Home at last?

I considered starting this week’s post with a line or two from a cheesy song about going home…you know, Daughtry’s overplayed, “Home,” or perhaps Bon Jovi’s “Who Says You Can’t Go Home?” but that would be too predictable. Too obvious. Instead, I’m simply going to say: I’m going home!

In less than twelve hours I will be boarding a plane to Atlanta. After almost five months, I will finally get to see the people I love. I’ll eat Mexican food and real movie theater popcorn. I’ll shop at Target and DSW. It’s embarrassing to admit, but just thinking about it makes me slightly squeal.

And yet, I’ve been so excited about everyone I’ll see and everything I’ll do that I seem to keep forgetting that this isn’t exactly a full-fledged homecoming. I am by no means home for good. No, this is a vacation, a holiday – a two week time-out from my new life in South Africa.

I’ve been here almost five months now, but in many ways it feels like much longer. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Now, once again, I don’t mean to imply that I’m unhappy here – I need only refer to my ‘list’ to remind myself of the reasons I love living in Africa – but in some ways I feel like my time here should be winding down instead of just beginning. I’m not panicked though; I think it’s merely ‘ex-study-abroad syndrome.’ This little known disorder typically occurs in well-traveled brats like myself who assume that because they have lived abroad (albeit for short amounts of times), they are emotionally equipped to move semi-permanently to far-off exotic locales. Symptoms of ex-study-abroad syndrome include severe homesickness (often only evident after 3-4 months away), extreme mood swings ranging from “What was I thinking?” hysteria to “What an adventure!” euphoria, and occasional confusion regarding the difference between moving abroad for a period of years and studying abroad for a period of months.

Although the disease can be distressing, there are several experimental treatments available. One rather controversial treatment involves limiting all contact with people and things from home. Some patients find it easier to adjust to their new life if they cut off all contact with their past. I’m unwilling to give this method a try. On the opposite end of the spectrum, although still controversial, is a treatment that requires the patient to remain in regular contact with family and friends from home. If possible, frequent trips home are recommended. I find this method to be much more appealing.

So here I go, home for a visit after only five months (only!). Some might disapprove of me going home in the midst of this fragile adjustment period, but I don’t care. When Roger and I made the decision to move across the planet, I negotiated no more than eight months between visits home. Now, after just five months away, the thought of waiting eight seems like an eternity, but I’m not thinking about that at the moment. I’m too excited about going home.

Now, odd as it sounds, there is also a bit of nervousness involved in going home after an extended period away. There are the superficial thoughts like, “Will they think I look different?” or “Have I picked up an accent?” or “Have I gained weight?” But there are also more genuine fears like; will it be even harder to leave this time? Will being home remind me of everything I’ve lost? Will seeing my mom and my sister only renew the initial pain of leaving them the first time? Will I be able to board my return flight?

Will someone please smack me? I’m not even home yet, and I’m already stressed about leaving. I need to simply enjoy the moment. I’ll worry about leaving when it’s time to board the plane. And when the time comes, I’ll remind myself of everything I love about Africa and think of the fun things I have to look forward to. And most importantly, I will think of the cute little cottage that should be ready and waiting for us by the time we get back.

Yes, the cottage is almost ready. There is light at the end of the tunnel. If all goes as planned, when we come back we will have our own space at last. No more laundry Nazi, no more tip-toeing around the house, no more hiding in my bedroom…I’ll be able to breathe again. And Roger and I will pick out furniture and dishes and linens, and maybe soon I’ll stop thinking of myself as a study-abroad student; maybe I’ll start to feel like I actually live here…

I live here. I live in Africa. It may not be my home, but I live here. And while it might never feel like home, at least I’ll soon have a house to come home to.

But I’m not thinking about that now, because…

“I’m going home, back to the place where I belong,
Where your love has always been enough for me.
I’m not running from, no I think you’ve got me all wrong,
I don’t regret this life I chose for me,
But these places and these faces are getting old,
So I’m going home.”

(Sorry, I couldn’t resist!)

See you soon…

Harbingers of Death

This weekend we’ve been house sitting for Gary and Laurel. They don’t exactly need a house sitter (seeing as their maid lives on the property), but since Roger and I are always looking for ways to escape our current domestic situation, we gladly volunteered to move in for a few days and look after the dogs, the fish and the hamster. We're not looking after Connor and Dale though, they are staying at Granny’s. So we've traded places for the weekend.

All is going well. The dogs are happy; the fish are fed, but when I go into Connor’s room to change the hamster’s water, Snuggles is nowhere in sight. I assume she’s in her bed, which is a cotton filled plastic bubble attached to the cage by a short clear pipe. I know from Connor that she likes to nestle into the cotton for both the darkness and the warmth. I change the water and put it back into the cage. “Snuggles,” I say as I tap on the bubble. I hate to disturb her, but I want to make sure she’s okay. “Snuggles?” I say again. Nothing. Not that I’m expecting an answer, but a little movement in the cotton would be nice.

“Roger,” I shout. “I can’t find Snuggles.” I open up the cage again and stick my hand inside, carefully reaching a finger into the pipe. I wiggle my finger around a bit, but the pipe is too long and my finger is too short.

“I’m sure she’s sleeping, Babe,” Roger says as he walks into the room. “She’s hiding in all that cotton,” he adds, looking over my shoulder.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course,” he says with his trademark confidence. I am eager to believe him, so we go to bed unconcerned.

The next night, it’s Roger’s turn to change Snuggles’ water. I’m getting ready for bed when he comes into the room with a nervous expression. He is holding Snuggles' bed/bubble.

“Did you find her?” I ask, slightly terrified. He shakes his head. “Did she eat the cucumber?” I ask. Connor had suggested placing a cucumber in the pipe to lure her out of her bed, but the cucumber lies untouched.

“Should I open it?” he asks.

“She has to be in there,” I say, unsure as to what is more terrifying: a runaway hamster or a dead one.

I watch as he slowly twists the bubble apart. He lifts the top of the sphere, but there is no movement in the cotton.

“Well…find her!” I say, irritated at his snail-like pace.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Stick your finger in there,” I answer.

“I’m not sticking my finger in there.” He looks at me as if I’ve just suggested that he place his head into a lion’s den. “Hamsters bite,” he says wide-eyed.

“They do not.” I roll my eyes.
“Do too.”
“Do not.”
“Do too.”
Deep breath. I am not an eight year old. “Well, if they do bite, it doesn’t hurt,” I insist.

“Does too,” he grumbles as he slowly parts the cotton with his index finger. “Oh, no.”

“What?” I ask, but his face says it all. I rush to Roger’s side and peer into the parted cotton. I see a bit of fur. “Snug-gles, are you sleeping? Snuggles?” But I know she’s not sleeping. I look away from the tiny fur ball. My mind is filled with visions of Connor’s face when we tell him that we’ve killed his hamster. Roger must have been thinking the same thing because we look up at each other and simultaneously exclaim:

“But we didn’t do it!”

“Of course we didn’t do it,” Roger says with the feigned confidence I’m once again eager to believe. “We haven’t even seen her, Robyn. We’ve been changing her water, just like we were told. We didn’t do it.”

“Try telling that to Connor,” I grumble, wondering what we can buy him to win back his affection. Once again, Roger is thinking the same thing.

“We’ll just buy him a new hamster,” Roger says. He then looks back down at the plastic bubble thoughtfully. “And maybe we could find one that looks exactly like Snuggles.”

I know what he’s thinking, and believe me, if I thought we could get away with it, I would be on my way to the pet shop at this very moment instead of sitting at the computer documenting the whole experience. But it would never work. Connor’s eleven – and extremely bright. No way is he falling for a fake Snuggles.

“Then what do we do?” Roger asks.
“I don’t know! What do you think we should do?”
“I don’t know!”
We sit in silence, staring down at the open bubble. Roger speaks first, hanging his head in shame. “We’re like...the harbingers of death.”

I’m not exactly sure what a ‘harbinger’ is, but I can speculate its meaning, and it’s not good. A terrifying thought comes over me and I race out of the room and down the stairs. I flip on the light in the fish tank and desperately try to count the fish. Roger is right behind me.

“How many are there?” I ask in desperation.

“I don't know, but there aren’t any floating at the top, so I think we’re okay.”

I breathe a sigh of relief as I turn the light off. “Do you think the dogs are okay?” I ask.

Roger pulls me into his chest. “They’re fine, my girl. They’re fine.”

We wait until morning to call Gary and Laurel. Being the responsible parents that they are, they decide to drive straight to Granny’s and tell Connor what has happened. Roger and I sigh with relief, grateful not to be the ones who deliver the news. We resign ourselves to the fact that he’ll probably hate us, but at least we won’t have to watch him burst into tears. I’m not sure I could handle it.

He does burst into tears. But Laurel is able to comfort him – after all, Snuggles had a good, long life. Gary and Laurel talk with him in the back garden for awhile and he finally comes back in with a tear stained face, but otherwise okay. Roger and I give him a hug before he scurries off with Dale.

A few hours later I’m passing by his bedroom when I hear him calling my name.

I pause in the doorway. “You doing okay?” I ask.

He nods. “You do know that it was nothing you did, right?” He looks up at me and my heart literally melts. “She would have died anyway,” he adds sadly.

And I know he’s right – I’m not the harbinger of death – but I can’t tell you how relieved I am to hear him say it. I do, however, feel a bit bad that in his time of grief, he's the one comforting me.

Kids are amazing, especially Connor and Dale. I know I’m biased, but come on – I killed the kid’s hamster and he still loves me! It’s crazy. In fact, it almost makes me want a kid of my own…but then again, Roger and I can’t even keep a hamster alive for three days, so perhaps we should wait a bit longer.

Yeah, the harbingers of death probably shouldn’t procreate.
At least not yet.

Chocolate and other obsessions

As I begin to write this I’m chewing the last bite of a miniature Bar One candy bar. I found it this morning in the “party favor” (aka “bag of sugar”) that my nephew left behind when he was here last weekend. Sure, I should probably have set it aside to give back to him the next time I see him, but I’m afraid that just wasn’t possible. See, I am incapable of having chocolate in the house. When it’s there, it’s all I can think about. The only way to stop thinking about the chocolate is to eat it. Don’t you see? I couldn’t clear my head enough to write this afternoon until I ate the chocolate. It was nagging me, calling me from downstairs until I ate it, and look at me now…writing at last.

I’m sure I have some sort of problem. It can’t be healthy, this obsession with chocolate. But what to do about it? There I was sitting at my computer, stressed about how to begin this week’s post, when all of a sudden an overwhelming need for chocolate came over me. The small bag of candy downstairs was all I could think about. Sure, I’m aware that I probably fixated on the chocolate to distract myself from the fact that I didn’t know what to write, but unfortunately, recognition does nothing to solve the problem.

And I’m afraid the problem is not limited to chocolate. If I’m sad…I’m certain that pizza or perhaps a little ice cream will cheer me up. Feeling homesick? Roger takes me to Nando’s or to a movie for popcorn and M&Ms. Stressed? Well, when stressed, it’s pretty much whatever I can get my hands on. Chocolate (in any form) is the food of choice, but I’ll stuff my face with pretty much anything until the stress passes…and it eventually does. That’s the problem, if emotional eating didn’t work so well, I could probably stop.

I hope I don’t sound like a total head case. In fact, I’m only brave enough to put this out there because I don’t believe I’m alone with my emotional eating issues. I mean, how many of us actually eat for the purpose of consuming the nutrients that keep us alive? No, we eat because we crave the taste. We eat because we’re bored. We eat because we’re stressed. We eat to be social. We eat as a reward. We eat for a thousand reasons other than sustaining life. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I think it's interesting.

I eat for all of the reasons listed above and I eat a hell of a lot, I admit it. “Oh, you’re such a good eater,” my mother-in-law says. It’s spoken like a complement, but was that a bit of judgment in her tone? Or is my over-sensitive self imagining it? “I like hanging out with you, Rob,” my sister-in-law says. “I never feel bad about how much I’m eating when you’re around.” Um, thanks…I think.

I am a “good eater,” a card carrying member of the clean your plate club. The obsessive exercising helps me rationalize the fact that I easily eat as much as my six-foot-four husband, but how long can I keep this up? At some point, I will have to get a grip on the emotions behind my appetite and deal with them once and for all.

Then again, perhaps - as usual - I’m overanalyzing my relationship with food. Maybe it’s not about being stressed or sad – maybe I eat a lot because I’m hungry. Maybe I have a fast metabolism. Or perhaps I just enjoy food (specifically chocolate) more than most people. Yes, that's probably it. How else do you explain my niece, a fellow chocoholic? She seems almost as obsessed by chocolate as I am, and I certainly don’t think she’s using food to ease the emotional ups and downs of her eight year old life. She simply loves chocolate. Well, me too.

Last weekend, while my mother-in-law prepared dinner (sausages and potatoes of course), Connor, the little chef, made Mulva Pudding (which isn’t pudding at all, but in this part of the world they call dessert “pudding,” as in “Granny, what’s for pudding?”). After dinner, Sally asks everyone if we’d like ice cream to go with our “pudding.” Both Dale and my eyes light up. Sally scoops out ice cream for us, giving Dale a rather large scoop (bigger than mine, I noticed). “Are you sure you can eat all that Dale?” Sally asks. Dale nods and licks her lips greedily. I dive into my dessert, only surfacing when every last morsel has been consumed. I’m practically licking the bowl when I hear Dale say, “See Granny? I finished all of it.” She then leans over to me and whispers, “And I’m still hungry.”

“I know the feeling, Sweetie,” I whisper back. “And I’m sure Granny would be happy to give us more veggies, but I’m afraid that’s all the ice cream we’re getting.”

“I know,” she sighs sadly. “But I’m not hungry for that.”

You and me both, kid. You and me both.

And on that note, I’m going to sneak downstairs for the last bit of Connor’s chocolate. After all, now that I’ve completed this week’s post, don’t I deserve a little chocolate reward?

I think so too.