Moving on...

So…I have not written on here in months and months. I am not sure if I even still deserve this place! Is life any less brilliant since last time I wrote? Absolutely not, there is more brilliance than ever.

I wanted to wait until this was final to announce it. Now it is final. I divorced. Yes, I know again, another breakup, another upheaval, another letting go of dreams and hopes and wishes about the future. This time…with kids included. Wohoo, you know that is fun. 

The truth is this: It hurt very badly. I still sit with the pain, digest the scope of it all, cry at inopportune times.

The truth is also this: I am clearer, calmer, more sober and peaceful than I have ever been in my life. I am so very grateful to my ex. for giving me my children. These particular children could only have been born to he and I and nothing will ever make me regret or want to change that. Ours is still a grand love story, but now it has changed. As all things do, our story has changed. My story has a twist ending. Someone told me during this whole mess, “You will be ok, even if it the future doesn’t look how you imagined it”. No truer words have ever been spoken. 

I am so happy and so grateful for everything I have in my life. I lost a marriage, but I have gained so very much. New people have come into my life to help and nurture and hand hold me along on this incredibly transformative process. I believe in love more than I ever have. I am convinced that love is the most fundamental element of our existence.

So…I am still living in my beloved Morocco, not planning on going anywhere as I quite love my life here and am very grateful for everything and everyone in it. 

The girls made it into a great school that will bring them a 4^th language and I could not be more proud and more excited for them. I have made major professional advancements and life is good at the moment. Even if it’s not the way I expected it to look, the view is still very nice. 

Now that I have gotten this announcement out of the way, I can start my writing here again. 

First week reflections

I thought it would be like running. Marathon long days that start with me dragging myself out of bed totally underprepared, rushing to make the lunches and herd the kids into the car and fight traffic to drop them off late to school and me ending up late to work…

It’s not been like that at all. I know that it WILL be like that some days, but it hasn’t been like so far. The thing that has surprised me the most about the girls starting school is what a joy it is to facilitate it. Everything associated with this whole enterprise of sending my kids to school…is a joy. I love it. I don’t resent it, in fact it’s a  really special feeling. It feels like one of the most special times of my life. This is also a time in my life that is very difficult. But I am keeping my head above water because I can’t afford not to. I am full on at work, full on Master’s degree and full on school mom. And I know this is just petite section, it will turn into so much more but I am really enjoying this part, sadly enjoying this part. I am watching my daughters grow into more independent girls that spend the day outside of the house, not in. 

Now…if I recorded the drop-off / pick-up situation outside of the school and that video were to make it into the right hands, it would be a nation wide, prime time, news story by which many Americans would justify their belief that they are in fact living in the best country in the world.

Dropping my children off at school and picking them up is a daily nod to some ingrained cultural chauvinistic patriotism that I didn’t realize existed within me until I moved here…and had to drop my kids off at school. I mean Mae actually whimpers and comments on the amount of cars that are there and the fact “oh no mama, there’s tars here too” (she says t for c). 

Picture taken from:

Portail de la Construction et du BTP au Maroc - www.bni.ma -

The above photo is a regular traffic jam in the city...go ahead and up the anty by adding the pressure of having to get your kid to school on time and then having to get to work on time.

Yesterday as we navigated the two city blocks of dead stopped traffic and marched through the unpaved, dusty lots of land waiting to be developed, dirtying our sandaled feet in the dust, Mae was clutching my hand and crying that there were cars driving around us in every possible direction! When I say driving, I mean blowing their horns non-stop, being blocked in traffic and then intensely accelerating when they get unblocked. When we finally made it to the car and I was strapping her into her seat, a car that had been in a traffic jam that finally made it through the other cars  sped by me so quick that I actually yelped out loud thinking that I was about to have my body impaled onto the car seat. I screamed and Mae jumped and then she was convinced for the next thirty minutes that that car had run over my feet!!!!! She literally made me show her my feet! Poor thing! Poor me! 

So…everyday, after I make it back to the car, I sit for a few seconds to inhale the calm and I imagine the orderly lines of slow moving traffic and the reduced speed limits and the sidewalks and the crossing guards and even the school bus stop signs that protrude out from the side of the bus in America. Then I start my car and move on with my life.

Life in Casablanca...Update

Thank goodness that freaking series is over. It turned into my reason not to blog. Anyways, I am glad I have the Moroccan living room. I sit in it every day. Here is a more general update of my life lately.

I have decided that I hate Casablanca…kind of…not really…ok I am still just as back and forth wishy washy as ever about casa and Morocco and all things really. 

 

Summer is nearing and I have a heavy heart from a lack of outside space. 

My kids are full on talking, totally bi-lingual in English and Arabic and really crack me up on a regular basis.

Spring time always inspires me to want to do more than I actually have the energy to do. For example, I want to plant and craft and paint and dance and work out and be outside in nature all the time. I want to take the girls to visit their grandma once a week and walk in parks and cook amazing dishes at home…but really I just go back and forth to work mostly. 

There is some magic still…maybe it will help if I list it:

• I taught the girls to race each other and they love that
• I went scuba diving
• I swam in the gorgeous clear Mediterranean sea and I was in heaven
• I still walk back and forth to work even though sometimes lately the car has been slipping in the picture
• We went to the beach on Sunday and had an absolute blast. We bought the girls a small blow up pool on the side of the road and then laughed so hard at how stupid we were for thinking that we could fill that thing and then easily pull it back up the sand to where the towels were. It took us like 10 minutes to get it back to the towels, laughing and grunting and incurring many a looks from other beach goers
• I am hosting a cous cous party for the teachers that work for me this Friday
• I went to visit a very sick woman that was in a coma and she WOKE UP while I was there, she continues to slowly recover
• Planning on demanding a date out of my husband very soon, he doesn’t know it yet

Thanks…I feel better now!

Lisboa in two days

And all I have to show for it is this lousy airplane photo. 

This trip was not the European lushful romp of my youth. It was a refined, somewhat boring  business trip. One in which I was too tired to even the leave the hotel at night and for the first time in my life, didn’t push it, let it go, promised to come back instead. Told myself I would rather see it with my husband and kids anyways. This is new for me. I had to not so willingly but not so dramatically let my facial moisturizer lotion be thrown away in airport security. It was either that or check it and quite frankly I have done too many waits at the Casa airport to bother with the whole thing.

 

I am writing this in the time before my flight home to Casa and I find myself reflecting on myself (surprise surprise) in the paradigm of Europe, work, adulthood, youthfulness, and relative perspective.

In my youth I raged through airports, I wish I could have a montage of camera footage of every airport passing I have done in my life. We would see some of my worst (never my best) moments and it would make for much humor. I had long crazy hair, was way too skinny, but the rush from that alone made me feel high. I was a young American girl out there doing what young American girls do best. I was being special and unique and gathering stories and memories that will last me the rest of my life. In fact anytime I feel bored or mundane now I can think back to those times and be so grateful that I lived them and remember why I wouldn’t want to go back. When I see young, stylish, European lovers, couples, confused, happy, before kids and marriage and all of the weights that make us not feel that way anymore, when I see them in airports on the way to hear and there, knowing how lucky they are to be living it right now, I feel so happy for them. Not envious or angry or annoyed, but truly happy for them because it is their moment and because I know I had my moment of such, and I know that there will be more that follow them, the next set and they will one day be sitting from my perspective (I hope, for them). I set a goal for myself at that time, and it would appear for all intents and purposes I have reached that goal…kind of. 

When I left Paris to return home to the states, I said that I wanted to go home, and get a job that would allow me to live in Europe and travel home, see my family, be a proper part of society. I was not that in Paris. I was a vagabond at best! A brilliant beautiful vagabond that wrote poetry on the scene and lived about every cliché you can imagine about life in Paris for a 21 year old anorexic American. 

Anyways, at the time I knew that I loved life there and I saw the women of my age, and I knew that when I was their age I wanted to be proper also, I wanted to belong to that club, have sophisticated clothes (still not there yet!), have gorgeous little kids and a great job and a husband that slightly touches me on the back as we enter or exit cars.  I have those things. I imagined it to be in Paris and it is not. My life  is in Casablanca for the moment, but I haven’t given up hope for Europe. 

That brings me to my final point about perspective. When I only knew Europe, the convenience of America was the best and anytime I went home I marveled at the wonder of it all, anytime I went back to Europe I cursed the inconvenance of it all. Now that I live in Morocco, I am non-stop impressed with European organization and customer service. It’s quite funny really. Perspective is so relative. 

For those Americans that think America is the best and that Europe sucks in comparison, I challenge you to go and live in Africa. I realize also that I live in north Africa, in the Maghreb, which is magical and consumer oriented and WAY MORE developed than many other places on the continent and in the region. So maybe the solution is not for me to find a way to move to Europe but to go and spend some time in somewhere less developed than Morocco and then go back to Morocco! Again, perspective is so relative and I am glad for mine, all of it.

I still dream of Paris, but Lisbon is nice too.

Moroccan Road Trips

I miss travelling. I miss the feeling of hitting the open road in Morocco.

I miss the way the sun feels in summer time. I miss the red walls of Marrakesh and the frenzy of the medina coupled with the calm of the hotel. I miss swimming in gorgeous pools with exotic looking palm trees sprouting out from them. Travelling through Morocco is always such a wonderful experience. I ask myself why. I answer myself with "because it's beautiful - of course it has dug way down deep in your heart and periodically spits up images at you".

When I first came to Morocco, before I (knew I) was pregnant with the twins, we took a trip to Marrakesh on a train. When my mother saw the pictures of me looking out the window at the countryside, she said "I can't tell if you are crying or just really happy".

I told her I was crying because I was so happy. It was in that stairway of a beat up old train, with a door open, speeding by rolling green hills of country side that I realized that I felt really safe with my husband. I was not afraid to sit by the open door because I knew that if I fell, if I slipped and my body flung towards the open air, that he would catch me, he would do what it takes to make me safe.

What a glorious trip that was. When our pride was about our newly re-found love. Our pictures were about us being so proud and feeling so strong and confident to be back together again. it was pure magic. The snails in djemaa el fna, the dinner at chez ali, all of it.

Whenever I start yearning for Marrakesh, it's actually that, that I have in mind.

Of course we have been back sense then with the girls. We had a gorgeous poolside room

and as soon as we got into the hotel the girls fell busy pulling themselves up on the furniture and we set up the cribs and then we found Mae had crawled inside of the cabinet. this past summer I found a picture of myself at that age doing exactly that.

We took a carriage ride at sunset around the medina.

We walked past the koutoubia, we had dinner in the square and took pictures by the pool and the girls pigged out at the breakfast buffet. 

We visited a gorgeous guesthouse in the valley, we ate a posh lunch overlooking a beautiful lake.

We drove through Berber villages and decided that if we ever did have a wedding, we would do it there. Then we abandoned the girls in djemaa el fna!

I miss vacation in Morocco. I want to hit the road but it's not going to happen anytime soon. We have other priorities right now so the goal is on making it through this winter for a spring retreat.

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue

Youssef and I are a couple that married, like officially, somewhere in the region of 4 times. Once when I was 18 years old in the Decatur courthouse. An event to which I wore tan, heeled boots and a light brown knee length dress. We ate at a Jamaican restaurant off of Lavista road afterwards with friends. The second time is when I took this photo:

The third time was this photo:

and I am sure we went to the Habouss at least one other time when I didn't even bother to dress for the occasion. I had no wedding shower, no wedding, no baby shower, otherwise known as the henna party, then we had no baptism for the girls and have really only thrown one Moroccan party as a couple (if you don't count the numerous dazed nights of youthful entertaining we did regularly in the West End many years ago). 

I guess you could call us, non-celebratory in traditional terms.

We are moving...finally. I am at peace with moving...finally.  I feel as though my destiny is being fulfilled but that's for a different blog post.

Back to the theme of the weddings and the moving...I have an idea. I want our new home to emulate love, our love, our partnership, a wedding that we never had, the official announcement to the community that we are a proper couple. So I am going with a theme for the new pad of something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue.

Current hodgepodge of ideas:

1.) Thanks to Tahir Shah I am now totally into the idea of salvaging for tables and dressers and an entryway piece.
2.) Speaking of the entry way, to set the tone for the love house, I am going to (enchallah) put a Moroccan wedding blanket on the wall in the entry way. 

3.) Something new...well that's going to be a full on Moroccan salon. I. am. so. excited. see example HERE:

4.) Something borrowed - I am just going to consider the apartment as borrowed because it's not ours
5.) For the blue, I am thinking tiles...not really sure yet, but it will present itself to me of that I am sure
5.) We arer planning a carpet buying trip...I told Youssef last night, "Hell to the yes, a carpet buying trip to the mountains, that is like why I freaking moved to Morocco!", he was all "Good...I'm glad you've found your purpose".
6.) I want a piano for the girls, so that will be old as well most probably.
7.) I want a proper dining room table and I have something like this in mind:

but I am actually considering this as well:

8.) As far as my destiny being fulfilled...well...I will explain that bit later, but I mean it.
9.) I want to create an environment to create in. Life is too short. I am in the process of getting my Master's degree and that is for career path purposes but honest to god  I am sick of being afraid to create. Being afraid to go for it. Being afraid to write. POETRY and STORIES!!!! AHHHHHHHH
10.) I am reading the artist's way, can you tell?
11.) Plus there is just something about the ancient culture here mixed with the laid back "ma'caine moushkil" attitude thrown together with the crazy stress of the traffic jams from the donkeys in the streets and the black Mercedes zooming around juxtaposed with the beggars and the carts and the free roaming sheep in the middle of the city. All of that plus the changing economy and country lends itself to a lot of inspiration if you can manage to escape the stress. I am working on escaping that stress and allowing the inspiration to flourish. One thing is for sure, February will mark the end of my 3rd year here and the beginning of my 4th year, and I feel luckier than ever to be here. Yes... I desperately miss my family and still entertain ideas of up and moving back but I am not actively fighting to get out, my philosophy is to enjoy where I am at while I am there. I miss my father's land. I miss how it feels to be there. I miss him. I talk to my mother all the time so I don't freak out as bad about her and somewhere in the back of my head, I know that if I stay eventually one day, I convince her to come and live at least part of the year here with me. But the father piece is a bit different. That won't change, I imagine it will only worsen. The only solution I can see out of it is if I have this amazing free life as a writer and we have the financial means to send me over to the US often enough for me to get sick of it and want to be back in Morocco. You know...not asking too much! As far as my point above about the culture and the change...anything feels possible in Morocco. I feel closer than ever to being able to actually do something like that. But it takes work, hard work and vigilance and that is just not where I have been putting the work. This is what I am working on for 2012. Trying to set the wheels of that work in motion. And I sure this will move at the pace of the traffic on the route de j'dida at 6pm on a Friday...but I am prepared to inch along to get there. A great quote from the artist's way is when people tell her 'do you have any idea how old I will be by the time I master that new skill' and she says "yes...the same age you will be if you don't".'

I'll do a proper post about the move update later.

The Nanny Diaries

I have suffered. It has been going on for years. I hope there is an end in sight but I am not sure. Since I have arrived in Morocco I have been put off by the “maid” thing. It is second nature for most Moroccans. The maid thing inevitably, with the arrival of children, has turned into the nanny thing. My family knows my woes quite well. My daughters are now two years old and this is the situation I faced when I came home last night:

Scene: Dust flying out from behind the station wagon as I zoom along the dirt road not even caring if I happen to actually run over a duck this time…I need to see my kids. I have been gone since exactly 7:20am and it is exactly 6:00pm. I spent the past two weeks with them all day every day and I KNOW exactly how much I missed today in those 11 hours. I pull the car in front of our white house, get out and find the big steel doors open for me, make it to the interior garden and find the kitchen quite but see a light at the end of the house. The screen door is open for me as well. Mae is at the end of the hallway, she sees me and runs at me with an overwhelming rush of loving energy. She clasps on to my legs and I kneel down to hug and kiss her, before I even get halfway down she wiggles away from me and runs to…her nanny. She loges herself on her and hugs her. Caresses her arms and pushes her face into her, looking back at me only to make sure that I will not try to take her away from her. I have at this point made it to the brown rug in the living room where the nanny, Sophia and Mae were sitting quietly reading and waiting for me. Sophia is absorbed in a book. She lets me kiss her and immediately starts pointing out the characters. I am trying to ignore the Mae situation, be fine with it, not care, and tell myself all of the things that people have told me to help me deal with this exact moment. An anger starts to gurgle its way up my throat and out comes the mother I hate myself for being. Me: Sophia, you want to go bye bye with mamma. Let’s go get Baba. Mae: bye bye? Me: not you, Sophia is going with mama you will go home with Hanane. Mae: clings to Hanane more tightly. Hanane: also caressing Mae’s hair, and kissing her. Me: fighting the urge to rip my daughter from her arms. Only fighting it because I know that if I do it will only end in many many tears spilled between Mae and I. Sophia: bye bye? Me: yes, let’s go get dressed. Hanane: yallah Mae, zidi a mama. Me: no, no, ma cain mushkil (no problem) Mae goes with you. Hanane: nervous laughter. Me: In the room dressing Sophia, hating myself for working and then reacting to the consequences. Mae: finds me in the hallway getting their shoes and asks me to go with them. Me: okay benti (my daughter) of course you will go with us. We are going to take hanane home and go and pick up Baba and go and play. I kneel down again to try and kiss her finally. Mae: runs away from me and grabs onto Hanane again. Me: trying not to be angry again, getting Sophia ready, dressing myself, acting like everything is fine, apologizing to the nanny for the long day, showing her the dark circles under my eyes so that she understands that I was  out working, that I really do love my kids but that I have to provide for them and I am not out partying or having coffee with friends. 

Finally we made it out, we dropped off the nanny (me profusely thanking her and insisting that the girls kiss her and say bye bye), we met their father, they played in a soft play, and we had a blast. 5 hours later, I lay on the living room floor beside my sleeping husband after just having finished a Woody Allen film and sobbed myself to sleep over Mae.

I wish I were a less selfish mother. But I am coming to understand that this is how I love. I am selfish and all consuming and I hate betrayal, I hate not being the most important. I hate the competition and eventually hate the beloved when betrayed. My mom says that my kids are NOT HERE to fulfill me emotionally. She is right, so so right. I totally agree. But I think this issue is more about the way that I love than what I need from them…anyways, this is my truth.