My fly-y Valentine

Got myself a pretty sweet present for Valentine's Day next February - a one-way ticket outta this fucking popsicle stand, all the way to Krautville. Actually I got one for the F-word and one for Godzilla too. I used points. Happy Valentine's all around, family; your present is two days without sleep and a permanent move back to the real world.

As soon as the tickets were purchased my brain started processing the departure. Not the wealth of tasks that lie ahead - those won't be processed so much as done and it's better if I don't think beyond each week's to-do list - but the meaning of the last four years.

To dismiss Australia as a humpback's nursery is not fair (barren but safe, where the mother and calf live off her reserves and avoid predators) - that may have been mostly what it was for us, but that's still something pretty important. Immediately last night, falling asleep after I bought the tickets, I started dreaming of L____, of streets I have no desire to go back to and only will if some shit or other with our rental property there demands it, but whose beauty I did enjoy and will, I understand now that the ticket is bought, stay with me. Just like all those other places I've or we've lived have stayed with me. Paris, among other things, it ain't, but it's just as much a part of me.

We want to have another kid, and I'm ready to have another kid back in the hustle and bustle of an actual city in Europe - but I'm glad I got broken into motherhood somewhere so eventless.

Anyhoo. Got myself another sweet present yesterday too - a ticket to Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake, which started 20 years ago and I expect has come to Australia to die, so this was the last chance. A swan song. Ah ha ha. Ha ha ha. I remembered aloud the other day while the F-word, Godzilla and I were out and about that I wanted to see it to cash in on that one evening the F-word fucked off to see the latest Hobbit movie, and that I would see it if I could get a ticket under $75. Okay, I backtracked, under $100. Okay, I backtracked a third time, let's be realistic - this is Australia - under $120.

It was $119. Siiiigh. I like my artsical fartsical things. But I'm really looking forward to going back to a place where artsical fartsical things only cost about $20 a pop. I may not be as tidy as the proverbial Swabian housewife, but I'm sure my penny-pinching at least will blend right in. 

Fuck this shit.

Since getting back from Cologne, I haven't been able to move myself out of an emotional shithouse for any substantial amount of time. Even getting a little high for the first time in four. Fucking. Years. didn't give me more than a few hours, though that won't stop me trying again now that Godzilla is getting less breast-dependent.

Part of it is kindergarten fretting, though I'm slowly getting over that by deciding to control that which can be controlled, and getting used to not being able to control that which can't. Part of it is hangover from spending too much time with family. Part of it is jet lag. Part of it was not wanting to come back here from Cologne, at all. When the plane caught fire in Frankfurt, purgatorial as the whole experience was I couldn't help but wonder if I'd done it with the power of my mind. But back here we are, and we're here for a few reasons, mostly though not only the F-word's, and very valid reasons - and you know, I don't give a shit about all those valid reasons. I'm done. I'm fucking done here. My brain hasn't come back. It doesn't want to. Fuck this place.

Cologne will be fraught with problems in getting our shit set up - I understand that - I'm not wearing rose-tinted glasses about this move, even though I fell for the place like a tonne of bricks. I just want to GET SHIT DONE. Find the kid a school. Find ourselves an apartment, which we can't really do until the kid finds a school. Open some bank accounts. Buy a king-size bed. Use saunas naked. Let Godzilla's bewildering language explosion explode all over German in a way that includes something besides him yelling "Dankeshen, Bitteshen, Morgen, Tschuss!" and then laughing like a madman (even cuter than it sounds).

And Hilts is dead. He hasn't been around here in awhile, and to be honest I don't really know why he started coming around in the first place. I know why I went around his place. He just seemed so decent and so - how to say it? - unapologetically still in the grip of the honest confusion of youth. There was something really refreshing about that because I don't believe most of us ever get over that great confusion of youth so much as learn how to ignore it, either because we can't bear it or we don't have time for it. There's something a little heroic about the men, and usually they're men - women usually find more pressing things to do with their time - who don't ignore that confusion. So Hilts being gone is like a hero being gone.  

CTFD

I am fretting about the boy's school next year, in a way I've seen and heard of parents doing but never imagined I would do myself. Well, here I am. Fretting. The school that loved Godzilla the other week sent us a definitive answer - which was, don't count on anything because of all the people on the waiting list before you no matter how much your kid charmed our teaching staff you fucking arriviste.

Bit of a kick in the teeth since I asked to get on their waiting list in March 2013. But this is just the sort of thing I need to be ready for, moving back to Europe - kicks in the teeth that might have something political behind them, or might have incompetence behind them, or might be from a self-inflicted failure to exactly follow the letter of the law of each administrative effort.

Still, this one is getting to me. Before this visit I hadn't even been expecting a definitive answer from anybody by the end of the visit. It never would have occurred to me to hope for one if the teachers at this one place hadn't fallen in love with Godzilla and over-committed themselves to telling us they wanted us there. But now I'm all glum and feeling helpless about it. One of those mums who is obsessing over getting her kid into the right school.

Not tiger-mummish, though. Because the thing with these schools that I want for Godzilla is that they're in the fucking forest. Outside. Children learn so much better outside, and are so much calmer, and get along with each other so much less Lord-of-the-Flysishly, however counter-intuitive that seems, when they're outside. And Godzilla has his whole life to possibly be stuck inside doing boring shit - I would like to spare him all that in kindergarten, at least. He enjoyed his trial days so much that I'm going to feel like a bad mum if he doesn't go to a forest kindergarten.

That having been said - I need to look at this again.

Any kinder he goes to will be better than here. No pedagogy, smaller classes, more teachers, more outside stuff. No book learnin' for years. And I can only do what I can do, even if it frustrates and depresses me when I suspect that there is some sort of nepotism happening at these awesome schools that I can't take advantage of as a stranger and a foreigner. Because the only places the F-word and I aren't strangers or foreigners are places we don't want Godzilla to grow up. So there. This is how it is. I have to stop being dumb about it.