Posts

I'm sitting blogging because I'm in denial about how much needs to be done in the house to get it ready for putting it on the market. There's a blog post in that.

It was lovely getting together with our realtor, reminiscing about when she helped us buy a house five years ago. There's a blog post in that.

The system of buying and selling houses is so much better organised here than in either England or Scotland. Our realtor (and I) can hardly believe how such a major life decision and financial investment can be so poorly taken care of in comparison (though perhaps we are out of date - perhaps new legislation has tightened everything up). There's a blog post in that.

I'm looking out of the window at lightning and heavy rain. I will really miss thunderstorms. I love the drama of them. There's a blog post in that.

A couple of friends who I've just been drinking wine and eating chocolate with, are coming round on Monday morning to take me and my house in hand, and help me dress it for selling. I can't even begin to explain what that would mean without writing a whole blog post.

What's that movie called? The one with Renee Zellwegger as a chic business woman from Miami, who goes to Minnesota to an ailing factory with a mandate to close it down, and eventually suspends her corporate superciliousness, to fall in love with the warmth of the community (as well as a good-looking - supposedly, though he didn't do it for me - widower). That would give you an insight into what kind of decor will help sell our house. I understand American films so much better, now I've lived here. Another blog post there.

I watched 14-yo play tennis yesterday. Ah, I remember those hours of hitting a ball to and fro with a preschooler in the back garden. Now my role is more relaxing. I sit and watch, and chat to friends sideways. Several blog posts in that.

7-yo turned eight, and we hosted a birthday sleepover. Lots of blog posts there.

7-yo asked "Will we sell the house for A THOUSAND dollars?" Certainly another blog post.

11-yo is going on a field trip to a Health Museum tomorrow. I have no idea what the place is all about, but it sounds good. I should probably google it. Then I could write a blog post about it.

We're leaving here. I can hardly believe it. I hardly want to believe it. I am me here. I don't know how to be me anywhere else. I will learn, I will discover. I'm both excited for the future, and sad for the loss of the present. It makes me pensive. Blog posts there, thick and fast.

So many blog posts, so little time.

.

Geographical locations come and go, but blogs go on forever

Of course the great thing about blogging is that even when your life moves geographically, your blog can stay where it is, in its own little cosy corner of the blogosphere. I find that settling, in a life which is suddenly in a whirl. So a big thank you, THANK YOU, to whoever nominated me for the Brilliance in Blogging awards (short lists here). Seems I am short-listed in two categories: I am "Lit!" (as in literary, I think, not as in all alight and on fire), and "Inspire!". You are very very kind, and you may just have persuaded me to keep blogging (for yes, dear Bloggy Friends, it had crossed my mind that once I am no longer an expat writing an expat blog, my blogging days will be over...).

So... I'm in the category "Inspire!", which is lovely of you all. I'm going to let you into a secret. When you have cancer, it's not difficult to be inspiring, because people kind of give you that label without you having to try. But I hadn't reckoned on the cancer effect not wearing off for a couple of years. Nearly three, actually. That's rather nice.

However, since I am about to return to the country where self-deprecation is the norm, I thought I should dust off my skills in this department, and share with you one way in which I have been totally uninspiring this week.

I wrapped the side of my car round a small post, about 18 inches high. It serves me right for using a bank drive-thru (sorry, I have to spell it that way). That is about the third time in five years in the US that I have used the drive-thru, partly as a matter of principle - what is so hard about parking your car, and walking into a building, for heaven's sake? - and partly because I didn't know how you actually operated a drive-thru and was too embarrassed to ask anyone. Or perhaps I had some dreadful premonition, that I would meet a sticky end in a drive-thru, and was avoiding them, but as fruitlessly as the King and Queen who banned all spindles from their kingdom, in an attempt to stop their Princess pricking her finger. Her destiny was to fall asleep for a hundred years. Mine was to mash up the driver's door, the passenger's door, and - ooh, my reactions were slow that day - the back wheel arch of my minivan. She dozed through a century, to be awakened by a Prince's gentle kiss. I endured the mirth of the Bank of America employees watching me from behind the big glass window as I got out to inspect the damage, and then phoned Husband to confess (who was very nice about it, though you can't get a kiss - gentle or otherwise - down a mobile phone). She planned a wedding and drifted off into the sunset. I looked up my car insurance documents, and discovered that we have a deductible of $1,000.

The incident did, however, give me a wonderful opportunity to model to my children how to react to such a situation. First off, I parked the car, and went into the bank to pay in the check. Yes, I did. I am nothing if not determined, when it comes to standing up to inappropriate bank merriment in the face of customer misfortune. I was definitely not going to slink away. I even remembered to make the kids stay in the car, so that they wouldn't get the free tooth-rotting lollipops that the bank gives out to them. (Ah... THAT was why I was doing the drive-thru... I knew there must have been a reason, apart from Destiny, of course.) Then I can't quite recall the details, but it involved shouting at the children, and subsequently listening while 14-yo, bless his tactful teenage heart, helpfully pointed out that I often tell him, if he is angry, not to take it out on another member of the family, and engaging him in a lively discussion about how this situation was in no way comparable to any previous one in which I had given that instruction. See? That is just how inspiring I am.

Oh, and the best bit was this. The reason that I crumpled the side of the car so convincingly, and spread it with the bright yellow paint with which the post was painted (bright yellow... so that people can't miss it...), was because when I heard the bang and the crumply noise, I thought to myself "ooh, don't cardboard boxes make a lovely bang and a lovely crumply noise when you drive over them?". Yup. Pretty darn inspiring, wouldn't you agree?

Moving on

We are moving back to Britain.

I don't know what else to say on my blog. I have learnt that anything you say, any information you share, you can't take back. I can't ever be properly anonymous again, but I can continue to be semi-anonymous, and I want to guard that. So I don't want to give out details of names and places. But I want to tell my news, dear Bloggy Friends. What to do?

I think what I'll do is tell you a little, and then if you want to know details, you can email me. The address is IotaManhattan, then the rest hosted by gmail. I'm happy to share information, dear Bloggy Friends. I just don't want to do it here. Please do feel free to contact me.

Suffice to say, there's a clue in the labels for this post. Husband has got a job as a school chaplain. It's a great option for the whole family. The kids will have places at the school, which is mostly boarding, but they will be day kids. We will live on site. So as far as the move goes, the two big challenges (finding a house, finding schools) are already in the bag. In the sporran.

It's one of those beautiful moments in life when everything seems to be falling into place around our ears. I haven't shared much about the search for a route back to the UK, but it has been lengthy and demoralising. Sometimes agonising. When we came to the US for a stint, we didn't plan for the credit crunch and what that would do to the job market. There have been times here when we have felt stuck, and panicky. The clock has been ticking in the background. We absolutely HAD to be back before our oldest was 12. He needed to start secondary school in the UK along with peers. That sacred cow fell by the wayside a couple of years ago. Then we had to be back before he was 14 and would start the GCSE curriculum. Bam! Another sacred cow keels over. I can picture it toppling sideways in slow motion, legs giving way and extending to a skywards-pointing position, as the bovine body hits the ground and rotates, sacred udder bouncing and wobbling. The field of our recent life is strewn with several of these supine creatures.

I have had to learn to go with the flow, to trust that life will work out, when we can't work it out ourselves. And now we have an option that is better than all the others. It was waiting for us, but of course we couldn't see it, hiding away round a corner in the future. Meanwhile, we've been determined not to live in limbo, and so we've never allowed ourselves to say "it's not worth it, we might be moving". It's a series of acts of will, but important for expats, I think. So I painted our bedroom even as Husband was in the UK having a job interview about this time last year, and I chose a colour that I liked, not a colour that would be sensible for preparing the house for market. We bought a table tennis table for Christmas, in the knowledge that we would never have a house big enough in the UK for it, and therefore probably wouldn't get our proper money's worth out of it. I started an MA, which I will now leave unfinished. When you're an expat, you have to live in the present, not for a hypothetical future. You really do.

I'm needing a clinching razor-sharp one-liner at this point, to close the post, but waah, I also have to make three packed lunches, get showered, put on some clothes, kill the haggis for dinner, and be out of the house in the next, oh, 4.2 minutes. Talking of living in the present.

I'm so happy.

.

Giveaway result!

I used Random.org to generate three winners. Don't you love the internet, by the way? How lovely that there is a site which is all about randomness! It's so... random, somehow.

The numbers were 1, 7, and 13, which means that Circus Queen, Rosie Scribble and Lois Thorpe get copies of the book. Please email me with your addresses.

I would encourage the rest of you to buy the book. I mean, who doesn't like buying books? It's just out in paperback, and there you are, I've just given you the excuse you wanted to go and browse Amazon.

And now, because I am the most dreadful tease, I am going to let you know that there is some BIG NEWS in the life of Iota, which I will be sharing in my next post. BIG NEWS. Think MOVING ACROSS CONTINENTS news. Ha! That's piqued your curiosity, hasn't it?

Giveaway!

Yes! A giveaway! It's a book I read recently, called Cinderella Ate My Daughter, by bestselling author and journalist Peggy Orenstein.

Do you ever have those "stop the world, I'm getting off" moments? Reading the press release for this book gave me several of those. For example:

• Walmart introduced an anti-aging make-up line for 8-12 year olds
• JCPenney released a T-shirt that read "I'm too pretty to do homework so my brother has to do it for me"
• Disney Princess products generated $4 billion in 2009 (it was a mere $300 million in 2000).

This is what the publicity for the book says:

"More and more, parents are deluged with products that teach their girls that the sexes are fundamentally different, that the most important thing for girls is to be pretty (and later "hot"), and that "girl power" is expressed by having the most stuff... The pursuit of physical perfection has been recast as the source of female empowerment, and commercialization has spread the message faster and farther, reaching girls at ever-younger ages... The potential negative impact of this new girlie-girl culture is undeniable."

I loved the book. It's easy to read, funny, judgmental where it needs to be and non-judgmental when it comes to the everyday struggles of individual parents. It's sensible and is the kind of thing that gives feminism a good name. I loved the stories of where Peggy Orenstein went, in the name of research (a toddler beauty pageant, a Miley Cyrus concert, the American Girl store). I tell you, if she lived next door, I'd be round there for a cup of tea every other day. I love a good story. In fact, I think I'm going to buy the house next door and have her move in.

I did meet her a few weeks ago actually (so on the basis of that, she would probably be totally up for the moving-in-next-door idea). She came from classy California to our little flyover state to give a talk, promoted by the Girl Scouts, who, incidentally, are much more fabulous than I gave them credit for. Turns out they are all about building girls' courage, confidence and character, and have an advocacy program dealing with all these kinds of important concerns.

I know, I know. Lots of you are sitting there thinking "Iota. There are more important issues out there. Don't get your knickers in a twist." (I just have to throw in that expression, because (a) American readers love British expressions like that and (b) I miss using it in everyday speech.) But it's an issue I feel strongly about. And pretty much everything I feel about it is in Cinderella Ate My Daughter.

I have three copies to give away. Thank you Harper Collins. You can enter simply by leaving a comment, by the end of Tuesday, March 13th. I will pick three winners using a random number generator. Please don't think that if you have sons and not daughters, that this book isn't for you. It is. Your son's way of looking at women is as prone to manipulation as your daughter's way of being one. If you don't have children, it's just a darn good read.

By the way, if you're an American living in Britain and you win, you can request an inexpensive mailable item (Cheezits, Rice-a-Roni, a double-ended Sharpie - whatever it is you're jonesing after), and I'll pop it in the parcel with the book. Provided you write "knickers in a twist" in the comments. Come on. Cross that cultural divide.

Accents

Thanks to Al Fresco Holidays, for putting right the situation, and offering a second holiday prize.

Now, here's a story about accents. My kids have varying degrees of American accents. As you would guess, 7-yo, being the youngest, has the strongest. She sounds American to me. According to a local here, you would think she was an American child, with rather proper parents.

That's one aspect of the British accent that I think fuels the American love of it. Somehow it speaks to them of bygone eras, and feeds that vague nostalgia we all have somewhere in our psyches, the sense that things used to be better. There was a time when all was well with the world, or at least a bit more so than today. I might be wrong about this, but it's a working theory. For Brits, it plays out in period dramas. We all know intellectually that life in Edwardian England was oppressive, smelly, and you couldn't get antibiotics, but somehow we all have a slight yearning for Downton Abbey days. Not From Around Here has an interesting take on the matter.

Anyhoo, 7-yo has clearly picked up this idea that a British accent means you're a bit proper. I know this, because she was annoyed with me for some parental injustice or other - you know the kind of thing - and from the back of the car, she piped up with her rendering of what I was insisting. And out came this prim, disapproving, rather aloof, voice. Think Maggie Smith as Miss Jean Brodie in an English accent, with light hints of Penelope Keith as Margot Ledbetter, citrus suggestions of Judy Dench as Q in James Bond, and woody after-notes of Helen Mirren as The Queen. (I haven't yet seen Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher; otherwise I expect she'd be in there too.)

"Mummy, you always say [enter Maggie Smith combo stage left] 'We can't possibly go, it's far too late, and you need an early night because we've had a busy week'. [back to Midwest twang] You always say that." (Or whatever the details were. I forget the exact conversation, but you get the picture.)

We've all had those moments when we hear our child use our phrases, and think "oh my goodness, is that what I sound like?" I tell you, this occasion was that feeling in spades. Do I really sound all prim and proper to her now? Or was she just taking the mickey? Or is she so attuned to American cultural assumptions, that to her, an English accent now implies a whole package?

It made me laugh, but it also made me a little sad - this gap between us. It's not that I want her to be like me, but it's that need for shared heritage with your children. Why else do we have Christmas traditions, take our children to places we went to as children, and teach them history in school?

Of course the alternative interpretation is that I really do sound like that.

.