The time has come again, dear friends. You know what I’m talking about – the magical day each year I fill your inboxes with my Boxing Day missive, my own fine blend of formulaic self-deprecation, wordiness, and trite fortune cookie wisdom. So get excited. (How could you not after that riveting opener?)
From what all the internets tell me, 2013 has been a year of change both in personal and public arenas. And as usual, some were crushing setbacks and others epic victories. Where there were Rob Fords, there were Pope Francises. Where there was gratuitous twerking and open letters, there was Oscar tripping and endearingly graceful recoveries. While wearable tech seems to be going ahead despite Inspector Gadget’s warranted side-eyes, NASA’s now on Instagram, which is undeniably awesome. Taco Bell debuted a Doritos shell, but something something, more words, the cronut. (Intentionally judgment-free for individual ranking.) And despite crushing setbacks on gun control and affordable health care adoption (aka logic and rational choice theory), things like human genome sequencing, disease, and poverty eradication, and the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act are so expansively hopeful that I am filled with optimism. (A muscle only recently rediscovered after 3-years of atrophy in London.)
On the personal side, I see that change has been afoot in many of your lives as well. A few years back BlingBook served up all my juicy engagement status updates and now babestagram has really come through to fill in the blanks on what y’all have been up to all these years I’ve been away. I mock in jest. All of your rings and weddings and children are beautiful. Well, except yours. (You know who you are.)
As avid Boxing Day apostles, you know change has been the name of my game for the last several years as well. Outside of this email, the Boat Show, and the Seahawks playoff choke, I’m not sure there’s a more reliable yearly chronograph than my annual Packing Tape Ritual. (You know, the ceremonial dance enacted whilst frantically picking at the tape’s taunting end, attempting to start a whole strip but succeeding only in peeling off toothpick-sized silvers.) And while I have an incredibly compelling reason to move home to the Pacific Northwest, I can’t pretend to ignore my borrowed Gilbertian sentiments that make this move more emotional than usual: traveling abroad is my great true love. Not only has it always been worth any cost or sacrifice, but I am loyal and constant in my passion for travel as I have not always been in my other passions. I can only assume I feel about travel the way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, restless newborn – I just don’t care what it puts me through. Because I adore it. Because it’s mine. It can barf all over me if it wants to – I just don’t care.
So while earlier this month I tenderly coerced the packing tape (read: performed Packing Tape Ritual), said farewell to my 6th flat in as many years, and folded up my life abroad so that my kid could one day become president I could embark on this new journey, I had to do so with the firm belief that this is not the end of an adventure, but rather a jumping-off point for an incredible new one. Funny thing is, the sharp learning curve of living abroad wasn’t all that much different from the sharp learning curve of pregnancy. Take these four simple observations and apply them to both scenarios:
- No one cares about the crazy things you’re experiencing other than you. (And maybe your partner, but the more likely case is that he’s just humoring you. Much like hearing about the scattered details of the wild dream you had last night, he doesn’t care.)
- You’re inundated with a new set of norms, rules, and lexicon, and you quickly decide which you’ll religiously abide by and which you’ll blatantly ignore.
- Like it or not, you’ll pick up local vernacular. For example, today I conducted a conversation that included the following phrases: “I’m a bit peckish,” “No dramas, arvo is fine” and “the rectal thermometer is more important than the hands-free pumping bra at this point."
- There’s a secret nudge-nudge, wink-wink club of those in your boat. You all hang out together even though you swore you’d never be the [ex-pat/parent] that only hangs out with other [ex-pats/parents].
Really, it’s the combination of these two things – pregnancy and living/traveling abroad – that provided me with so much hilarity over the past eight months. Not so much in the garden-variety surprise flatulence vertical, but in the various manifestations of “indisputable” prescription and admonition I received along the way. Each society has its own unique set of rules that they share with fervor at the site of the bump, usually around the same time they burst all personal bubble illusions and give into the bump’s magnetic pull.
Take pregnancy eating dos and don’ts: In the US, alcohol is officially off-limits throughout pregnancy, while in the UK doctors advise women to “try to limit consumption to one pint of beer or one glass of wine a day.” Just try. In Singapore, I was nearly spontaneously Heimliched by a concerned street vendor after putting a piece of pineapple in my mouth, but was encouraged to eat ramen with chicken collagen and alkaline-soaked noodles to “reduce heatiness.” I could not find anyone who would serve me cold water in Tokyo, but I happily ate all of the sushi after the chef assured me that sushi made babies smart and strong and is the staple of every prenatal diet. My French colleagues scoffed at the idea of avoiding brie or other soft cheeses but doled out stern warnings not to consume any raw vegetables during gestation. They couldn’t bear to even describe the inevitable consequences.
And all of this – all of the rules, the differing opinions, the wide and often conflicting array of ritualistic practices for something as primal and universal as giving birth – illuminated the fact that while each culture assumes they have it right, most of us under each societal umbrella are just following the rules and norms passed down to us, labeled as fact. In other words, we look as weird to them as they look to us. At the core, we all want the same things. Healthy babies. Loving families. Safe streets and schools. Strong economies. We just go about getting them in different ways. And that’s okay.
So as my path once again directs itself to a different continent, albeit one I’m familiar with, I hope to eradicate the fear that often masks itself as dogmatism or indolence and to continue exploring, rather than rejecting, ideas that might seem the most foreign, outlandish and uncomfortable. I challenge you to do the same. That said, I just can’t get behind wearable technology... yet.
It’s with deep gratitude and expansive hope that I wish you and yours an adventurous, change-filled, and fearless 2014.
