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I was an ocean away from my wife and daughter on Mother's Day. We had decided beforehand that they should stay an extra week in Iowa with family, even though I had to return to Spain for work.
I got back last Friday, which meant I was home alone for a few days before Mother's Day...just long enough, in fact, to realize how many things April does around the house that I don't even know how to do when she's gone.
I suppose I should clarify. I was a stay-at-home husband for a year and a half while April was getting her Masters degree, so I know all about maintaining a home, but I guess I didn't realize how many household chores I had stopped doing once we moved to Madrid and I was the one working outside the home.
In only two days at home by myself, I got "stuck" a bunch of times not knowing how to do basic things around the house.
So, when I called April on Sunday to tell her Happy Mother's Day, I also prepared a list of all the things I couldn't do around the house without her help.
I didn't know how to operate the wash machine (in fact, it took me five minutes just to figure out to get the thing to open)
I didn't know how to access our Spanish bank account online
I didn't know the pin number for our Spanish debit card
I couldn't find one of our grocery stores (without asking someone on the street for directions)
I couldn't find the cutting board (I claim jet lag on this one)
I didn't know which clean sheets went on which bed
Surprisingly, April thought my list was funny, not sad. I did tell her before we got off the phone that for future reference, if she really wanted to be appreciated on Mother's Day, maybe she should make a habit of going away for a few days beforehand and leaving Alleke and I to fend for ourselves. She might get better results that way.
Yankee Dutch I watched DJ copy his spelling words onto lined paper.
s-c-a-r-e-c-r-o-w
t-o-o-t-h-p-a-s-t-e
a-w-h-i-l-e
c-h-e-r-r-y
k-a-p-u-t
I stared at the last word.
"Kaput?" I asked. I looked at my sister who was making rice in the kitchen.
"DJ has some Dutch spelling words," she explained. "You know, the words we still use around here."
I raised my eyebrows. "No kidding."
I lived the first 22 years of my life in a small Dutch settlement in the cornfields of Iowa, and it wasn't until I moved to Madrid five years ago that I realized that some of the words I used weren't actually English, they were Dutch.
Actually, over time, the pronunciation and spelling of these words has changed, and many of them aren't recognizable to my Dutch friends either. "Yankee Dutch" is what my father-in-law calls these words he picked up from his parents--they spoke Dutch when they talked in private.
I still use these words, even in Madrid, but I've had to teach my friends what they mean. For example, if I'm woosed that means I'm running around the house like a chicken with its head cut off trying to get a million things done at once. If I'm feeling benout, I'm feeling something between overwhelmed and claustrophobic. Weather can be benout too when it's humid and oppressive. If something is fees, it's gross, kleine beechie means a little bit, and in some churches the pastor is still called the dominie.
I like these words. They make the place of my childhood different from other places, even as it becomes increasingly more difficult to distinguish one place from another in America where everyone shops at the same department stores, eats at the same food chains, and watches the same TV programs. I'm thankful to be set apart, somehow--to be grounded somewhere.
I wonder, then, how we will set ourselves apart as an American family living in Spain. Which aspects of our American, or even Dutch-American, identity will we pass on to Alleke and other kids to come.
April sat on the couch with a book watching her two nephews construct guns out of legos. The two boys worked quietly and carefully until they finished, at which point they stopped to admire each other's work.
Hunter, the older of the two boys, ran upstairs to find a snack, and DJ was left sitting on the floor with his gun. He lifted the gun to his eye and searched the room for a target. First he found his sisters in the far corner sitting around a small table pretending to sip tea from plastic cups. He continued around the room until he saw April sitting on the couch.
"April," DJ said with a grin. "Do you like my gun?"
April looked up from her book. She was quiet for a moment.
"I don't like guns," she said.
"Why not?" DJ asked. He lowered his gun.
"Because guns hurt people."
DJ frowned, then his face brightened.
"Yeah, but you can use guns to go hunting," DJ said, "and then you can eat the meat."
April was quiet again.
"Yes, but the gun you made isn't used for hunting," she said.
DJ bit his lip and stared at the gun in his hand.
DJ's sister, who had been listening to the conversation from the corner of the room, ran over, dug through the legos, and pulled out another gun.
"My gun is made for hunting," she said bringing the gun to April and putting it in her lap.
DJ looked up.
"No, it's not," he said. "It's a pistol."
"Hello, this is Alleke." Alleke is taking advantage of the fact that it's legal in Iowa to drive while talking on your cell phone.
Tornado April and I were walking through town last night when the sirens went off. A woman ran out onto her porch and yelled at us.
"Do you have a place to go?" she asked. "There's a tornado coming."
She held the screen door while we ran inside, and all of us, including her three little boys, hustled downstairs to the cellar.
I watched the boys huddled in the corner with their flashlights and tried to make out the muffled words from the weather radio sitting on the counter in the kitchen overhead.
The tornado had touched down six miles west of town--only four miles away from my parents' place, where we had left Alleke to play with her grandparents for the evening.
Much later, we drove onto the yard at my parents' place. Inside, we found Alleke and Grandpa and Grandma playing with legos in the basement.
"Alleke saw her first tornado," Grandpa said, grinning.
Here's a video of the tornado Alleke saw. The body of the tornado was a kilometer wide.
And, here's a video clip of the damage from the local news. Thankfully no one was hurt.
Green Parenting April has been thinking a lot lately about how to make our home more environmentally friendly. While we're here in the US, she's been doing some online research and buying books and supplies.
Last night we were sitting at the kitchen table with our laptops when April looked up and said,
"Hey, what do you think about using cloth toilet paper?"
One reason I was looking forward to our trip to the US was because I thought Alleke would improve in her ability to speak English. Being around people who only spoke English, I thought she might begin to differentiate between English and Spanish and see that they were not one language, but two.
On Saturday Alleke's cousins came over to play. I should have known things weren't going in the right direction when the older cousins, DJ and Josie, began telling Alleke all the Spanish words and phrases they had learned at school.
"Rojo is red."
"Verde is green."
"Azul is blue," and so on.
When they discovered Alleke knew how to answer the question, "¿Cómo te llamas?" (or "What's your name?"), they made the question into a game and spent the rest of the afternoon seeing who could get Alleke to answer the question the most times. There was lots of giggling involved.
All hope was lost by evening. We were sitting in the family room watching Finding Nemo when Emma, the youngest cousin, who didn't speak any Spanish to my knowledge, climbed up on the couch next to me and pointed at Alleke.
"I think Alleke wants some more agua," she said. More thoughts on cousins...
I looked up from the open suitcase in front of me, then got up, walked over to the window, and leaned over the couch so I could see the street below.
In the glow of tail lights I could see the shadow of a man standing on the sidewalk in front of our building.
The buzzer rang again. This time I picked up the phone.
"Hello," I said.
"Airport shuttle."
I hesitated, glancing toward the bedroom.
"We're on our way down."
I hung up the phone and walked back through the apartment, stepping over the suitcase to get to the bedroom door.
"The shuttle's here," I said into the dark room. "I'm gonna start bringing things down."
After yanking the zipper around from one corner to the other, I drug the suitcase and our other bags to the front door and set them in the hallway. I slung the baggage over my shoulders and struggled to the elevator.
The driver and I were leaning against the van waiting when April and Alleke finally appeared. It wasn't until much later, after we had checked in at the airport and found our gate that I noticed that Alleke was in bare feet.
She was curled up on the seat between April and me with her head on her mom's lap, her blankie in her arms, and her bare little toes resting on my leg.
Alleke always sleeps with bare feet. She kicks off her covers, and when she first started wearing footie pajamas, she was constantly pointing at her toes until we ripped apart the seams so her feet could stick out.
Still, I didn't like her bare feet. Not here. I get worried about doing things right at the airport and on the airplane. For instance, I'm the guy who feels bad about leaning my chair back so I can sleep when I know the person behind me will have less room, even if the person is leaned back and sleeping too. I don't like it when April asks me to ask the flight attendant for a glass of water. I don't like asking another passenger to switch seats with me so I can sit by my family, or asking the person sitting next to me to get up so I can go to the bathroom. I definitely don't like it when Alleke makes a lot of noise, even when she's giggling.
I had been watching April prepare for our trip, though, and she spent days thinking about how to make the airplane fun for Alleke. She didn't mind feeding Alleke yogurt while we're boarding, or making a mess on the airplane with Alleke's toys, scattered all over the floor, stuffed in all the pockets, and rolled into the aisles. She made people wait in line for the bathroom while she hummed a song and changed Alleke's diaper, and obviously had no problem with Alleke running around the airport in bare feet.
And you know what, Alleke was happy.
What I've realized is that the people around me will probably be a lot happier if I put Alleke's needs first, like April does. If Alleke is happy, everybody is happy, even if it means she's running around in bare feet...and who knows, maybe next time I'll even take my socks off and join her.
The Moon I collapsed on the couch. I had been unpacking boxes all morning. The stack of cardboard by the front door was my witness, and Alleke, who had stood by my side watching. To her, I was the magician, pulling things from our old house out of a box.
From the couch, I could see the moon. It was a strange thing to see the moon caught there between the window frame and the roof line in the middle of the afternoon.
Alleke climbed up on the couch next to me. I pointed, and she saw the moon too. We sat there side-by-side with our heads back, like we were in dentist chairs, and looked up at the white dot in the sky.
Later, when Alleke was in footie pajamas, and we sat reading stories in the rocking chair in her bedroom, she wanted to read the blue book with the moon on the front of it. She pointed at the moon on every page. I found another book with a moon in it, and she pointed at the moon in that book too, each time looking up at me to make sure I saw it as well.
There it was, the moon.
Over the course of the next few days while I carried Alleke around the city on my back, I would catch her leaning way back in the baby carrier looking for the moon, and sometimes she would find it.
I wondered if Alleke's obsession with the moon had to do with simple fact that it always came back. If she kept looking, eventually she would find it again. The moon was one of the few things in her life, besides her mom and dad, that was usually the same and usually there. The moon was her reference point.
I grew up on the rim of the horizon, on a small acreage on a gravel road in Iowa. There were some things that never changed, like the sky over me and the dirt under my feet.
Alleke, on the other hand, is growing up in the city, a place that reinvents itself constantly. Nothing seems certain or eternal. One building goes up, another comes down. Friendships come and go, jobs change, and we move around. We filter out strangers and street noise and try to ground ourselves somewhere, being intentional about seeing the same people and going the same places, because it doesn't happen naturally--not here.
Maybe that's why when Alleke is looking for something she knows, she looks up.
We fly to the US this week, and we will be there for a few weeks. Once again, everything will change for Alleke--that is, except for her mom, her dad...and the moon.
I was in an Ecuadorian restaurant decorated like the inside of a boat, eating a fried banana and talking with friends, when I happened to glance over and notice that Alleke had squatted down next to the table and was pulling money and credit cards out of an open wallet.
I looked around the room.
"Um...did someone give Alleke a wallet to play with because she's going through it and taking out all the money and credit cards," I said.
Everyone at the table looked at each other.
"It looks like this," I said, dangling it like a snake by the tail.
"Isn't that yours, Terri?" someone asked at the other end of the table.
"I've got mine right here," Terri said. Everyone watched as she dug through her purse for a while, then stopped and looked up.
"Can I see that?" she asked, squinting across the table.
I smiled.
I helped Alleke scoop up the pile of coins, bills and cards and return them to their compartments in the wallet. It helped that she knew right where everything belonged, and when we finished, I asked her politely to put the wallet back where she found it.
She led me around to the far side of the table, dropped the wallet in Terri's bag, which was hanging off her chair, and smiled. I could see that she was proud of herself for doing what she was told.
I don't know why I was surprised. We live in Madrid after all, where everyone has a story about a wallet or an ipod or a bag that was stolen and a theory about who took it when. I had overlooked, perhaps, the most basic question about right and wrong in Alleke's world.
So, I sat down next to her and began to explain.
"Honey," I said, "we don't steal people's wallets."
Thursday afternoon April and I sat down with our calendar. It wasn't until after we circled dates that we realized we were booked solid for three weeks. We had close friends visiting from Sevilla and the US, a weekend in the mountains, a work trip, and we were moving to a new apartment. Each event sounded fun and adventurous, but put together, all in a row, seemed like the kind of parental behavior Alleke would talk about someday in her therapy sessions.
Maybe you can have too much of a good thing...we were about to find out.
Josiah visits (March 17-23) Josiah is almost three and didn't mind being Alleke's big brother for a week while he and his parents stayed with us. He showed Alleke how to play games, how to share toys (and to say "I'm sorry" when one of them wouldn't), how to scream and chase each other around the house, and how to give hugs and kisses.
1st Mistake: Alleke had so much fun and leaned so many new things from Josiah that she was worn out by noon most days. By the end of the first week, she was clingy, whiny, exhausted, and completely incapable of dealing with her own emotions.
Easter Retreat (March 20-23)See Photos We spent Easter weekend at a campground in the mountains, and while Alleke had more opportunity than she does in the city to run around, play in the dirt, and admire the stars, it was also an unfamiliar environment and the second of three weeks without sleeping in her own room.
2nd Mistake: These three weeks were a progression of taking away from Alleke everything that was familiar to her, including her room, and later on even her home.
Daniel, Amanda and Dawn visit (March 22-28)See Photos Three of our close friends from college came to visit. Because we only had a few days together, we planned our schedule to see as much as we could of Madrid, including a day trip to Toledo, and plenty of time to talk and catch up on each other's lives. Alleke was her cheerful self most of the week, but by the end I could tell she didn't appreciate being told where to go all the time, and she was sick of being around people. She finally learned how to say the word "no," probably out of necessity.
3rd Mistake: We planned Alleke's schedule so tightly that she didn't have any time to play or be by herself.
Moving into New Apartment (March 28-30)See Photos Friday morning we said goodbye to Daniel, Amanda and Dawn. That afternoon at 6pm some friends would arrive to help us move our things to our new apartment. The one small flaw in our plan was that because we had been busy for two weeks straight, we had not packed. Our silverware was still in the drawer, and our clothes were still hanging in the closet. So, we spent the day throwing things in boxes and taping them up. At six our friends arrived, and between two cars and a moving van, eight trips, and over the course of three days, we managed to get all our things to our new place, clean the old place, and hand over the keys.
4th Mistake: Almost all the time I spent with Alleke I was also doing something else (like packing boxes or ordering people around).
Catching a Cold (March 26-April 2) All three of us caught a cold. I'm not surprised. There was the day we all went to Toledo without coats because it was nice out in the morning, and then it got frigid by afternoon and we were all shivering. And then the move was just exhausting, and all the dust got my allergies going. Alleke went to the doctor on Friday, April was sick in bed on Sunday, and I was on antibiotics by Monday.
5th Mistake: We didn't take care of ourselves, and we got sick, which made it more difficult to care for Alleke while she was sick and deal with how we were feeling about moving.
Team Building Weekend (April 3-5) We were all feeling much better by Thursday, but we hadn't unpacked much, and we were leaving for a Team Building weekend for my job. April and I were in meetings for two days while Alleke played with her friend Adriana.
6th Mistake: Alleke loves Adriana, and I'm sure it was good for her to be completely immersed in Spanish for a couple days, but the last thing she needed after these three weeks was to be separated from her parents for two more days.
Moving Day We moved into our new apartment over the weekend. A big thanks to over twenty of our friends who packed boxes, carried boxes, unpacked boxes, cleaned, hung light fixtures, drove cars, made meals, babysat, the list goes on.
Here are a few photos from the day...
The Old Apartment
The New Apartment
Swimmers, Snorkelers and Fish This post is part of a series called Spring Cleaning where I asked you, the reader, if there was anything you wanted to know, but never asked about me or my family. Today's question was asked by Sandra77:
Is Spain now home for you, April and Alleke? Do you think you'll return to the US to live? Would you live in other cities in Europe? I'm curious about whether Americans who are not retirees really make the switch to permanent living outside of the U.S.
Living in a foreign country often feels like that game we would play at the pool as kids where we would try to see how long we could hold our breath under water. Mostly we played to see who could last the longest, but also because it was fascinating to be under water where everything looked and sounded differently.
Using water as my analogy, I feel like when it comes to living in a foreign country there are three kinds of people: swimmers, snorkelers, and fish.
Swimmers (holding your breath) As kids at the pool, we had to come up for air at some point. It was inevitable. In my experience, most people who live abroad are holding their breath. They want to see how long they can last. They come to see the world from a different angle, and they study or work temporary jobs so they can experience the local culture. Most eventually return home to be closer to friends and family or pursue a career.
Snorkelers (sucking air through a tube) Others, like us, are snorkeling. We found jobs at home that sent us to work in a foreign country. In our case, April and I work for an international church called Oasis Madrid, and as such, were hired by an international non-profit organization that pays us from home. This is a viable means of living in a foreign country, but it's fragile. If anything happens to that snorkel tube, we need to come up for air. Exchange rates and permission to work in a foreign country can change. Plus, most international organizations and companies, like the military, expect their employees to move every couple years, making it difficult to settle down somewhere and integrate. April and I love our jobs, and plan to keep them, but if we wanted to stay in Spain and change careers, it would be very difficult because we found our jobs at home, not here. Our education and experience from home don't translate very well.
Fish (breathing water) To live in a foreign country permanently means to completely reinvent yourself. In other words, if you want to breath under water, you have to learn to be a fish. I haven't met very many fish, and by that I mean I haven't met many non-European couples who have moved to Spain, found Spanish jobs, and plan to stay. After a year or two, most people decide it's not worth the trouble, and they realize they don't want to be fish. They miss their families, or the familiarity of their own culture, or they realize they could get a better job at home.
Let's face it, those from the foreign country will almost always be more qualified for most jobs. They speak the language, they intuitively know how things work, and they have a base of friends and family who support them. Learning to be a fish is not simply a matter of putting in enough time and effort, it means countless people going out of their way to listen to you fumble along in a language that's not your own, rent you a room or an apartment when they don't know much about you or your culture, and give you a job when others are more qualified. It can happen, but it's a slow process.
All this to say... Sandra, all of this may be more than you wanted to know, and I'm not sure I even have any answers to your actual questions. What I do know is I didn't expect April and I to be some of the few internationals I know who still live in Spain. I really don't know why we stayed, and they left. Many of them seemed more fit for Spain than us, and what makes it even more bizarre is we liked living in the US and we love our families, so it's not like we didn't give up a lot to move here.
I suppose we stay because a) we are a part of a very close-knit group of people in our church who care about us, which makes us feel like we belong here, b) we believe our jobs are important and help make Spain a better place, which gives us a purpose for being here beyond just seeing the world from another perspective, and c) Spain (specifically Madrid, and even more specifically our neighborhood) challenges us to be the kind of people we want to be. So, we feel like Spain helps us to be better people.
In the Shadow of the Olive Tree "I'll put on some music," I said. I got up from the table and walked over to the stereo. Meanwhile, April asked for everyone's plates and served lasagna while they talked about the upcoming Spanish elections.
I flipped through our CDs, found a favorite, and put it in the CD player. It wasn't until after I found my seat at the table and picked up my fork and knife that I noticed April grinning at me from across the table...and why.
Alleke stood at the front door and pointed. I couldn't help but notice her resemblance to the monument of Christopher Columbus in Barcelona pointing the way to the Americas. Ironically, the statue points in the wrong direction (towards Italy, not the New World), which gave me an idea.
I had planned on taking Alleke down to the playground a little later, but now I wanted to see where she would take me. She would lead, and I would follow.
I grabbed my keys off the table and opened the door. Alleke raced over to the elevator and waited for me to push the button. When the doors opened on the ground floor, she dangled from my hand as we took the steps. I yanked at the heavy wooden door until it opened, and Alleke ran out into the street.
She was nearly at the corner before I got hold of her hand, like grabbing a dog by the collar. Actually, it was a lot like walking a dog. She would stop to look at something like a cigarette butt on the sidewalk, then prance along ahead of me, never once in a straight line of course, but always back and forth like she was hiking up a mountain.
She tired quickly, so I scooped her up in my arms. She was the captain, and now I was the ship.
"Where do we go now?" I asked at the next corner, wondering if she actually knew where she was going, or if she always pointed at what was in front of her.
She pointed to my right.
I smiled as we turned the corner and began walking down towards the playground. At every corner I asked her the way, and every time she assured me it was straight ahead. When we got to the square with the playground at the other end, she unbuckled herself from my arms like a seat belt and dashed off across the cobblestones, scattering pigeons.
I caught up with her again, this time chatting with an elderly woman who wanted to know her name and asked if her hair was really that blonde or if it was dyed that way by her parents. Alleke politely answered all her questions, but in a language neither I nor the elderly woman were familiar with.
In the end, Alleke didn't make it to the playground. Instead, she climbed up on a park bench and watched dogs chase rubber balls. I suppose that's what explorers do. They chart their course, but if they find something else more interesting along the way (say the Americas, instead of a shortcut to India), they're willing to recognize that the process of discovery is always more important than the final destination.
I was sitting on the couch playing guitar when I heard the bathroom door open. Alleke scampered into the room looking for music like kids after an ice cream truck. She had escaped her bath in her birthday suit, which made my music her victory song as she giggled and galloped circles around the room.
Much later after Alleke had exhausted herself with spinning in circles, she crawled into my guitar case with a blanket and closed her eyes.
I strummed a lullaby.
It wasn't until after she sat up, got out, and began running around again that I noticed the little puddle in the bottom of my case.
Déjà vu Déjà vu is the strange feeling that you've been here before, even in new situations. Last year at this time we moved back to Madrid, found an apartment, and moved in. I can't help but think we're repeating history this year, even though we've never been here before.
We found a new apartment over the weekend and will be moving in at the end of March. We spent most of last week negotiating a new contract with our landlords, but as soon as we settled on something, our new apartment came on the market, and it was everything we wanted, so we took it.
Here are a few things I like about this particular apartment:
250€ less per month By far the main reason we like this apartment better than our current one is because of the price tag. We need the money for basic things like groceries, but April keeps dreaming of the trip we'll take to Greece with all the money we have now.
It's 8 streets away We are moving to a new apartment, but not a new neighborhood. I've discovered that our neighborhood matters more to us than our apartment, which means we'll still be able to drop in on our friends, play at our favorite playground, and shop at the stores we know.
Playgrounds 3 playgrounds = lots of kids for Alleke to play with. All three playgrounds are within a five minute walk, and two of them are the best I've seen in the city center.
Market I love buying fresh fruits and vegetables from local vendors. Our new apartment is closer to a food market that I started going to a few months ago. In comparison to the other markets, it has a larger selection of foods from around the world and has lower prices.
Grocery stores Only a few grocery stores are located in the city center, which means it's always a hassle to get groceries. As a result, we've ordered our groceries online for the last four years. Our favorite grocery store, Mercadona, doesn't deliver to our current address, but will deliver to our new one. We will be eating better next month, my friends.
70 m2 (750 ft2) Our new apartment is smaller than our current one. I'm sure our European friends will think it's spacious, but coming from a super-sized nation, we're still tempted to think bigger is better. April and I are both looking forward to the challenge of living smaller and more simply (in other words, we'll be giving things away and throwing them out as we pack).
Walking We will be close to three metro lines, but even more importantly, we will still be within walking distance of most things we do. I prefer to live my life at a walking pace because I get exercise, I can stop and chat with people, and I'm not burning gasoline.
Anyway, we haven't signed the contract yet, but if all goes well, we will be moving in at the end of the month. Here's some photos:
"Where is your blankie?" I asked, scanning the room.
I carried Alleke around the house, and we hunted for her blankie. We checked her bed, and the toy cupboard, and under the couch cushions until eventually we stopped in front of the door to our bedroom, out of ideas.
I thought through the situation, looking for the missing link. The only difference between this morning and every other morning was that it was a Saturday and April was in our bedroom sleeping in.
I grinned.
I set Alleke down and cracked open the door to the bedroom. Alleke ran in ahead of me. She stopped at the edge of the bed and pointed. There, sound asleep, was her mom, curled up like a kitten around her blankie.
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