Tiger by the tail

 So if you just stay in one place long enough, you start seeing weird shit, right? Everything is Twin Peaks a few years under the surface. That's the thing that makes me most nervous about how much we've moved around - that I'm not preparing the children adequately for the fundamental weirdness of existence, the way the uncanny and unexpected ripple through the day-to-day like the fake-liquorice-goo through pseudo-orange-ice-cream in the great tiger tail of life. It's not just their family that makes me take them back to Canada every summer. They need to be able to watch a place change, and learn to see all the smoothed-over crooked shit, and with four-year tenures everywhere we've been more or less since they were born they haven't been able to do that where we live.

My work, however - I've been involved with this company for a kajillion years now and a kajillion years does give you the time to see weird shit evolve and some of the weirder shit I've seen has been there. I'm too old and indifferent and remote for workplace conflict, but if I had any, it would have been with this long-standing co-worker who, it came painfully clear this weekend, is many kilometres deep into some sort of rabbit hole, to the point of no-further-comment-from-the-hospital-but-they-won't-be-home-for-awhile. 

I'm spending some time now thanking God for my oldness/indifference/remoteness. There were a few points where this person was temporarily in a position of slight authority over me, and used it poorly, when I would have been rude if I was less indifferent. I considered being confrontational, needlessly confrontational considering the briefness of the position of slight authority. Pre-motherhood me would have had some choice words that would have felt good to say in that moment and that would have been hard to remember now, now that it's painfully clear any of the punctilious, superfluously demanding or otherwise shitty behaviour this co-worker was showing to me or their colleagues was probably only a dying echo of how shitty they were to themself. Themself is a word. I just made it up. It's all rather discombobulating frankly. 

Give me the shits

 As I reach an apex (I hope) in the amount of international travel I have to routinely do, I’ve realized a lot of my planning now orients around “will this itinerary allow me to take my normal morning shit without holding or hurrying it or having to pay to use a theoretically public toilet?” Which means trains. Lots of trains. Preferably train routes close to their point of origination so other train passengers haven’t yet had a chance to sully up the toilet too badly. 

There are a lot of reasons to prefer trains, but I feel like that one is really underrated. Budget airlines flying into dumps like Charleroi - those dumps have pay-per-use toilets (but here is a secret: small regional Italian airports are miracles of convenience and efficiency. Not just the bogs. They’re what all airports should be: a simple place that gets the job done fast, where you can get a brioche, a good coffee, and probably a fresh-squeezed orange juice). And whilst on the flight, I just can’t relax enough to shit; too busy imagining some hideously malfunctioning “Get Smart” scenario wherein I’m unwittingly doing a very exact sequence of actions that is going to lead to the floor collapsing and me tumbling into the void. 

And coaches - nothing to object to on their own. I rather like how they take you through a city. But they’re traffic and they’re driven by the hideously underpaid so appalling delays are routine; you can’t count on even a ballpark arrival time. And more than half the time, there’s no bog. And when there is, it doesn’t have good ventilation, so you make people smell your shit, and while like most people I *believe* my shit don’t stink, my common sense informs me that in fact, it certainly do. 

Not so silly now, huh

 So, she asked, my 87-year-old aunt, the one who all the other aunts and uncles called silly. Why did the baby die? She asked of my cousin's baby, who had indeed died. Was the mother too old?

I don't think so, I said, not wanting to get into other people's bodies, especially the dead bodies, especially the mourning bodies, and resisting the urge to tell her it was none of her business, none of her silly-aunty business. Most new mothers in Italy are around that age. I think the baby was just born too early. 

Yes, but, said silly aunty, and then a little silence. My baby's heart wasn't working properly when she was born, she continued eventually. She died after a week.

Oh, aunty. 

I gave her a bottle, and she was too tired, you know. To drink. Pause. She died before I could go home with her. Anna Maria. Such a pretty baby too.  

When was that, aunty?

After S_. Anna Maria was the youngest one. The last one. Pause. We had a little funeral. 

How many times have I left a place? I can't even count them all up anymore. And it has taken until *this* time, this umpteenth time, to realize the funny feeling on the way out, even if it's a move you're chomping at the bit to do, is fear. Or a lot of it is fear. There's a lot that pisses me off here but they're all known quantities. This is a familiar place, and soon I won't be in a familiar place. That's frightening. It'd be frightening for any animal, let alone a human animal with a consciousness of mortality. Because I know who *I* am here, and whoever I am next, wherever I am, I will have different challenges and be older . . . . eventually frailer . . . that many more minutes closer to death. If you don't have these life stages all harshly chopped by a complete change of environment maybe it's easier to ignore that. Probably hadn't realized that until now because me at 18 vs me in my 40s haven't felt much different health- and energy-wise. But these days as soon as a mirror pops up it's clear the crone stage is on her way. Fair enough but it does take getting used to. 

Sometimes I get a feeling that every feeling we feel, all that bewildering and subtle range of emotion, is some exacting cocktail of maybe four things. Fear, joy, love, hunger, and sleepiness. Is there anything else happening up there in our spandrel-ly little brains? Maybe not. Honestly, that's already a lot. 

As I stuff my face with red currants and gooseberries on my way out of Day-to-day Northern Europe, I'm having a moment of intense nostalgia for Yorkshire. I was having drinks with a Midlands friend in Brussels last week who asked me if I was reverting when I said I was thinking of buying the family some pet ferrets. Hah hah. I haven't been there since I was pregnant with Godzilla and Granny was still alive. Nigh on exactly 11 years ago. But it struck me as soon as we got to Deutschland - how familiar it seemed here. Not like northern France or Belgium or the Netherlands. Here and northern England recall each other a little. There's something intensely similar. The rooks probably, or the red currants. Or the gooseberries. The brambles. The language. I don't know. But I think my grandparents would have felt something comfortable here, if they hadn't absolutely detested Germans as was reasonable for their generation and many others. I will miss that - the rooks especially. Fuck me, will I miss the rooks. Oh well. I'll visit. Perhaps not here, but I'll visit rooks somewhere. 

Truly blogging into the wind now. Oh well. Forgot my diary in this country I'm leaving behind. I act like it didn't strike a chord with me, I don't believe there's been a big emotional attachment, but I haven't spent this long in one country since I moved out of my parents' house. Curious about what I'll miss. I'm guessing mostly the green - at least we get one last June of it - and the desperate bids to salvage the bits of pre-war architecture, even the industrial stuff, that hasn't been knocked down yet, while allowing enough renovation to make it livable. Let's see. At the moment, with so much admin done but so much grunt work to do to get to the next place, I'm thinking harder about what I'm leaving behind than what I'm getting into.

Just turned down the boys' school places here for next year. It was the hardest bit, emotionally, of this whole process, which is ironic because this whole process wouldn't have started unless we hadn't decided they shouldn't be going to school here. The childhood-ending Gymnasium Godzilla isn't going to is really nice, for a childhood-ending institution. It has a vivarium in the atrium. Nice big one. Recent total rebuild. Looks like well-lit Star Trek. And the Monkey King knows what's going on too, and he's sad about it. The pandemic really fucked up the years we've spent here, but it's still their place, their friends, their sense of everything. What are we doing dragging them out of this sense of place? 

I thought I had accepted it, but I hadn't: parenting is choosing your poison. Not for yourself, because that's just life once you move out of your parents' place. I'm totally comfortable choosing my own poison. It's choosing your poison for other people, for the people you love most in the world, the people who you would literally set the world on fire to protect. But you still have to choose a poison. 

So last week was a pretty big international life admin week - safe to say biggest of my life by some measures and the groundwork for my whole midlife crisis, which should last about 15 years, minimum. And at the point where I bought my fifth piece of real estate - second that week, and fourth country - the agent congratulated me, and it caught me totally off guard. I mean they're very nice people for real estate agents and I was absolutely polite back but honestly, when someone blows all that measurable money on something with such a basically unmeasurable value all at once, isn't the correct response "good luck" rather than "congratulations"? 

All of which contributes to saying, things are trucking along. The F-word's studio got packed up and shipped last week. Everything else gets packed up and shipped in a week and a half, including the boys and I - off to the family to wait all this out for the summer, and let the F-word repay with the sweat of his brow all the admin work I've been doing for the last year or so. It feels good. Weird. One of the things that went with the movers at the same time as the studio was my bike, so when I got back from all the international admin work and I realized I wasn't going to ride a bike here anymore, I got a little misty. I really liked riding a bike here. Keep thinking "oh, I'll just pop on my bike and go get some pasta cheese" and then think nope, nope you aren't. It's a little like when someone who you still need to tell something dies, and nope, nope you can't tell them. I've often thought that moving was a bit like a little death, a practice for death maybe, and the older I get the more I think that, with growing horror. 

Nevertheless, she persisted. Hahahahahahahahah. Idiot. 

The emotional implications of capital gains tax

There's a sort of conspiracy out there, I think, to present life-changingly important, huge things as boring so that people won't know about them and won't change their lives, and keep paying attention to things that are not life-changing and ultimately are fucking boring. (I may be in a minority of one here but a high-cost dramedy about Rupert Murdoch and his shitty kids is a weird thing to invest dozens of hours of your life into.) I say this with the proviso that I am doing life-changing things in three languages that are not my own so very likely I'm missing things that are obvious to the natives, until they come to me as a big surprise or revelation. Or I just keep missing them - I like the way we've chosen to live our lives but I do sometimes get chills thinking about all the shit that's just going straight over my head. All the unknowns, known and unknown. Fuck me, what am I fucking up right now that I have no idea I'm fucking up?

Anyhoo. That's all a long-winded way to say that this week we found out the finer points of local capital gains tax law, which is leading us to sell up here instead of rent out. There is obviously a depth of relief here that I can't even quantify, a fucking Lake Baikal abyss of relief, that we won't have to faff around with the cost and the worry and the risk of running a furnished rental from very far away, which in itself would be life-changing. But even more than that is the consciousness that when we sell, we are functionally done with this country, or at least this region. The few friends I made despite the handicap of the pandemic have all moved away from it. And our town - oh man, especially with the dressings of spring upon it, our town is beautiful - but, like the beautiful town we left behind in Oz, there's no compelling reason to come back to it. When we leave, when we sell, it's not a chapter in a book ending, it's the ending of a Part. (OMG. Part. Parting. I just got it.) 

Now, that's weird enough for me. And the F-word had his first real professional, living-on-it success as an artist here so I guess it will be weird for him. And the Monkey King has a real sense of place here. But it's Godzilla my heart aches for. There's a certain irony in that, because the reason this move went from fantasy to reality as far as I'm concerned was him, and concern over how the rest of his childhood and education goes - a concern that his primary school teacher of four years shared. The F-word and I can't really pinpoint the moments our moves from Europe to Australia, and then from Australia back to Europe, were decided. But I can pinpoint the moment I decided we were moving away from here - during a parent-teacher conference when Godzilla's teacher told me he was too smart for the general stream, but that the academic stream would crush all his curiosity and intellectual initiative. To hear your own suspicions put into words like that by the person who was most in position to know. . . anyways. That's when the decision was made, as far as I was concerned. 

All of that notwithstanding: Godzilla loves this place. He loves his school, he loves a couple of his friends, and beyond that, he's used to it here, and that's huge for a kid. He didn't bat an eyelash when we switched towns when he was younger, but now, we are separating him from his fabric, and he's sadder than he is excited about what's coming, and my heart just aches for him. 

Something similar happened to me at his age - something my parents, I assume, thought about very carefully, in terms of it being for my sake. At least partly - one part of it was certainly not for my sake at all and they should have seen that; I suspect after so many years of kids, many of them stressful beyond my current and probably future comprehension, they were tired of weighing their decisions in terms of what was good for their kids. Decided to do something just for them. Well. Nearly 40 years later, I'm still angry about it, because it was a fucking blunder. It was a bad idea. Two bad ideas at once. There are children starving in the world right now, I'm conscious of my lifelong privilege, but at the same time it's not an exaggeration to say their decision blighted my childhood. Didn't do them much good either.

This decision started for me as an escape hatch for Godzilla from premature academic streaming but there's no doubt I'm super-pumped for it as a lifestyle change. It's for me, this move, absolutely. For us - the F-word is even more pumped than I am. And I'm nauseated when I think that we might be repeating my parents' blunder beat for beat. At the same time I'm confident it's the right decision, or at least the rightest decision available. And we have been and will keep scrambling to find ways to make it easier for him, which from memory my parents did not. But it's only him, looking back 40 years from now, who will know if it's a giant fucking childhood-blighting blunder or not. 

Self-care Italian Style

There are five extraordinarily difficult and high-stake things happening right now which would each in themselves be enough to make me feel put upon, and that's on top of the normal work of being an intellectually curious breadwinning family woman. Fucking five. And I am only fully enthusiastic about one of them. I'm not fully unenthusiastic about any of them, so that's something. But I'm extremely fucking unenthusiastic about this degree of sustained stress. We are close to the apogee at the moment, and will hit it over the next month, and by September I hope to be reasonably human again. It makes me wonder how people with real problems cope. Sometimes they don't, I suppose. 

I'm making a conscious effort to take care of myself mentally and physically through all this, with more or less success; still lots of phone-gazing and the occasional pre-menstrual sugar rampage. One thing that has been absolutely marvellous is Alessandro Barbero. He speaks and writes with so much welcoming, inviting enthusiasm about whatever he's speaking or writing about, which hasn't been my experience of Italian intellectuals before, either because I was paying attention to the wrong ones, or I wasn't paying enough attention, or because there is indeed a strong Ivory Tower syndrome there. In any case the Italian language has some built-in barriers to the uneducated, which certainly includes me when it comes to Italian. 

Anyways. Barbero speaks and, often, writes in a way that is extremely accessible and welcoming to people like me, and for the past six months his books have been my bedtime reading. The books come in three categories: academic, conversational - almost a transcript of his lectures - and somewhere in between. The conversational books are no mental effort to read, linguistically. The academic ones send me off to sleep in half a page. And the ones that are in-between are perfectly relaxing. Very engaging but also, structurally, complex enough that after ten or so pages I'm floating in and out of meditative consciousness.  

I'm wrapping up his history of Charlemagne right now; one of the in-between ones, and it's amazing. A history rather than a biography - details about the man himself but firmly contextualized in his time, organized by theme rather than chronologically. I was never particularly interested in Charlemagne as a person or subject, but I find myself during the day looking forward to bedtime and reading. Same thing with his Frederick II biography, which is conversational - on a scale of one to ten, my interest in Frederick II was never more than three, but I couldn't put that little book down. 

Haiku for middle age

All of my problems 

are rich white woman problems

they still give me hives 

Woman of the world

 Today, at the end of a week of staycation - enough of it in the F-word's studio to convince me that what I already thought was a Good Idea should be a Family Business - as I walked my foldy bike and no luggage through one busy metropolis's train station on my way to another busy metropolis's train station a couple of countries over, it struck me that I'm living the dream. One of them, anyways. The one about being an international woman of mystery with a foldy bike. Calm, assured, knowing what to do, where to go, in several countries, in several languages.

Then I got on the Thalys and it took me five minutes to find the button to flush the toilet