A whole year?

Who cares?

A good question to ask yourself before writing anything for public consumption is, "Who cares?" In this case, I couldn't find what I was looking for, so I began writing what I couldn't find, using what we learned - often the hard way - along the way. I've assumed that others in the same situation might care. This blog is for potential exchange students and their families.

Where's Chloe?

Where is Chloe sleeping tonight? I don't know and haven't given it much thought until just now. The daughter of her current family might be home by now and probably wants her bedroom back. Is Chloe still there or back at Alicia's house? Or someplace else? I've progressed from near-frantic concern over sending my barely sixteen-year-old daughter to a strange family thousands of miles from home to offhandedly wondering where and with whom she's living. What's better, though, is that she's progressed in the same way. When I asked her where she was going to be living these days before she leaves to meet me in Madrid, she casually said, "I haven't given it too much thought but I'm not worried about it. I'll figure it out in the next few days."

It's all true - time flies

In the beginning we kept track: in five more days Chloe will have been in Spain for two months. Then it was, oh my gosh, in two days Chloe will have been gone for four months! Then, can you believe that I've been gone for seven months today? Now it's, how long has Chloe been gone? Um, let's see, today is, what? The fourth? So she's been gone, um, [counting on fingers] it was ten  months, no, nine months, two days ago. If she hadn't left the day after her birthday (an easy number from which to calculate: 1) I would never remember the exact date she left.

A Mother of a day

Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers who went against their initial maternal instincts, the ones that screamed

No!!!! What are you, nuts? Sending your kid across the world for almost a year? To live with complete strangers? You don't even let your kids spend the night with a local friend unless you know the family. And the drinking! Isn't it legal to drink and smoke beginning at thirteen Over There? What about The Terrorists? She can't be safe! Seatbelts! Do they have seatbelts? Who will make sure he goes to church in the Godless country where he'll be living? What if he comes home married because the only reason his host family signed up was to marry-off their daughter so the whole family could move to the United States? To your basement. She'll meet a boy and decide she can't live without him and burn her passport so she can't come home. You won't know her friends so how will you know if she's hanging out with a recreational shoplifting ring? And the unsupervised piercing possibilities!

No, instead you sucked it up and sent your kids on their merry ways, realizing that if they've made it this far you've probably done a decent job up till now and there's no reason (well, little reason) to assume that they'll jettison everything they've learned in the last 16-18 years at the first sight of a smoky bar with no discernible limit on the drinking age.

Eight down

Everything happy former exchange students tell you in the beginning but you don't believe because you can't imagine it? Believe them. Chloe left eight months ago today. Just like they said, it seems like only yesterday and it seems like a lifetime ago; the middle months, especially, have flown by for us and for her; we can't believe it's almost time for her to come home; her language has improved past where she thought possible; she's worried about leaving, knowing that she won't see again so many people who have been a part of her life. As much as this has been a unique experience for Chloe and for us, it's not at all unique among most exchange student families.

It's okay for me, but . . .

I told Chloe that her friend is thinking about looking at a few colleges on the east coast. Chloe, who is spending her junior year of high school most of a continent and an ocean away from all of her friends, said, "No! I don't want her to go that far away!" I'm happy, though, that it takes only a few seconds for her to realize the hypocrisy in such a statement, probably because she wants to beat me to pointing it out to her.

Open sesame

Although we live only a 30-45 minute ferry ride (five to seven miles as the crow flies) or a one hour drive away from Seattle, this is a small town with a definite blue-collar demographic. There are a few people around here who consider Seattle an overnight trip and more than a few who rarely find a reason to venture beyond this area. Puget Sound seems to be a psychological barrier to Seattle as much as it is a physical (and expensive and inconvenient) barrier. Just a 10-minute ferry ride away, where Chloe's school is, is a whole other world because people living on a rural island a mere 15-minute ferry ride away from a major metropolitan city have to leave their island paradise if they want to buy a pair of shoes. For them, riding a ferry away from their homes is an intrinsic part of their lives. And, many of the people who live there chose to live there (isn't that the case with any island community?), where a lot of the people who live here do so by default.

So Chloe and her brother and their other commuting friends (many who commute from Seattle to the island) have grown up living an interesting dichotomous life, which is only one reason why we made them commute by ferry and bus to school. At home, their friends from their old schools live very different lives than they live with their friends from their island school. I wanted them in a smaller school, but mostly I wanted the concept of venturing beyond their immediate surroundings to be a part of their lives that they didn't think twice about.

If Chloe goes to a movie with her friends, it's likely to be in downtown Seattle. We have movie theaters and department stores close to home, so kids here don't need to venture to the big city, and many of their parents would forbid it: the big city scares them because they don't know it because their parents never had a compelling reason to venture beyond this area. My parents came from Seattle so we were lucky to be spared that provincial attitude.

Which is all a long-winded way of saying that it worked. I don't know if, had Chloe gone to our home-district school, she would have wanted to be an exchange student. I don't know if the high school counselor here would have told the upcoming high school class about that possibility and, if so, I don't know if Chloe would have been interested. I do know, based on the experience of a former Rotary exchange student to France from our home high school, that Chloe would not be getting the credit hours she needs to graduate on time - it's much harder to be flexible in the largest three-year high school in the state. That alone is enough to scare many kids and parents away from the opportunity.

Myriad reasons that are impossible to parse led Chloe to the decision that she wanted to be an exchange student. The result is that now not only does she not think twice about taking a ferry away from her home to go to school or go shopping or see a movie, but she realizes that the rest of the world is only a plane ride away. It's not much more difficult to go to college out of the country as it is to go out of state, which literally opens a world of options. I was going to joke that she can thank me later, but just having the attitude that the world is open is thanks enough.

Growth vs. change

Exchange students often make a big deal of how much they've changed and how friends and family at home need to be aware of how much they've grown and matured: "I've been living away from home in a foreign country for a year and my parents think I should be the same person I was when I left." And they're right. So it's amusing to hear them get upset when things at home have changed: "Where's the blue rug that was in the bathroom? I loved the blue rug! You can't just get rid of the blue rug without asking me!" We'll have to be sure to take down the Room for Rent sign before Chloe comes home.

Happy basketless Easter

Having our high school daughter away for a year and our son in community college but living at home and working until he goes away to university next fall has been a gradual introduction to what it will be like to have no kids at home. I know Chloe will be back and finishing high school next year, so having her gone is like practice, and there are more and more times when there are no kids at home. Like this Easter weekend.

I am truly enjoying not feeling a little bit guilty about not getting out the Easter decorations. I didn't always get out the few bunnies and other pastel accessories, but I always felt guilty if I didn't because it's my job to create happy memories of familial traditions. That we don't have too many absolute traditions is perhaps tradition enough. In the meantime, I am so happy that I don't have to dig out the Easter baskets, but that freedom is tempered by worry: is it going to be this easy for me to turn into an apathetic old person who never celebrates anything? I know people like that and I've always thought it sad. That implies that it was all nothing more than a pretense put on for the kids. And it indicates that rather than enjoying doing those things for my family, I saw it as a chore. And that's just unspeakably lazy.

I don't want to be that crabby person. The kind of person who doesn't bother with a Christmas tree or Valentine's Day or our anniversary. I'm desperately afraid that "Too much bother" will too easily become my mantra if I don't have someone to go to the bother for. That does not mean, however, that I am not reveling in the lack of responsibility required of me this Easter weekend.

Easter not

For Christmas we usually decorate the house to look not unlike a moderately tasteful circus side show. As a result of reading too many parenting articles, when the kids were little I'd entertain thoughts of making an effort to decorate for all the lesser holidays and make nearly every day a Special Day! I'd buy cute ceramic jack-o-lanterns and pretty pastel resin Easter bunnies with the best of intentions. They'd be displayed the first year, but the next year it would be the Friday before Easter before it would occur to me that I'd better attempt to unearth the Easter baskets before it was too late. Which would lead me to the box of Easter decorations that I'd forgotten about. I'd feel guilty about failing to provide our kids with festive holiday memories because the miniature Easter egg tree was on display for only three or four days.

Even now I still do Easter baskets for all four of us (well, the Easter Bunny does the bulk of my basket). All of us use the baskets we've had since our first Easters, which makes Steve's basket pretty damn old. Steve's mom was alive for Christopher's first Easter and what an Easter it was for him, the least of which was the ginormous Easter basket she bought and filled with all manner of Eastery goodness. The pool table was covered with Easter gifts for her first grandchild; it was good to be him, but it's left me that huge basket to fill every year. Chloe came along too late to know the joy of being showered with gifts.

This year, though, I think I'm safely off the hook. Chloe will be somewhere in Spain not enjoying a hot shower and Christopher probably won't be here this weekend. Sure, they've been old enough to not believe in the Easter bunny for many years, but not assembling Easter baskets seems like such a crabby-old-person thing to do. Steve's not a fan of candy and assembling Easter baskets for people who are not here would be a daft-old-person thing to do so no Easter frivolity for us.