Thursday, December 29, 2011

Happy New Year

I am sitting in my office working. The students are on vacation. My babies are at home sick with the nanny. Mae is on antibiotics. New Year's Eve is coming and I feel a feeling of peacefulness. Finally, peace and calm. I have Skype on and I am watching my mother sleep. She hasn't been sleeping and has passed out while talking. I think the sound of my keyboard clicking away just now is probably creating white noise for her. I can't bring myself to hang up because I am afraid she will pop awake again into her sleepless grief hell and I won't know it. Thank god for skype. How amazing that I can be there for her like this even while I am at work. I guess it is kind of similar to those fancy daycare in-crib monitors in the US.

Casablanca is cold these days. We almost bought a car, almost as in showed up to pick up the keys and argued about who would drive it off the lot over breakfast. All the paperwork was signed and legalized. And then they asked me to go ahead and hand over a 7 thousand euro advance on it. Don't you think if we had 7K euros we would have freaking agreed to pay that from the beginning. So due to a lack of competence and communication...we have no car. We have not moved. We have not decided on the school. Nothing has changed. I still feel peaceful about that, calmer.

I hope that this New Year will bring us much peace and time together. 2011 has been about acceptance for me. For all of my life I have looked at nothing as impossible, everything magical..Brilliant. This past year of  motherhood has worn down that child like ambition that I have always had. I didn't want to live in a suburb of Casablanca, I didn't live my whole life to end up in sidi fucking maarouf. I don't want my kids to be from there...ok wait...actually I just want things to be easier than they are now, so even though I don't want to live there, I'll take it, please and thank you if that means I get to see them more, avoid traffic and have a better organized life.
I want them to learn Spanish and  be brilliant and make it into la mission or a school with a European baccalaureate...ok wait, actually we can't afford those schools and I am just fine with this MOROCCAN private school right by my job that would allow me to drop them off and pick them up everyday. Walk in and get them, chat with their teachers, see their world...everyday. I think part of this goes back to: no my grandmother can't die, no she won't, or it is abstract and not real and not happening, certainly not before Christmas...ok wait, she's gone. Death came and I saw it. The leukemia showed up and ravaged her body in two weeks flat and she is gone, but miraculously I got to sit at her bedside and hold her hand and hear the most magical words whispered to me on her way out.

I understand all at once that she is why I am so fucking impossibly, hopelessly ambitious about brilliance. All of the concessions I am having to make as a mother feel like mediocrity but maybe it is just practicality. At the end of the day my grandmother was one of the most practical people I have ever known, with a heart full of magic...This is her wathcing my mom turn 50:







And this is her watching her first great grand daughter being born:






And this is me, once upon a time - on a New Year's eve in Scottland,  when I still thought the world was mine:

Damnit I wish I could still fit in those jeans! (see practical things, practical things!!!)



2 comments:

Elizabeth said...

Happy New Year! Please give giant bisous to the girls from me and Clara. And really, don't sweat the move, the car, the school. It will work out. Go zen for 2012. At least that's my resolution. Right after I get skinny.

Prof. Abenirex said...

And the world is still yours and you know it... Chin up always :D