – had to sign on to something similar.

Wheat is an extremely time-sensitive crop (one of the many things I’ve learned since marrying into a farm family): once the wheat is ripe there is a very short window – a few days – before the grains starts falling. And you need fine weather for threshing. Wet wheat stalks fall over and do not pass easily through the thresher. Wet wheat also brings a lower price if you are able to harvest in the rain. So when the wheat is ready and the weather is fine, it’s time to thresh no matter what day it is.

Which is how my father- and brother-in-law came to be threshing on not just any Sunday, but Sunday August first, which is Switzerland’s national day. Most small family farmers don’t own their own threshers (a combine harvester can run about $250,000) – they hire a thresher, and the farmer who owns the machine does the actual driving. The farmers who own the fields ferry the tractor-trailers into which the grains are emptied back and forth to the barn. So strictly speaking, my brother-in-law was not threshing; N, who owns the combine, was threshing. He let Boychen and Small Boy ride along for a few passes. 

I feel like such a kid when the big farm machines come out. I get as excited by them as the boys do.

When grief ages

I have been writing this post for days; I have been writing this post all month; I have been writing this post for twenty years. My father died twenty years ago today of lung cancer. He didn’t even live a year past his diagnosis, the diagnosis he received while I was in my junior year of college. The diagnosis he and my mother weren’t going to tell me about until my brother threatened to tell me himself if they didn’t. They told me when I came home over the long Thanksgiving weekend, and he was dead the following July. Eight months. Eight months, more half of which I missed finishing out my junior year. My father wouldn’t hear of me taking time off and coming back home. He wanted no part of me putting college on hold. (I can’t recall if I actually suggested doing that. If I did, I can well imagine I said it knowing he would refuse.) It was the pride of his life that he, a high school drop-out, put both his kids through college debt free. He didn’t live to see my senior year, but by the time he died he knew the tuition had been covered; he knew I’d be able to finish without having to work. He was quietly but implacably opposed to me holding a part time job during the academic year. “No, you won’t get a job,” he told me when I said I could work part time to help make up the difference between in-state tuition at the University of Illinois, where my brother went and where I could not, would not follow, and the out-of-state tuition at Indiana University where I wanted to go. “Your job is to be a student. My job is to pay for it.” He wanted me to be a student. He wanted me to take classes and study and make friends and play sports and have the time to do whatever it was that kids did in college. (Things he didn’t get to do; I’m well aware that he needed me to have the full co-ed experience because he never had it. There are worse dreams to pin on your children and god knows I don’t hold it against him. I found my best self in those four years, and I owe that to him.)  

So I went to Indiana, with its collegiate cycling tradition, and I had the time to be a cyclist in college because my father was an old-fashioned mid-Western man who believed that putting his kids through college was a man’s job; and being a cyclist in college was the best thing I did in those four years. It was where I found my best self. It was also the thing that carried me after he died. The spring of my junior year, when he was dying, and my whole senior year, when his death was raw and unbelievable, cycling saved me. Racing saved me. I rode my bike hard that year and a half, grinding out time trials on Flat Bottom Road, climbing Firehouse Hill then coasting back to the base to climb it again. Riding full of sorrow and anger and self-pity, riding as if I could leave first his cancer and later his death behind me. Riding with my team, who were the only ones who knew what was going on with me. Who were the ones who knew that I wanted it to hurt, I needed it to hurt, I wanted to finish those workouts, those sprinting drills, those team time trails, those spinning drills, and fall over on the side of the road and throw up from the effort. Because if it hurt, if I was gasping for breath, I was still alive.

Now, unbelievably, it’s been twenty years – twenty years! I have been fatherless almost half my life – and the sharp and jagged edges of grief have been worn away; I don’t have loose pieces of glass rattling around inside of me anymore, cutting me anytime I make a sudden move. I don’t wake up from dreams of my father believing for that first confused second that he’s still alive. I don’t miss him every day. I probably do miss him every day but it’s not all-consuming; it’s background music. A kind of emotional white noise. What I miss now are the things I miss on my father’s behalf. The things he missed. He never met my brother’s wife, or my husband, or any of his grandchildren. My father coached hockey, and of his four grandchildren my Small Boy is the only one who plays. My father missed that, his grandson learning to skate. He would have liked my father-in-law. Sharing no common language, they wouldn’t have understood a word the other had to say, but my father-in-law would have taken my dad to an SCB hockey game and they would have been great friends. He would have thought R was a fine man and he would have enjoyed teaching him to fly-fish. He would have laughed when I moved to the farm last year, the laugh of a father sharing with his daughter a private thirty year old joke about living on a farm. I miss these things on his behalf, I mourn for everything he missed and not, I think, for myself anymore. I have had, after all, twenty years to get used to his absence. Grief and I have come to terms.

It still sneaks up on me though. I expect it on days like today, on my father’s birthday or on Thanksgiving, but grief sneaks up on me sometimes, too, at the most unexpected times and in the most unexpected places. In the locker room lacing up the Small Boy’s skates. Racing popsicle stick boats in the creek with the boys. Catching a whiff of coffee beans grinding at the grocery store. It’s there, suddenly, over my shoulder, like a cyclist I can’t drop. It’s not fierce and urgent anymore, though; it’s not racing me to the mountain top. We don’t grind it out, grief and I. It doesn’t taunt me, and I don’t need to beat it. I don’t need to push, and push, and push. I no longer need to be the fastest girl on the track, racing away from my loss.

You can’t out-race grief anyway; it’s got a better bike.

There were also lobster rolls

There wasn’t just poetry. There were also lobster rolls. I ate lobster rolls from the day I landed in Boston to the day I left. I also ate whole lobster, and crab cakes, and fisherman’s stew, and fabulous egg dishes and homemade scones, and pizza by the slice while watching the tide come and go at Duck Creek. I had lattes in the afternoon with individual sized cherry cheesecakes while writing my poems for the next day. I had a beer now and then and, on one occasion, margaritas. (Several.) I ate constantly, wonderfully, deliciously. I ate and ate and ate. I ate much and well. Much more and much more well than usual. I love my boys, but sweet Foxy Brown they manage to take the sheer selfish sensual pleasure of eating from the dinner-time experience and my god how I loved stuffing myself with lobster and crab cakes.

I need more of that in my life. More food, more good food, more grown up food.

What I learned in Wellfleet

Wellfleet. I’m still trying to write about Wellfleet. About Wellfleet the town. About working with Marge Piercy. About the eleven other wonderful poets, amazing women all, who travelled the week with me. About what I learned; what I learned about poetry and what I learned about my life. 

It’s easier to write about the poetry, about the workshop experience. It was a juried workshop: we had to apply with an initial package of five poems (perhaps you remember my poem choosing angst?); the twelve of us who were ultimately selected then had to provide an additional ten poems prior to the workshop. We met for three hours each morning with each day devoted to a particular aspect of the craft: imagery, oral effects, titles, line length/line breaks, etc. In the afternoons we had assignments based on that morning’s work and we then workshopped these poems the following day. Each one of us had an individual conference with Marge, in the gazebo in her garden, during which she went over our fifteen poems in great detail and provided more general feedback. We capped off the week with a public reading in Wellfleet; Marge closed the reading with some new poems. There was a lot of work, but not too much, and Marge deliberately balanced the workload with us having an opportunity to explore and enjoy Wellfleet. (And may I say: I will be back with family in tow. Yes, you impressed me that much, Wellfleet.) It was a fantastic experience.

My instinct that I am good at this, that if I stick at this I will have some modest success, was confirmed by Marge, who gave me some very positive feedback. (She also suggested that I might want to consider abandoning altogether any further attempts at the villanelle; she’s nothing if not honest.) I have a good eye for the right detail and I’m generally good at titles but I could play with sound a lot more than I do. My use of the line break is generally on target, but when I fail, I fail spectacularly. I have a good instinct for revision. My best work speaks to my emotional truth; my weakest poems are those that I write because I think I should write about a certain thing or in a certain way. Much to my surprise, I have a pretty good reading presence. All in all, Marge’s message to me was: stick with this and you will be widely published. It was so rewarding to have my instincts confirmed. I do so much of my work and my attempts at growth and learning alone here in expat isolation; it is good to have those reminders that this is not a fool’s errand. 

Write. Just keep writing.

I’m back in business

Of course my blog went down the whole time I was in the US. Of course I completely rely on R to provide tech support for my blog. Of course I have no idea as to what goes on behind the curtains of my blog. (Of course I need to change that.) Of course I had a lot to say: the bizarre reverse culture shock of an Overseas American coming back home (e.g: hey, US, what’s with the air conditioning set to 67 degrees? Seriously?), how it was being away from the boys for so long (surprisingly okay, and Skype video calls helped a great deal), taking the ferry from Boston to Provincetown (Switzerland, I love you, but you are a bit, um, land-locked, no?), the workshop with Marge (yes, I get to call her Marge now), and the glory that is Curious George & Friends children’s bookstore in Cambridge (the English language children’s book selection is pretty limited in a non-English speaking country). Of course what with the two of us being six time zones apart and him having his hands full solo parenting, I didn’t bother to ask R to look into it whatever was going on with the blog until I was back in Switzerland. 

Of course I wrote. I wrote in my journals and I wrote poems for the workshop. And over the next week I hope to go back in time and sort it all out here, for you and for myself. Because for me, things aren’t fully real until I capture them in words.

Holding it in my hand

My copy of Walden and Other Writings is the copy I gave my father for Father’s Day in 1988. I am sure that somewhere in a box sits my first paperback copy from high school with its underlinings and marginalia, but the copy I keep in my library is the one I gave my father and which I took for my own after he died. I inscribed it with a quote of Thoreau’s, his most over-quoted quote, no doubt, but one I chose for a reason:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived…I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…

Then I wrote “Happy Father’s Day to the man who taught me the above long before I ever picked up Thoreau. Thank you,”

Twenty years on, it is hard sometimes to distinguish between memories of the actual relationship I had with my father, the real feeling that was there at the time, and the glossed over glow the memory of a dead loved one can take on. Especially after twenty years it would be easy to have created in my mind a relationship far different from the one that really existed at the time. In light of some of my other memories that have revealed themselves as false, I hold this copy of Thoreau with my school-girl’s writing on the fly-leaf, this piece of my love for my father that I can hold in my hand, especially dear.

It was real. He was my father, and I loved and admired him. And I know, and will always know, that at least once in my life before he died, I told him clearly that he taught me how to live a true life, and that I was grateful.

This brings me some peace when the memories shift like mist over the river.

Random expat thoughts

A grocery store I frequent has a big display at the end of one of the aisles, all “Neu!” and “Jetzt!” and big attention-grabbing signs and a tower of boxes of … Fruit Loops. As soon as I saw them I said “OH! Fruit Loops!” My heart might possibly have fluttered. Here’s the weird part, though: I don’t eat Fruit Loops. I never ate Fruit Loops (we were more of a Frosted Flakes family), except for possibly a few Sunday mornings in the college dorm when I was hung over, and I have no desire for the boys to ever discover the existence of Fruit Loops. I could easily go the rest of my life without eating a single Loop of Fruit. But seeing them in my Swiss grocery store made me so excited I almost actually grabbed a box just because I could. I’ve been here for ten years, but I still get excited when I see American food in the store, even if it’s nothing I have any interest in.

*  *  *

I’ve been in Switzerland for ten years, and I’ve been toying with writing for much of that time. I never took it as seriously as I have for the past eighteen months, but I always had bursts of energy and Big Plans. And postage stamps for those pesky SASEs. (And 8 1/2 x 11 paper, too.) More and more journals now accept on-line submissions (at least for poetry; I’ve put prose on the back burner these past two years so I don’t know what the status is there), and I’ve found that many of those that say they don’t will make an exception for overseas submissions if you send a polite e-mail asking about it. But there are still those journals that only accept postal submissions, so I’ve always got some US international airmail stamps around. I’ve got 75 cent stamps. I’ve got some 80 cent stamps. I’ve got 90 cent stamps, and 4 cent add-ons, and now I’ve got 98 cent stamps. I’ve even got some regular old 32 cent stamps, and if US postal rates keep going one like this I’ll soon be able to combine them with the 75 cent stamps and get both of those denominations out of my hair. I have seventy-five cent postage stamps. I have been in Switzerland for twenty-three cents worth of rate increases. 

*  *  *

When Small Boy started talking, he preferred Swiss; he still does, I think. It felt strange, this son of mine chattering at me in Swiss. I guess I’ve gotten used to it, because I kind of think that when The Boychen (who I think is more linguistically balanced than his older brother) says, “Ja, das chöi mir, Mama” * it’s the cutest thing ever.

*  *  *

When I read the first line of this Tony Judt article, “One is not supposed to love Switzerland.”, I took umbrage. My pride was hurt, and I felt defensive and protective. Damn, I’ve been here a long time, because the truth is this: I love Switzerland. Unabashedly. 

* Yeah, we could do that, Mama.

This woman’s work

In less than a month I leave for Boston where I’ll spend a few days recovering from jetlag and enjoying one of my favorite cities before heading on to Wellfleet for the poetry workshop. R asked me to make up a general schedule for him to help him stay organized and on top of things while I’m away – just keeping track of when I do what I do so that he doesn’t suddenly wake up one morning to find that Small Boy has no underwear and Kindergarten starts in 12 minutes. 

I’d been starting to feel some creeping guilt about this upcoming trip, the kind of guilt that I’m sure some of you moms, especially fellow stay-at-home moms, will understand and perhaps find familiar. I’ll be away for twelve days (two of which are lost to trans-Atlantic travel) and I’ve been starting to think that’s rather a long time. I’ve been starting to think it’s a bit selfish. I’ve been starting to think it’s a lot of time and money for a poetry workshop. (It doesn’t help that the work I have chosen – or the work that has chosen me – holds no financial promise. I mean, even the Pulitzer Prize for poetry only awards ten grand. From a purely financial calculation, every poetry workshop I attend is a net loss – more so if R has to take vacation days so that I can get away.)  I’ve been starting to wonder if I actually deserve this all-about-me trip away from my family. Why do we do that? As women, generally, and mothers, specifically, our wants and needs end up on the low end of the totem pole more often than not.

So I started making this list/schedule for R, and it’s two pages long – and that only covers Monday through Friday! (Though I’ve put some effort into organizing things so that I don’t have to do routine house chores on the weekend.) And I’ve left off the intermittent stuff that he won’t need to deal with(recycling, washing the car, migrating boy toys back into more orderly storage) as well as the blindingly obvious stuff like “feed the children.” We let a lot of things slide around here (ironing, for example, and washing the windows), it’s part of our agreement, but apparently I still do a lot. Laundry alone takes up half the list. Grocery shopping. Picking Small Boy up from Kindi (R does the morning run), shuttling him to play-dates. Keeping the plants watered. Vacuuming. Heavens, do I vacuum. Now that we don’t have a cleaning lady, I’ve picked up the cleaning, too, and I try to stay on what was her schedule but one week out of four that probably gets lost in the shuffle. When I write down everything I do to keep this house more or less running, it runs to two pages – and here’s the scary thing: in spite of all that I do do, we don’t exactly run the tightest ship around here plus R’s chore list would probably go on for quite a bit as well. It’s exhausting, all the stupid stuff I do every day just to keep our heads above water. But seeing it listed out like that, I have to say: I’m feeling a lot less guilty about this trip. Seeing it listed out like that makes me realize that I have a full time job, and this is my two-week vacation.

Do you see yourself in this post? Do you feel a pang of “I don’t really deserve this” when you take time for yourself? It’s the time, I think, more than anything, we feel guilty about. I don’t have a problem buying things that I need (clothes, a new bike) or want (books), but when I carve out time for myself, when I get out of the house for the day (or twelve), there is a twinge of conscience. Is this ringing a bell with any of you? What do you do to push through the nagging voice and take what you need?