We're coming up to our 6th month here. It feels especially poignant because our kindergartener finished his first semester in an American school. And boy was that first day full of tears. That day, that week, I think the whole month - every dropoff for every kid, every whatsapp text from a friend back home - anything set me off with this horrible guilty feeling that we had made a terrible mistake. (Full disclosure: I still feel like this nearly every day, but at least I'm not in daily tears about it...?)
I'll never forget that first day of kindergarten. Staying at a dumpy (yet somehow $120/night) hotel with a free breakfast (truly, free breakfast at American hotels is the saddest breakfast), our son asked us to pack him a lunch. How? I asked him to please buy, it would be warm, he could eat well, and ... I didn't have a kitchen. He said, how about an egg sandwich? I put together the saddest egg sandwich I'd ever seen: 2 dry pieces of toast (no matter how much I added butter) with some watery scrambled eggs in between. A cold, dry muffin, and an apple. That would be his lunch. I asked his teacher, when we met her, to please make sure he ate a warm meal in the cafeteria... she later told me he just wanted to eat what his mommy had packed for him. The only time I felt like maybe this could work, in the entire day, was when we picked him up and he said he made a friend. A girl named Shayla had invited him to sit with her. She'll never know how much that meant to his mom but in the whirlwind of stressful months, I needed to know he could make a friend. And we hadn't totally screwed things up for him.
I wish I could say that 6 months later, I don't regret coming back here. But I can't. If anything, being here 6 months brings a new wave of sad emotions. We are 6 months farther away from what was a really easy life. And we're 6 months into the reality that will stay for at least the next few years, with little change we can make to improve our quality of life. It'll continue to be 2 hours in the car every day, sweaty and humid days (for at least several months), feeling lost in a sea of strip malls, big buildings, and bad drivers, and trying to maintain some semblance of the relaxed pace of life we had before. We're 6 months farther away from barbecues with our beloved neighbors and preparing for the end of the vorschul year. Farther away from a daycare that taught healthy habits, didn't drown our kids in milk, or fill the empty space in school days with tv or ipad games (seriously, what is UP with the dependence on screens in our school?). Farther away from an efficient train and transit system, safe bike paths, and pedestrian-only shopping areas that made it easy to pop in and out to grab what I needed. Instead, I spend hours driving around to find a speck in a strip mall, a parking space, and inevitably - need to drive to the next strip mall over for just one more thing.
If I wasn't able to shop online, in spite of having a completely flexible workplace, I wouldn't be able to make this work. In fact, there are so many "problems" that I need help from my parents to solve (making time to go shopping for the boys' clothes... filling in the few hours a day when aftercare isn't available because school is shorter here... etc) - that were not problems at all in our last life. How does our infrastructure here continue to make it so hard to exist within it? Why do we put up with this life, where we work ourselves to death, drive our kids around in our little free time, and try madly to keep up with our household shopping needs somehow in between?
I know there's a better place to live out there. And despite living in the #1 fastest growing city in the state of Texas (or maybe because of?), I still want to go there, and not be here.
I'll never forget that first day of kindergarten. Staying at a dumpy (yet somehow $120/night) hotel with a free breakfast (truly, free breakfast at American hotels is the saddest breakfast), our son asked us to pack him a lunch. How? I asked him to please buy, it would be warm, he could eat well, and ... I didn't have a kitchen. He said, how about an egg sandwich? I put together the saddest egg sandwich I'd ever seen: 2 dry pieces of toast (no matter how much I added butter) with some watery scrambled eggs in between. A cold, dry muffin, and an apple. That would be his lunch. I asked his teacher, when we met her, to please make sure he ate a warm meal in the cafeteria... she later told me he just wanted to eat what his mommy had packed for him. The only time I felt like maybe this could work, in the entire day, was when we picked him up and he said he made a friend. A girl named Shayla had invited him to sit with her. She'll never know how much that meant to his mom but in the whirlwind of stressful months, I needed to know he could make a friend. And we hadn't totally screwed things up for him.
I wish I could say that 6 months later, I don't regret coming back here. But I can't. If anything, being here 6 months brings a new wave of sad emotions. We are 6 months farther away from what was a really easy life. And we're 6 months into the reality that will stay for at least the next few years, with little change we can make to improve our quality of life. It'll continue to be 2 hours in the car every day, sweaty and humid days (for at least several months), feeling lost in a sea of strip malls, big buildings, and bad drivers, and trying to maintain some semblance of the relaxed pace of life we had before. We're 6 months farther away from barbecues with our beloved neighbors and preparing for the end of the vorschul year. Farther away from a daycare that taught healthy habits, didn't drown our kids in milk, or fill the empty space in school days with tv or ipad games (seriously, what is UP with the dependence on screens in our school?). Farther away from an efficient train and transit system, safe bike paths, and pedestrian-only shopping areas that made it easy to pop in and out to grab what I needed. Instead, I spend hours driving around to find a speck in a strip mall, a parking space, and inevitably - need to drive to the next strip mall over for just one more thing.
If I wasn't able to shop online, in spite of having a completely flexible workplace, I wouldn't be able to make this work. In fact, there are so many "problems" that I need help from my parents to solve (making time to go shopping for the boys' clothes... filling in the few hours a day when aftercare isn't available because school is shorter here... etc) - that were not problems at all in our last life. How does our infrastructure here continue to make it so hard to exist within it? Why do we put up with this life, where we work ourselves to death, drive our kids around in our little free time, and try madly to keep up with our household shopping needs somehow in between?
I know there's a better place to live out there. And despite living in the #1 fastest growing city in the state of Texas (or maybe because of?), I still want to go there, and not be here.
Comments
Post a Comment