On the road again

We touched down in Heathrow today. I feel kind of badass. Even though this is BAD. This is when I realize that I’m totally not twenty-four anymore. 


The judge sustained the deportation notice. It was a “Matter of internal security.” We're leaving our home and it might be for good. 

"This is the best sign we could get?." Flickr Creative Commons. Web. 25 Jan 2011. 

I feel like this is about to be fairly major. I need some way to talk about it, to get it off my chest, even if it is to a computer screen. Benj isn’t stressed, not even a little bit. I don’t think he’s hit the “I’m not twenty-four” mind screw just yet. He went out again today and stood on his soap box and probably outran the cops and almost got arrested (or resisted arrest) and came home all pumped and wanting to punch a plate glass window.

   

Thank God, our kids are great. Thank God. They have no way of grasping what went wrong but they are totally willing to adapt. Kiel is so sweet and sleeps through everything and would eat shit off a shovel. Low key kid, I tell ya. Amelie just started first grade and she could make friends with a headless Barbie doll. I’m bummed we have to take her out of school because it’s a good school and I didn’t want my children to experience deportation before they even got a handle on playground politics and learned how to blow their own nose. 

Benj found us a place to stay for the first month that we’re here until we can figure out where we’re going from here. It’s some old dude who lives with his wife south of London who watches Benj’s videos on YouTube. I’ll figure out how to homeschool Amelie in the meantime. Benj can make work wherever he goes. Goes from bar to bar seeing if they’ll pay him to play. And I...well I paint. And while I don’t get excited over painting trim on houses or doing single-stroke portraits of kittens and old men with their hunting gear, this is my adventure.

"English." Flickr Creative Commons. Web. 22 Jan 2011.

To the East

Combined Media. Flickr Creative Commons. Web. 22 Jan 2011.

No more Croydon. I don’t know how to grasp how much has happened and somehow put it into that time frame. We’ve been in Croydon, which is an hour outside of London, with Pauly and Alice for the past week but some kind of alternate reality has been enacted. A friend my parents knew during university contacted us our second day in. Which makes me think the Maternal Dissemination of Anxiety has been distributed to anyone who has the misfortune of being on my mother’s contact list. She is convinced that we are going to kill our children while we’re over here, as if in some way the good ol’ U-S of A would have prevented us from doing that. If anything the FDA would have helped us along. But it is fortunate for us that he approached us because otherwise we’d be sleeping at the airport. They make unfortunate movies about those kind of people. 

Anyways, this Gavin guy, he’s in Edinburgh, teaching Linguistics at the University. Benj and I met with him yesterday and he handed us a slab of addresses and contacts of colleagues of his and extraneous friends of my parents. Every country on the European continent is represented! Not to mention Taiwan, Western Russia, and Japan. We’ll head to Edinburgh tomorrow with the kids and then from there...I don’t know? It’s our choice. The continent is our oyster. We’ll probably go to Ireland first and then over to the mainland. I think it would be great for the kids to see the countryside in France or to go see Copenhagen. See a place that is different from their home, a place that could be their new home. 

We bough the kids a pop-up atlas at the airport to show them where we are and where we’re going, where we came from. The first thing they did when we got to Croydon was dump all of Amelie’s clothes out from her suitcase and stuff Kiel in it. Amelie toted him around the room for probably five minutes while Kiel laughed from inside. I sat outside the room and cried. Benj was nowhere to be found. The kids are playing around with no concept that their life has been wiped clean because their parents don’t know how to keep their opinions to themselves and like to break things, especially things that belong to the city. 

"Protest 4." Flickr Creative Commons. Web. 22 Jan 2011.

We could do this before, Benj. We can’t do this now. We can’t do it when it doesn’t only affect us.

Life through rose-colored glasses.

I just watched as Amelie stared in fascination as a clown sang “La Vie en Rose” to her on the street corner. She didn’t take her eyes of his face even as he made her a balloon animal dachshund. When we walked away she asked me, “I know he’s a clown but all he said was bla lalala bla…” 

Marie-Pierre was an exchange student with my mom at Arizona State. When my parents went to Paris for their 25th they stayed with her apparently. She's been married three times, no kids and her house looks like a Versailles miniature. Everything is chintz and gold-leafed. We make sure the kids are never unsupervised. We make sure they're never really IN there. Marie-Pierre is a curator (not at the Louvre) so she's gone most of the day. 

"Tour eiffel at sunrise from the trocadero." Wikimedia Commons. Web. 22 Jan 2011.

We found a park in Paris that the kids could play at. Benj wrestled with them for probably an hour. It was nice to finally have him there. He’s been out pretty much since we landed at Heathrow trying to get gigs lined up. He plays usually every night at least, trying to sneak into bed at 3am, creaking along unfamiliar floors and stubbing his toes, hitting his head on unfamiliar furniture in unfamiliar homes. He says he’s used to it because of all the touring he's done but I can tell he’s still tired. Today was the first day I feel like we were all in the same place, mentally. Having to scramble to put this all together has been really interesting.  Pauly and Alice were the reason we came to Europe. We could have gone to Canada. Canada would have been easy. Canada would have been cheaper. 

"Inukshuk." Flickr Creative Commons. Web. 22 Jan 2011.

While Benj played with the kids at the park, I did rough sketches of the area and sold some caricatures. It’s not much to plan on but it made enough money for dinner. I wonder when the kids will realize that this is not our routine? I wonder when we’ll realize? 

Guten Tag!

We're in Frankfurt! I know…I know. Marie-Pierre was getting a bit…tense yesterday. I don't think she had a real grasp of what it would be like, having a family of four staying with her in her tiny apartment. We only planned to stay two days and that was more than enough. Nice lady though. Kind of. 

We found this tiny English speaking community in Frankfurt where my third cousin lives. There are English speakers in Frankfurt! And I have a third cousin! Lise is originally from Minnesota, or so she says. She doesn’t sound like a midwesterner. In a sea of Europeans, American accents stick out like a flame stack. All they have to do is say, "honest". 

Lise has been in Frankfurt for ten years. She speaks German fluently now so she’s been taking us around. We had some beer and the kids ate their weight in German sausage. They love the subway. If I'm having a hard time keeping them occupied and Lise finally has to get some work done, we just drop ten euros and ride the subway for an hour. 

"i look out of the window, but you're not there." Flickr Creative Commons. Web. 22 Jan 2011.

Lise has this HUGE apartment that overlooks the river Main. She works from home but she lives alone and she says she needs the company. But adding a three year old and a five year old in the span of a day isn't an adjustment that's easy to make. She asks us to stay as long as we want. I don’t want to...push that. She loves the kids and they love her back so we’re comfortable to stay for now but by the end of the week I need us to have a plan. Because moving every seven to ten days with no foreseeable game plan is not going to work forever. What ruining this for me is that in the midst of this adventure, I'm the one trying to tie things down, I'm the killjoy. I feel like a stranger in my own mind lately. I feel like my mother. My kids got to wrestle in the grass that overlooks the Seine. They got to sit in a 800 year old British pub and drink Shirley Temples. Amelie rode a Wolfhound that was literally as big as she was. This is my adventure for them. I should make it seem like a gift. 

I feel like this is the first time in three weeks that my chest hasn’t been tight. I fell asleep yesterday morning at the breakfast table and slept (at a right angle!) for three hours. I woke up, having slobbered down the inside of my arm, to see that my kids content playing “repeat after me” in German with Lise. They hadn’t even realized that I wasn’t there. They are comfortable here. They like it here. 

Benj already has a weeks worth of gigs booked. I found a art studio that’s looking for a part-time art teacher. On the railway over I was able to put together some more paintings that I've been selling slowly. Lise brought me ten flyers that she collected on her walk home from the grocery store with local, inexpensive rentals. Amelie has crushes on these twin boys we've seen at the park. Their parents are from Cincinnati. They moved here because he had a job opportunity but also because the health care is better. They send their boys to the English-Immersion school just down the road. And Frankfurt has the best friggin' beer I've ever tasted. I'm not compiling a pro-con list, I swear.  

Frankfurt am Main

"Frankfurt." Flickr Creative Commons. Web. 22 Jan 2011.

So much for that

So Benj is flying to Tel-Aviv tomorrow. Apparently there’s a concert going on over there for the protests and Benj, the eternal activist, wants to be right in the middle of it. I asked him what the protest was about and he said that there is a lot going on in Israel right now. Really? Huh, Israel I had no idea. 

I need my children's dad right now. And that's me, who can tuck myself in at night and wipe my own face. When Amelie asks me where Dad is I don't know how to explain why he's not there. I tell them where he is and we find him on the map. They see how far he is from where we are. Then they sleep and they ask me again tomorrow. 

I called my mom today for the first time since Croydon. I was on the phone for twenty-five minutes and she cried the whole time. Apparently, Dad’s been down at the courthouse everyday  since we left. Mom says he thinks he can get us back. 

Kiel’s not sleeping anymore. I think we may have expected too much of how well he would adjust. He says he wants Petey, who is his snail plush toy. He tells me he won’t sleep without Petey. 

"P is for Pig." Flickr Creative Commons. Web. 22 Jan 2011.

I forgot Petey in Portland. I didn’t think about Petey because he had his little pig toy that I don’t remember the name of. A little pig toy that he ALWAYS uses. Why can’t he just sleep with the pig?

Amelie already has a friend. We’ve been in Frankfurt for three days and she’s already besties with a little boy, Alef, from the apartment across the hall. There’s Louise that she met at the park in Paris and Little Pauly (to distinguish him from ‘Big Pauly’) who lived in the house next door in Croydon. That’s not to mention the twins she played with on the plane over the Atlantic or the two sisters that she met on the metro under the English Channel. She knows them by name still and remembers the names of their dolls and what their favorite colors are. She asks me when she can see them again and when she can tell her teacher at school about all her new friends. I always say ‘hopefully soon’ which is the ambiguous mother shit I always used to get so pissed with. But it’s all I have now. I was so convinced that I could be that mom that would tell my kids the truth, even the nasty truth. It would make them better and more realistic. But what if I told Amelie, “You’re never going to get to tell your teacher about Alef.”  And what if I told Kiel that he’s never going to see Petey again!? And then WHAT IF I’M WRONG?!

I am handling this. At least I am handling this. No meltdowns yet. I'm going out of my mind not having anything to do with all this anxiety. I sketch when I have a spare moment. I'll go to the art studio tomorrow for an interview. Even just the part-time work would do wonders. The kids will have to come with me. We'll see how that goes. 

"Pigtails." Wikimedia Commons. Web. 22 Jan 2011.