In the old days things were black and white for me. It was easy to tell what was right and what was wrong, good from bad, smart from stupid, happy from sad.
That was then and now is different. I don't even know how I feel anymore about so many things. It's really unsettling.
I lived in Southern California my entire life until the age of 48. I was completely of California. How could I have been any other way? I wasn't a militant Southern Californian - you may know the type - smugly thinking of all the poor stiffs shoveling snow while sipping iced tea on our patios in February. Feeling superior for only wearing long pants twice in the last year.....Since shorts and sun in February were completely normal, it was nothing much special.
In fact, the grittiness required to live other places was kind of intriguing to me.
I've been living in Paris now for almost 4 years. Not very long as a percentage of all my years, but long enough to make me not quite the same anymore.
I'm not only a Southern California girl anymore, but I'm certainly not a Parisian - or rather a French woman. Pas de tout.
I live a bit on the outside of both places. I'm not part of the tennis team, or dinner groups or the bunco girls anymore back home, but I also am not French, can't speak the language very well, don't have the ancestral family house and structure to go to on Sundays or lean on when you're feeling weak or out of sorts.
How did this happen? Well, I chose it in a way - and in a way I didn't. My husband decided to bag it all and be a Buddhist so I decided that life was too short not to see what it was like to pull up roots and make it in a foreign country like all those heroines in the books.
Well, now I know. There's no real mystery or magic. You just sort of dig in and make a life out of nothing. You learn that other language (though I am afraid that I am destined to speak like a 3rd grader for the rest of my life), you thankfully make more girlfriends (where would any of us be without them?), study, get a job, and even add to the family in a new way.
MFM's daughter is proud to have an American belle mere. My daughters come "home" to Paris for Christmas. I get to show my Californian friends what it is like to cook in a cramped Paris kitchen and survive with only one bathroom. Sunday lunches en famille are on my Paris schedule.
How do I feel about all this?
Changed. Happy and sad, lost and found. I'm of 2 places but belong in neither completely.
That's why what used to be so clear is now kind of foggy.
Stay the course, mon ami. When the fog does clear, it will be beautiful...just like San Francisco! Love, Carrie
Posted by: Carrie Dern | June 01, 2010 at 04:34 PM