I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(30)

Children who haven’t eaten anything since the stale airplane dinner roll from the night before are no longer human. They are animals, driven purely by their hunger, ready to gnaw off each other’s limbs and/or your face. And when you realize that you have nothing but three Goldfish crackers and some cracker dust left in a plastic baggie, and that the landlord who was supposed to show up with your key is nowhere to be found, you may begin to cry.

Focus, you’ll think. Don’t cry.

You may heave one big sob anyway. Because although you know you have absolutely no right to despair or exhaustion considering the world’s spectrum of true despair and exhaustion—the wars, the famines, the plight of the animals nearing extinction—you also know now that you should have packed more granola bars. No one here is starving-starving, but your kids are starving, and no one here is dying-dying, but you are dying, and everything’s soaked and there’s no umbrella and the house is right there and you can’t get into it.

STOP CRYING.

You will stop, but you won’t notice that you’ve still got tears and snot and rain all over your face, plus blood streaming down your chin now from where the baby you’re jiggling has just head-butted you and split your lip open. So it won’t occur to you that you can’t just knock on a neighbor’s door and summon the last flickering twinkle of your Southern charm to smile and ask where the nearest grocery is. Because the neighbor might take one look at your bloody grin, mumble something you can’t hear, and close the door.

But there’s no time machine, so I can’t go back and tell myself any of this. Nor can I ask my then-self: Girl, what were you expecting from this trip?



* * *



A smart thing to do before going somewhere like this would be to connect with some people who live there—find a few friends-of-friends to show you the ropes. I didn’t. In retrospect, I think it’s partly because I was too busy trying to figure out whether a Pack ’n Play counted as a piece of carry-on luggage and if my baby could sleep in it every night for a period of several weeks without developing a bad back or whether babies even could get “bad backs” or if that’s just an old-person thing. But I also have to admit I didn’t think about needing friends.

Back home in Atlanta, I used to sit out in my little front yard under the shade of an oak tree in the mornings, just me and my little ones on blankets, watching cars and people and pets pass by. In the afternoons we headed to the park with other mothers and babies from the neighborhood playgroup. Most of those new moms had taken indefinite leave from work to stay home with their kids, and I, too, had quit my full-time job and switched to writing freelance at home. We’d had a couple of years of this routine before the opportunity arose to go to Dublin for a few months, and the idea of a change made it particularly alluring.

I knew this time of life wouldn’t last forever, and sometimes I wanted it to slow down. Children of my own, time to raise them and know them—that’s what I’d been waiting for, trying for, making deals with the universe for. When I held my baby to my shoulder after a bath, her warm, damp body wrapped in a towel, I thought, I can’t believe I get to do this. I can’t believe she is mine. When I attempted to snap pajamas around her roly-poly torso and found that they no longer fit, that she had moved out of nine-month-size clothes and into twelve-month sizes, I sniffled. I wanted, often, to freeze time, so I could hold my kids forever and soak up their babyness until it saturated me.

But this was true also: Our lives had a repetitive Groundhog Day quality to them lately. Wake up; feed baby; feed toddler; clean dirty dishes, dirty faces, dirty hands, dirty clothes, dirty diapers. Cut the same food into little pieces on high-chair trays, watch the same episodes of Sesame Street, play the same game of lining up stuffed animals across the den floor, every day the same, the same, the same.

I longed to mix things up a bit. I imagined, instead of sitting on our front steps, sitting on unfamiliar museum benches or in pubs, absorbing the conversation of our Irish neighbors, a world of train schedules instead of nap schedules. Wouldn’t it be fun to have all the babyness and none of the boredom? A change of scenery always helps, I knew that, and although I couldn’t picture exactly what the new scenery would look like, at least it would be different.



* * *



In Dublin, our rental stood in a row of identical old townhomes lined up like teeth on a cluster of streets rounded up behind a gate. Beyond our gate were more residential streets and, if you walked a little farther, a main road that stretched from one end of Dublin to the other. I knew we had neighbors, but I rarely saw them and had no idea where they went during the day. I never heard children, other than my own.

As the weeks passed, I began to venture out a bit more with the kids. I signed my son up for a toddler yoga class so that we’d have somewhere to go twice a week. While he ommmmmed with Irish kids, my daughter and I sat at an outdoor café—me sipping coffee, her mashing pieces of cookie between her fingers. We found a park within walking distance.

Once, I saw a flyer for an American women’s mother-and-baby group. Ah! I thought. Other parents. Fellow expats. Someone to talk to! I took down the information about their next gathering and decided to go.

I had just started pushing my daughter’s stroller into the loose pebbles of the hostess’s driveway when a possibly rabid, definitely pissed-off Doberman came galloping toward us. My son, who had been walking at my side, screeched and climbed me like a tree.