Category Archives: ex-pat

Ode to suburbia

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This is the time of year when I really love where I live. The streets are lined with trees drooping heavy with pink and white blossoms, like big fat balls of cotton wool, raining their petals down at the bump of a branch. The weather is my absolute favourite type: jeans-and-sandals temperature. Not too hot, but definitely warm. The sky is blazing blue, I can hear a woodpecker somewhere in the trees, and we’re digging out the shorts and wondering if last summer’s Keens might possibly still fit.

This neighbourhood is an oasis of small-town life in deepest suburbia. Once you venture beyond its bounds, you’re on the big anonymous roads with ugly strip malls and chain stores – Target, Safeway, Giant, Payless Shoes… nothing fancy, just the basics. They’re pretty soulless and indistinguishable from any other Targets, Giants, Safeways, Paylesses. But inside the bounds, it’s a village. We have a selection of one-of-a-kind establishments: a (really) greasy spoon, a takeout pizza joint, a barber’s, a shop that sells Keno tickets and hats, a Lebanese cafe that’s a live music venue too – and a co-op supermarket that’s not part of a chain. The first time I stepped inside it, I was transported back to supermarkets in the west of Ireland, the sort you went to when you were on your summer holidays, where they sold things with funny-looking labels and there was a distinctive smell and if you were lucky they had soft-serve ice cream.

Our local Co-op doesn’t have soft serve (at least, I don’t think it does) but it has that same distinctive smell, and exactly the same ladies at the cash registers – except instead of soft Galway accents they have Maryland ones. I don’t get that same spine-tingling thrill of nostalgia every time I walk through the doors any more, because I’m there at least twice a week; but I do still appreciate how special it is to be in a supermarket that’s not a chain, that’s different from everywhere else, that has wine and beer (not the norm in this state), and where I’ll usually see someone to say hi to around at least one turn of an aisle.

My mother stopped shopping at her local supermarket because she didn’t want to meet people she knew. Not that she’s anti-social; I think more because she’d stand there chatting for half an hour and the whole morning would be gone. I think I’ve already heard my children announce, in a deprecating tone that sounds oddly familiar, “…and then Mom met someone.”

But that’s what I love about it. I love that on any weekday morning I’ll drive the girl to school and pass at least two cars whose drivers I can wave hi to. I love that I’ll bump into a mom I know in the supermarket (to whom I can chat at length, or just say hi). I love that I know the fruit guy in Safeway and that the meat-counter lady asks where my baby is – followed by a laughing acknowledgment that she’s not a baby any more.

Much as I miss where I used to belong, I love that we belong here, because that makes it a home.

Spring in the suburbs

Non-native

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My poor American children do suffer somewhat from having parents who don’t quite speak the vernacular.

It’s rare that I encounter a word these days that I really just can’t find the American equivalent for, but I was pulled up short this afternoon when I found Mabel denuding the toilet roll of its paper in the bathroom halfway through a playdate.

“Stop messing,” I told her, exasperated.
“Is she making a mess?” her little friend asked me.
“No, she’s just … messing.”

I really couldn’t come up with the right word for what Irish people call messing. Messing about? Being mischievous? Up to no good? Cruisin’ for a bruisin’? No, I’m back to Dublinese there. In any given class at school there are the messers – everyone knows who they are and what it means. They’re not bad (or “bold”, for that matter); they’re just … exuberant.

“You speak English with an accident,” her friend told me.

That about covers it.

Little Americans

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I didn’t get selected for the Listen To Your Mother cast. That’s fine, really. It gets us out of a babysitting hole because one of the unmissable rehearsal days was when B would be on a very rare work trip. It would have been fun; I might audition again next year.

Anyway, it means I have a ready-made blog post for today. This is the piece I wrote for it.

———-

I never meant to have American children.

Years ago – far too many years ago to count in public – I was in Boston with my boyfriend. (He was from Ireland too.) One day on a dusty baseball diamond near where we were staying, we saw some kids playing T-ball. I heard their little shouts and watched their little legs run and realised that their American accents were already in place. You know how when you’re in a foreign country it’s amazing that even the three-year-olds can speak the language? It was like that. “They’re tiny Americans,” I thought. “They’re going to grow up to be American all the way down. How bizarre.”

If you’d told me then that I’d have American children, I’d have been positively insulted. That was one thing – the one thing – that I would definitely not do. My children would be Irish, like me and my mother before me. They would grow up with the wind and the rain, rosy-cheeked and soft-skinned, they would paddle in the chilly Irish Sea and complain about their Irish-language homework and criticize Bono (because that is the birthright of natives) and sound like suburban Dubliners, just like their parents.

What’s that saying about fate laughing at your plans?

It began with thinking we could have a baby in America so long as we moved home to Ireland before he knew what was what. Things progressed, so that I felt if we moved before he started school, that would be fine. Oh look, now I have a second-grader and a rising kindergartener and hey guess what, they’re American.

Becoming a mother so far from my mother – and everyone else – gave me a certain freedom. If I’d been surrounded by all those people whose opinions count, whose merest incline of the head I might interpret as a judgement of my parenting choices – well, I might have made different choices. As it was, I was free to read the books I wanted to, to find my tribe on the Internet, to follow my instincts and trust myself with my babies. If people looked askance at me in America for whatever I might have been doing – breastfeeding in the supermarket, for instance – well, I’m a foreigner. A European. And we all know what those Europeans are like.

Similarly, if in Ireland my mother wondered when I was going to stop breastfeeding in the supermarket, for instance (or wherever), she could put it down to the hippie dippie influence of America, where they have no inhibitions at all.

Probably, nobody was judging me, but that’s not the point. The point is that I was free to play the crazy foreigner card on both sides of the Atlantic.

So my kids have American accents. Of course they do: they were born here. They have American passports and American birth certificates and American social security numbers. My kids learned to swim in a lovely warm outdoor pool in a swelteringly humid DC summer. My son rattles off the Pledge of Allegiance every morning with his classmates. Despite their parents’ best efforts, they say mailman and sidewalk and zee and twenny and sometimes they even talk about to-may-toes.

And that’s okay. Maybe time has softened me. Maybe I’m coming to terms with being almost-American myself. Maybe it doesn’t matter, because when they meet their Irish cousins – once the first amazed comments from their aunts and uncles about how American they sound have been registered, for the record – they all start talking about Disney movies and My Little Ponies and superheroes and the Irish cousins are saying “awesome” and quoting Star Wars just as much everyone else.

Life does funny things. You can tell it where you want to go, but it’s not a taxi driver. Sometimes it just picks you up and swirls you around and points you back the way you came, or to exactly the wrong spot; and you can rail against it, and you can decide to get off the bus and walk, or you can recalibrate your expectations and work with what you’ve got. Mostly, you have to do a bit of everything and muddle about and see what happens.

If I had been so dead-set against having American children, maybe I shouldn’t have taken up with a boy whose ambition was to go study in the States after he finished his undergrad degree. But I have no regrets.

Last summer, my seven-year-old signed up for baseball. He ran his little American heart out on our local dusty diamond, and I sat on the bleachers and cheered for him.

Machine-pitch baseball

Brat bán sneachta

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Mabel making a snow angel

Apparently every Irish essay I ever wrote in school involved the unlikely scenario of waking up to snow. I know this, because I can still write it.

Ar maidin, dúsigh me go luath mar bhí geal ait ins an seomra. Nuair a d’fhéach mé amach an fuinneog, chonaic me brat bán álainn sneachta ar fud na háite.

[In the morning I woke up early because there was a strange light in the room. When I looked out the window, I saw a beautiful white cloak of snow everywhere.]

(No correcting my Irish, please, from any of you Gaelgóirí. It’s mostly right, and I only looked up one word.)

I know this phenomenon is not limited to me, because the first thing my husband said to me this morning was that he was considering posting “Brat bán sneachta” as his Facebook status.

But I remember so well all the mornings I spent lying in bed trying to divine a geal ait (strange light) in the room, approaching the divide of the curtains slowly, wondering if what I was seeing through the crack was just plain white sky or if it might possibly be a brat álainn sneachta (beautiful cloak of snow) after all.

Almost always, it was not snow. In spite of all my Irish vocabulary had taught me, snowy winter days are not very common in Ireland.

But last night here, around 3am let’s say, when for some unknowable reason (Mabel) I was wandering around our house, the geal ait was completely obvious. Instead of an inky night sky - Washington DC light pollution allowing – the sky was eerily light, illuminated somehow from within, or maybe as a reflection of the thick layer of white stuff it had already begun to lay down below it. I could see the softly falling flakes quite clearly everywhere without having to find the arc of a streetlight to show them to me.

So, snow day. I think the sled is buried somewhere at the bottom of the garden. Hope we can find it.

Dash making a snowman

Milking my origins – my Listen To Your Mother audition

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Let me tell you something: I sound horrible.

Okay, that’s a bit subjective. What I mean is, I hate my accent. I don’t hate that it’s Irish, or that it’s Dublin, or that it’s South Dublin; just that it’s some horrible accent I can’t even put a name on but that sounds just like this girl who was the year below me in school, who I always thought sounded poncy and annoying. (Or maybe she just was annoying. I wasn’t able to separate her from her accent.) The first time I heard myself on tape was SUCH a blow to the ego.

But I have accepted my accent and moved on, and I try hard to avoid hearing myself recorded, because from inside my head it sounds fine and I’m just going to continue to pretend that that’s what everyone else hears too.

(I’m pretty sure that what you sound like on a tape recorder is not exactly the same as what other people hear in real life, especially what I sounded like on a tape recorder in 1984, which is probably the last time I intentionally listened to my voice. But there are elements. Elements that you don’t hear from the inside but everyone else does. The way someone’s voice on the telephone – and I’m not talking about their telephone voice for talking to strangers that’s extra polite and/or assertive depending on the task at hand – someone’s voice on the phone sounds like them but not exactly like them. I imagine that’s the sort of difference there is between what I sound like on a recording device and what I sound like in real life.

Please do not disabuse me of any of these assumptions, even if they’re totally erroneous.)

ANYWAY, enormous digressions aside, that’s the thing. But when I decided to audition for Listen To Your Mother , I knew that my accent could be a point in my favour, because for whatever reason, many Americans love it. They love accents, full stop. (Period, I should say.) They love accents that are cute or sexy or exotic and that they can also understand pretty easily without squinting and tilting their heads and listening extra hard to figure out what it was you just said and what that means in American. So I had a bit of an unfair advantage, I figured; and I was willing to milk that as much as I could.

Which is not to say that I wrote and performed a piece in pure inner-city Brendan Behan-esque Dublin vernacular or put on my Lucky Charms accent and pretended to be from Wesht Cork. I just talked, and even though my Irish friends think I sound pretty American these days, and most Americans I know are used to me now so they don’t bother to remark on it, there’s enough there to be heard.

So I did that. The hardest part was (a) driving all the way to Gaithersburg, a mere 30 minutes away, (b) managing not to take a wrong turn where Google maps had not told me there was a turn at all, (c) arriving half an hour early without so much as a book to read (and my phone is not smart enough to be fun), and finally (d) not being able to find the right room at the last minute because the nice lady at the front desk had disappeared and room 37 was up the stairs and through two totally unmarked doors.

The easy part was meeting two lovely and very groomed women who greeted me kindly, let me sit down and de-stress, and listened to me read my piece. I galloped through it far too fast, in spite of all my best efforts, but they laughed in the right places and said “Aw” at the end, and (I’ll admit it) said they loved my accent.

So, that’s that done. There are more auditions next weekend and they won’t announce the cast until the 15th of the month. I really do believe them when they say that if I’m not picked it’s not because they didn’t like my story: they’re not putting together a volume of memoirs, they’re crafting a stage show, and it needs to have a certain arc of laughter and tears, light and dark, the strange and the familiar. I did what I wanted to do, that’s all.

So if you live in a city where there is a performance of Listen to Your Mother, if it’s something you’ve thought “I couldn’t possibly do that” about because really you’d love to but you think you’re not a big enough blogger; you’re not a blogger at all; you don’t have anything to say; you are too shy or too plain or too old or too young … yes, you can. Just do it anyway (though probably next year, at this stage). There’s no wrong way. It’s just reading your story to two nice women in a little room, and then you’ll know you did it. Whatever happens next is … beyond my control.

Small mercies

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The best Christmas present was the one I bought us last weekend in the sales: an electric blanket.

I don’t know why it has taken me so long to get one here. I had one in Ireland and when I got it I felt the same way – that this was utterly the Greatest Invention of Mankind, ever. It actually came over, mistakenly, in the Shipment of Stuff , and is utterly useless here because of the difference in voltage. Even with an adapter, it wouldn’t work. So maybe I felt guilty about that, or something, but for whatever reason it’s been a long cold ten years of winter bedtimes (except in Texas , I suppose) before I finally decided that I was allowed to be happy again in those exquisite few minutes after I get into bed and stretch my be-socked feet gingerly down into the otherwise Polar no-man’s-land of sheet.

I’m always the first one to go to bed, see. So I do all the dirty work of warming things up, and by the time B gets there I’m into furnace mode and everything’s hunky dory. (Or I’ve already abandoned the bed and gone into Mabel, but let’s assume that’s going to happen less as time goes on.) But the PEB (pre-electric-blanket) era was no so much fun. Every square inch of exposed skin had to be protected, with pyjama bottoms tucked into big fluffy socks and pyjama top tucked into bottoms (very fetching, especially when you’re short-waisted, but then who’s looking at me in bed?), and even then the chill of the sheets would stop my feet warming up for a long time and it was all very tragic, you understand.

Anyway, now, everything is wonderful. Getting into a warm bed on a cold winter’s night is a bliss that simply cannot be overstated.

Or maybe I’m just getting tragically old. It might be that, I suppose.

Weather, from both sides

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Everything is about the weather right now. I know it’s a terrible topic, but I can’t help it.

In Ireland, something that looks awfully like a hurricane is bearing down on the west coast, bringing storm surges and flooding all over the country. In the US, most of the lower 48 states are facing record low temperatures, and everyone is complaining about how cold it is, or how cold it is somewhere else and how much those other people who think it’s cold have no idea what cold is.

I learned my temperatures in celsius, like any good European. In Ireland – I mention, for the sake of my US readers – the average temperature is 10 C (or 50 F), but things don’t vary much from there. A scorcher of a summer’s day right in the middle of the country might measure 29 C, but a more normal summer temperature might be 18. That’s about 64 F, which is barely Spring for much of the landmass I now occupy.

Similarly, the temperature might go down below freezing point now and then at nighttime during the winter, but not much below. Forty degrees F or 4 C would be a more normal winter temperature. The wind and rain do make it feel colder, but not an atrocious amount colder.

An atrocious amount, coincidentally, is about how much the temperature is dropping tonight where I live now. It’s just about freezing point at 7pm – that’s 0 C or 32 F, for those of you who like the numbers – and in the coming 12 hours it’s going to drop to a low of 6 F, with a windchill factor making it feel like minus-14. Fahrenheit . That’s minus 15 and minus 25 C, respectively.

I cannot begin to imagine what this will feel like. Of course, I have no intention of finding out, since I have every intention of being tucked up nice and warm in my bed. (Or quite possibly Mabel’s bed.) But by nine in the morning it promises to feel like minus-26 C (with windchill), which is quite cold enough. So far they haven’t cancelled school but have put it on a two-hour delay, which means that Dash will go in at eleven, when it’ll be a positively tropical minus-8 F or minus-22 C. And sunny. Sunny all day. Lovely!

When I first moved to the US, we lived in central Pennsylvania, and there were two very snowy winters. I do remember it being about 17 F one day, and wondering if there was anything I should know before venturing outside in all the clothes I owned. Would my nose fall off? Would my eyeballs freeze? Apparently not. But this will mark the first time I’ve ever encountered negative fahrenheit temperatures, a thing that has always seemed singularly unnecessary to me – surely once you’re below freezing point there isn’t much difference in how much.

Oh, ha ha, says everyone in Canada.

There’s actually hardly any snow left on the ground here today, thanks to our milder temperatures and some rain yesterday, so with luck there won’t be much moisture to cause dangerous road conditions. It’s just that I’m a little afraid of leaving the house at all, because my fingers might drop off like icicles, or my brain cells atomize themselves.

Come back tomorrow to see if I’m still here.

New pyjamas

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Did you get new pyjamas for Christmas?

As time goes on, I’m starting to think that traditions I thought were merely American are much more global than that; it just happened that my family didn’t subscribe to them.

New pyjamas for Christmas, for instance, is something I had never heard of before a friend of mine here mentioned that her girls all get them – so they look nice in the photos the next morning. How American! I thought. But a quick straw poll of my Irish friends indicates that some (but not all) families at home have always done the same.

The same goes for photos with Santa. I was taken “to see Santa” once that I remember; let’s say twice in all, during my childhood. There are no photos to prove it, just my very vague memory of standing in a long line at the top of Dun Laoghaire Shopping Centre.

I always got a new pencil case in my stocking, and a bar of chocolate, and a tangerine (which I would put straight back in the fruit bowl the next morning). Santa used to leave my presents, unwrapped, on the end of my bed, and they always included an annual, so I had something to read before bounding downstairs and waking the house. Santa did not bring me socks, or underwear; but I did always get a new outfit before Christmas to have something nice to wear for the day.

And so I’ll give the kids chocolate and an orange in their stockings tonight, but no pencil case since they don’t need them yet. Santa is also bringing them new snow mittens and maybe some socks, as well as lots of fun things, some of which they might actually have asked for.

And maybe I did have new pyjamas and I just don’t remember, and maybe the pencil case on several consecutive years was just a coincidence; and maybe the traditions you think they’ll remember are not what they’ll remember, and the traditions you try to make are not the ones that will stick and maybe if what you eat for Christmas is different every year, that will become a tradition of its own; and maybe none of it really matters so long as tomorrow has some moments of pure delight.

And I’m pretty sure that it will.

Happy Christmas to you and yours.

Dash and Mabel with their stockings hung

Someone was a little hyper before bedtime.

Dichotomy

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There are two kinds of tree lights: multicoloured or white.
There are two kinds of apples: eaters and cookers.
There are two kinds of sins: a mortaler and sure it’s only a venial sin.
There are two kinds of things to eat: a meal and a collation.
There are two kinds of embarrassed: morto and scarleh.
There are two kinds of pudding: black and white.
There are two kinds of children: a dote and a holy terror.
There are two kinds of cake: birthday and Christmas.
There are two shops on Grafton Street: Switzers and Brown Thomas. (Dating myself here.)
There are two kinds of tea: Barry’s or Lyon’s.
There are two sorts of Guinness: a pint or a glass.
There are two kinds of weather in Ireland: drizzle or lashing.

There are two kinds of Christmas: the ones when you go home, and the ones when you don’t.

Ramalamadingdong

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This week is not going as planned, so far. But not all in a bad way.

Yesterday began not going to plan on Sunday night, when I realised that I was scheduled to co-op at nursery school the next morning. I had vaguely planned on going back to Target and finalizing some of the gift shopping – the gift shopping that I’d done a week earlier and that had been helpfully sitting on my bedroom floor for the next six days, waiting for me to do something else useful with it.

This problem was compounded on Monday afternoon when I discovered that that very day, not some vague date in the misty future, was the last day for posting by regular mail to Europe. Oops. Because of course 90% of the stuff in the bag on my bedroom floor was to be mailed to Europe, but I’d been waiting for this and that, for the perfect final present to present itself to me at the weekend’s craft fair or some other opportune place, before wrapping it. I also subconsciously felt that B. should partake in the wrapping so that he had some input in all this shopping I’d done for members of his family, but since I didn’t tell him that, and last week was busy with various meetings and whatnot, it hadn’t happened.

Finally, last night, we sat down and had our gift-wrapping extravaganza, and happily we did have enough wrapping paper and tape and I had even bought a box at the post office that was the right size, all of which are no trivial matters.

So that was ready to be mailed first thing this morning, which would only be one day late and therefore practically in time, and would probably make it to Ireland before the big day anyway. Which would have been simple if this was a normal Tuesday, but then we got a snow day.

Monday had already been a delayed-start for the schools thanks to Sunday night’s snow and ice storm, but then it snowed all morning here and they cancelled school entirely. It’s only about an inch, and melting already, but I suppose the schools didn’t want to deal with the potential mess of getting all the buses in during a snowstorm. We’re not in Colorado, you know. Maryland is technically the South, and thus Not Great With Winter.

However, it was the good sort of snow day. The sort when B. has one too. Yes, yes, he was “working from home,” but that also meant I could send him to the post office once the snow eased off, which it did at midday or so, and the roads had all been nicely treated so they were fine. So, BOOM, the parcel has been mailed and with a bit of luck everyone in Ireland will get their presents in time after all, and even if they don’t, it’s out of my hands now.

While he was doing that, I got off my arse and went through the recipes I’ve been meaning to try out and we made pretzels! BAM! Where’s my snow-day baking award?

And Dash made a snowman all by himself for the first time. It’s a little leafy, perhaps, but he’s proud of it.

In the afternoon, B went out with Dash and got a Christmas tree, which we hadn’t got around to doing yet, so that’s something else we don’t have to wait till next weekend for. DING!

It’s beginning to look a lot like…

Awfully Chipper

Optimists think they have more fun