The Script Ended

Blame it on email

I get so caught up with doing something just so that I can become frozen in place. Boy is it ever easy to then waste time! And the very best, most effective time waster in the world today IS..........the internet of course. I came late to its many time eating avenues of possibility, I remember not all that long ago being chastised by my more internet savy friends to remember to check my email. Hah! THOSE were the days. Now I check it countless times per day, I think that I have developed a problem. Is there a 12-step program for email checking addiction yet?

And this problem first put down its roots in France. I traveled to Bordeaux for a language immersion program in 2005 and set up an email account to keep in contact back home during my travels. The french keyboards were so frustrating to use at the time that my efforts and communication was spotty during my stay. That all changed once I returned home. The addiction began. I had met people in Bordeaux that I did not, under any circumstances, want to lose contact with (the "why "of that is another story). There was no other way to keep international chatting alive but learn how to email, and then a junkie was born. My interest in those overseas grew in direct proportion to my fading satisfaction with my life in the "burbs". In retrospect it was the beginning of the end.

A message from a friend who lived thousands of miles from sunny southern california took on almost a mystical aura for me. I was a citizen of the world! Someone was contacting me from Europe. Pretty pathetic I know, shows you how narrow and sheltered my world was then. It all seemed impossibly romantic. Messages from across the Atlantic arriving in real time in San Diego. I have come such a long way since then.

Can I sincerely blame email for prompting my move to Paris and my subsequent marriage fall out? Maybe. At least a little bit. But given the ease in which something so simple was able to nudge me so far begs the question, if not that, then what? Something was brewing behind the scenes waiting for its stage call. Bordeaux and my email conversion just happened to be the first candidate in line so they got the job of catalyst.

Wow, see what comes out when you start to write. I have been asking myself over and over during the upheaval of this last year, what went wrong and how did I end up here etc....... Now I know, it is all because of "@ hotmail.com".

Dream Apartment

It is really true, Parisian apartments reek of charm and history. As a "Southern California tract house survivor", I basked within my new surroundings.  High ceilings bordered with wedding cake moldings, herringbone parquet floors, fireplaces in every room topped by ornately encased mirrors and of course - french windows opening out onto curvy iron balconies. They all came along with a price of course. Simply deposit 130% of one year's rent into a blocked account you cannot touch, and all this can be your's too. You've GOT to be kidding!! But, no, they were not. We gulped and handed over the money which, by the way, had to be converted to euros from our rapidly devaluing dollars. What price is beauty?, you ask............a lot.

Poodles and Pearls

The 16th arrondissement of Paris is a stately and posh quarter inhabited by the bourgeois of the city. Why we chose to live here can only be explained by receiving some skewed advice from a new "friend" and the easy access it afforded Jane to her new school. It is a beautiful neighborhood for sure, but lively or typically "Parisian" by many standards, it is not. As described in one tour book - it is the "poodles and pearls" quarter. Well, we DO have a poodle after all!

As I write this post, I am eyeing the stack of moving boxes in the entry. My procrastination must come to an end here shortly because I have packing to do. The moving truck and lift arrive in one week's time. We are off to the 15th arrondissement and a less expensive apartment and a less stuffy neighborhood. The adventure continues.

Finally a Beginning in the middle

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.