Hobbling, but happy

Hobbling, but happy. That’s me.

I’ve been in Chicago. My big brother (the legendary Charlesinparis) had a conference there, and said to me ‘If I come over a couple of days early, will you come up and hang out with me?” We stayed with Expat Mum, she who showed a group of English bloggers round so ably this time last year. She plied us with tea, wine, nuggets of information about living in Chicago. I met the Ball and Chain (I didn’t call him that). Thank you Expat Mum. You really looked after us well. Ah, Bloggy Friends, it was fabulous.

We went on a boat trip, we went to the Chicago History Museum, we shopped, we saw the Bean (I love the Bean), we ate, we drank, we talked, we went to the top of the John Hancock tower (second highest building in the US) and felt a bit wobbly looking at the view. Here's a picture of the Bean.


We walked miles. Miles and miles. Mies and mies (van der Rohe) - little Chicago joke there. I don’t walk all that much in my daily life (one of my beefs about living in my car-orientated city), and after the first day I was feeling the muscles in my feet and lower legs. I was wearing natty city shoes, not my usual flip flops (it’s still summer weather here), with a little more of a heel than I’m used to. But I wasn’t going to let aching limbs and extremities curtail my city experience. By the end of the second day, I had a blister on each foot. The one on my left foot was on the sole, right in the middle of the fleshy pad, and BIG. Don’t you love blogging? Where else could I share details of my pedicular woes and be sure of a sympathetic ear? I must have looked a sorry sight hobbling through airport security at O'Hare. I’ve spent the week-end walking on the sides of my feet, and wincing, but it was worth every single painful, incapacitating step.

There is a big city person inside of me. It’s quite a small corner of me these days, but it needs a fix every now and again. My big brother is a big city person. But even if he’d invited me to spend a couple of days in a cave in the middle of nowhere, I’d have gone (and I wouldn’t have got blisters). We couldn’t remember the last time we’d spent two days in each other’s company, one on one. If ever. It’s very different to spending time in a big family conglomeration, which is how it usually is. It was wonderful. Thank you, Charlesinparis.

Hobbling, but happy… that’s rather how I am in my life at the moment. Quick update. I did enroll to do an MA in Christian Ministry. I’ve rather taken myself by surprise. I love it. I really do. Every minute. And therein lies the rub (speaking of blisters). There aren’t enough minutes in the days any more. I’ve also upped my hours at the toy shop for reasons that have their own internal Iota-style logic, though an outsider might look at my life and think “Hm, interesting timing”. I do love being busy. I’ve had too many years waiting for green cards, recuperating from chemo, being the at home mum who I love being but who has ceased being as busy as she used to be now her children are getting bigger and going to school. So now I’m busy, but aaaargh, there aren’t enough minutes. Is this what they call juggling? Struggling and juggling, hobbling and bobbling, I call it. Hobbling, bobbling, jobbling and wobbling. I have so much in my mind that my brain has run out of compartments. The chicken casserole we’re having for dinner is all mixed up with Church History, 14-yo’s need for new soccer boots, Neil Armstrong (school project), and Savlon. All to the soundtrack of 10-yo's clarinet practice and the Disney Buddy Songs CD that 7-yo bought at a yard sale at the week-end chim chimma-nee chim chimma-nee chim chim cher-eeeee. It’s not pretty in there, I tell you.

Hobbling, but happy.


Photo credit: www.explorechicago.org

Crismis

So this is Crismis. Or that’s what it says on the calendar on my kitchen wall. Written by 6-yo way back last January, when she was a mere Kindergartener, and she went through the calendar painstakingly writing in birthdays and holidays in letters larger than the space allowed. Of course now she is a First Grader, she would know how to write Crismis properly. That’s what a year does for you. And when we went swimming yesterday, she insisted that I use the Winnie the Pooh towel, which is too babyish for her now, though it was a favourite in the summer. Time passes and things change.

If I were feeling in a philosophical mood, I would reflect that this has been a year of two halves for me. It started badly, with that trip, when Husband was head-hunted and it all came to naught. Then I don’t really remember much about the spring, except I couldn’t really get back in the groove, and I was truly fed up with people telling me to be gentle with myself and not expect too much of myself, and that getting over a major trauma like cancer would take time. Don’t you just hate it when you know the answers, and people keep telling you them, and it doesn’t make the darnedest bit of difference?

The year’s half time was our trip to the UK, which was lovely. I remember day after day in the sunshine in my mother’s garden, trips to beaches, a very hot visit to Paris, walks on the North York Moors, resting and recuperating. There were tears in the gardens of Grosvenor Square, sprung out of the sheer frustration and anguish involved in getting through the US visa system. I remember that.

Then the second half began with the arrival of my green card, and a job in a toy shop. Morale improved. I was busy. It’s easier to make good use of time at home, when you’re not at home all the time. All three children made happy starts to the school year. I joined the church choir, remembered how very much I love choral singing, and wondered why I’ve done so little of it over the past ten years. We celebrated Thanksgiving in Colorado, which has become something of an annual tradition. I spent a week-end in Chicago with five other British bloggers living in the US, leaving Husband to look after the children and pass a kidney stone (or not pass a kidney stone, as it turned out – it had to be blasted apart a week later). That man is a saint.

In terms of blogging, well, I was a finalist in the MADs awards, in the category ‘Best Writer’, and now it seems I’m a finalist in the BMB Brilliance in Blogging list, in the category ‘Inspirational’. Ooh, get me. The blogging highlight of the year for me was reading out a blog post at Cyber Mummy. I loved doing that. I was really nervous, truth be told. Given that it was an emotional topic, my youngest child’s first day at school, I wasn’t sure I would make it through without tears, so I’d given a copy to a friend in the front who could take over if necessary. Be prepared, as they say in the boy scouts (although I’ve never actually been a boy scout, so I don’t know for sure that that’s what they say). Reading that post reflected how I like to think my blog plays out in the blogosphere. Some members of the audience had never read my blog, so for them, the post would have been an interesting commentary on school life in America through an English woman’s eyes. All the audience at Cyber Mummy were mums (or dads), so the post would have tapped into some of the feelings that all mothers experience from time to time, when our children move on and grow up. The specific interest and the general appeal - a good balance in a post. But there were some people, who have followed my blog through thick and thin, and for them, the post was loaded with significance. They would remember that my daughter started school in the middle of my 12 weeks of chemotherapy, and that it was only by the fortunate chance of where the date fell in the 3-week cycle, that I was well enough to take her. They knew how important that was to me. They knew that at the back of my mind were thoughts not only of her first day at school, but where I would be for her last day of school. I spotted tears at the front table. I love that about blogging – the way we all connect in different ways, and on different levels. It’s a rich web of interactions.

Enough about blogging. Another year has gone by. The tree is decorated. The wicker reindeer is on the front lawn, bedecked in lights. The organic turkey will be collected tomorrow. The egg nog is in the fridge. So this is Crismis.

The Chicago Six

So there I am, sitting in a Vietnamese restaurant in downtown Chicago, listening to another English woman tell a story which begins “so there I am…”, and I’m thinking “I love that – the way English people tell stories in the present tense. I miss that here.”.

Get me, though. Chicago. Chi-ca-go. I’m having this FABULOUS week-end. We’re eating, we’re drinking, we’re being driven around on our own personalized tour, we’re looking at pictures in the Art Institute, we’re strolling around Chicago in the late autumn sunshine… We’re having the best week-end, and all the time, we’re talking, talking, talking. I think I haven’t ever talked so much in a 2-day period in my entire life. We talk as if talking is going to be banned tomorrow. We talk as we eat, we talk as we walk, we talk as we sit in a taxi, we talk when we’re ready for bed and should be going to sleep. I don't mean 19 to the dozen; it’s more like 91 to the dozen. We use much-loved phrases, rarely heard in our American lives: we speak about a fortnight, faffing around, losing the plot, being all over the shop, going to the loo. It’s the conversational equivalent of comfort food. I feel enveloped in a warm blanket of spoken words.

The cast list. You want to know the cast list. There were the two Chicagoans who organized us and looked after us. Thanks, Expat Mum, for your knowledgeable guided tour, and Nicola, I’m in awe of anyone who can wear a white wool coat and keep it looking that good. There were the two Californians, who turned up in bikinis carrying surfboards. Hope you’ve warmed up, Calif Lorna and Geekymummy. The East Coast was represented by Nappy Valley Girl, with her tales about visiting New York's Museum of Modern Art, (though I suspect she’d just got lost in her own neighborhood and was looking at the Hallowe’en decorations, which, if her blog is anything to go by, are works of art of museum quality in their own right). And then me, feeling like I’m one of the hicks from the sticks, though I think I impressed them all with my tales of how we have electricity and hot running water in every house, and a Wal-mart on both sides of town.

I remember a period of time when bloggers in the UK started meeting together. In real life. In the flesh. Sometimes it was an ad hoc group, sometimes it was arranged by British Mummy Bloggers. There was a flurry of ‘meet-ups’. If I’m honest, I hated reading those reports. I felt I was missing out big time. I wanted to know what it felt like to clap eyes on a completely strange face, and yet know the person behind it so well. I wanted to join in all the posting and commenting: “you were JUST like I imagined you! Can’t wait to see you again!” Sometimes living abroad really sucks. Then last summer, I was thrilled at the thought of meeting people at Cyber Mummy 2010, but I was also a little irritated that the blogging wagon had rolled on without me. Everyone was over the novelty of the whole meet-up thing, and was moving on, before I had even had my first taste. People were going to Cyber Mummy because they wanted to attend the sessions and learn stuff, when all I wanted to do was sit at a succession of coffee cups and talk. Not even talk… Just chat… I’m even going to confess (sorry, Susanna, Jen, Sian) that in advance of the conference, I emailed a few bloggers who I really wanted to meet, and sought to lure them out of sessions, so that I could fill my day with my own personal serial meet-up. (It only partially worked.)

Anyway, what I’m trying to say, in amongst all this wittering on, is that this week-end in Chicago was not only a fun-filled, chat-filled, friendship-filled two days which will live in my memory for years to come, but it also somehow made up for all those meet-ups in England which I missed. And in Chi-ca-go, for heaven’s sake. Yup. I think I’ve caught up now.

Thank you, fellow members of The Chicago Six. I wish I could put all those conversations we had over the week-end in bottles, and uncork them over the next few weeks. I'd love to re-run them and chew them over again and again. There was so much great content!


PS Since someone is bound to ask, I don’t know if I’m going to Cyber Mummy 2011. Don’t know if I’ll be in England at the time. But if I am, and you fancy a quick coffee and a chat behind the bike sheds when teacher isn’t looking, email me.