It has been eighteen months since my move to Paris. What had started out as an adventure has turned into a completely different life. Did I realize where I was going when I came to Paris? Not really, at least not consciously. But here I am. I had all the best intentions of recording my French adventure in chronological order on a brightly designed blog. You know, the perfect diary of "experiences" to impress and inspire my friends. Unfortunately raw unfiltered life got in the way of my flowery descriptions of romantic Paris. Living here is a postcard experience in many ways and my irony is that this existence is juxtaposed alongside the pile of rubble remaining from my former life. I came here as a 47 year old woman, married for 23 years. My husband, Peter, and I are the proud parents of four daughters, born one after the next, five years from first to last. We were nearing the home stretch of parenting with three in college and our youngest half way through high school when we arrived in Paris. Less than a year later, I was newly single, struggling to parent a teenager in Paris, part of an amazing group of people from all over the world that I can count as friends and my life was now uncharted territory stretching out before me.
So since my first post is a year and a half late, I better begin to fill in with the "cliff notes" version of how I came to this new life as a Parisian. I am beginning this blog because I believe that I have something to share from having lived through what I have lived over these months as well as the new steps I am learning to take as I move forward into the future.
My husband and I, along with the youngest of our four daughters, landed in Paris, France in the summer of 2006. We were escapees from the upper middle class lifestyle of suburban Southern California. We had recently sold our San Diego "dream house" to pursue what I liked to say was now our "dream life". A fair trade off I reasoned. Little did I know that the dream life that I thought I was living would soon become a nightmare....
A bit more history
My husband, Peter, had been struggling with depression and a general dissatisfaction with his life for several years. This depression had insidiously lodged itself into the intimate crevices of our marriage, and begun to unhinge it from its foundation. As in every pair, an action causes a reaction and then another action and soon you can't tell where it all began. The emotional turmoil that we found ourselves in caused us both to behave in ways that only widened the chasms growing between us. Did we acknowledge this process? Of course not, at least not until it was too late.
In the midst of this challenge, Peter's mother passed away and that emotional event precipitated his sudden decision to sell our 20 year old tax and accounting business. This change seemed as though it was meant to be because on the first day, within the first hour of posting our transaction, we received an inquiry that resulted in a full price offer by the end of that week.The sale and transition of ownership was smoothly completed and now we could do whatever we wanted, within reason, for several precious stolen years. "How about a year in Paris?" Peter suggested. Really? Wow, now that really was a dream come true!
An investigative trip that I took several months later seemed to point towards making our one year adventure a three year sojourn to best maximize the international educational experience we were seeking for Jane, our 16 year old. Jane was quickly accepted to a wonderful bilingual school. That decision led to selling our family home and as luck would have it, the buyers wanted all of our furniture too. Our overseas move flowed seamlessly forward. We were unshackled from most of the large possessions accumulated over 23 years of marriage. Save for the photos and assorted "stuff", we had nothing to move. We packed the dog and 17 suitcases and took off for Paris to hunt for an apartment . Were we really doing this crazy thing?
A snowball had begun its descent and it was picking up speed rapidly. We landed at Charles de Gaulle and began to improvise.
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