A whole year?

Daddy's Chloe fix

Chloe and I don't talk on the phone much any more, and she doesn't e-mail as often, but she almost never communicates with Steve because he's not here when she calls and he doesn't quite know what to make of The E-mail that all the kids are talking about these days. In fact, he just asked if I was "still e-mailing Chloe" because if I hadn't sent "it" yet he'd add something to the end of it. I told him that it doesn't cost more to send a separate message or 80 separate messages.

So she sent him a real letter telling him that she misses him and that she appreciates him even more after living in a somewhat male-chauvinist society. Now he's a whimpering mush head. He's on his third reading of the letter in two hours and said he's going to reread it all night and probably sleep with it under his pillow. Then he saw my blog on the monitor with the picture of CC right below the picture of Chloe at the beach. I had to scrape him off the floor after that. She wanted to know if he was still going to make her school lunch for her next year. He told me to tell her that he'd make it for her even if she was a divorced mother of five who moved back home. She's lucky that one of us is a nice guy.

All of her will be back

When a loved one has been gone for a long time, either just living somewhere else or who has died, we tend to remember only the positive things. We miss her laugh or the jokes he used to tell. What we forget is the less than charming things about that person. I read a book by Virginia Graham, Life After Harry: My Adventures in Widowhood. She had a friend who went on and on about her dear, departed Frank: what a wonderful guy he was, how he always had a kind word for her, how he brought her flowers for no reason at all, and was just in general a kind, considerate husband. Finally, after weeks of hearing about Saint Frank, Virginia asked her oldest friend if she'd been married more than once. "Why, Virginia! You know Frank was the only man ever in my life! Why would you say such a thing?" "Because I've never met the guy you've been talking about."

Today I was IMing with Chloe and she said she feels like an old lady whose bobby pins pop out of her hair because her broom is flying too fast. She's been finding bobby pins all over the floor. Then she said she "got told" about not keeping her bedroom spotless (hair stuff again, and if you have Chloe's hair, you need mountains of all manner of hair stuff). The first thing that occurred to me was, "Oh, how I haven't missed that." I've written before about Chloe's lifelong habit of leaving Chloe detritus in her wake and, while I can't wait to see her again, that I could live without. Yeah, yeah: that's all part of why we love her. Right.

No more creamed corn, thank you, but I will take another year in Europe

If you asked my grandmother for seconds of the creamed corn before she had a chance to offer you more (which would mean you were exceptionally quick), you'd be branded a lover of creamed corn, a person who can't get enough creamed corn, even if the only reason you wanted more creamed corn was because you hadn't eaten since breakfast and your stupid brother just took the last of the mashed potatoes. If you have one conversation with someone and he talks exclusively of, say, the basketball playoffs, you might reasonably infer that he is a basketball fanatic. Or it could be that he just watched an exciting playoff game and is still caught up in the moment. That's two clumsy analogies in one week, but that's what it's like to talk with Chloe on the phone or online or in e-mail. If I talk to her when she's exhausted from studying early fifteenth-century Spanish philosphers for a final, in Spanish, and she's certain that she's not only not learning anything, but that everything she's ever learned is being hoovered out of her brain, it's easy to assume that she's having a terrible week when she may be just having a fleeting moment of frustration, and that's the moment we happened to talk, especially when I won't talk to her again for a few days or so. What I write are my perceptions and inferences, based on limited conversations, which may or may not be accurate. And here are some more.

One thing I hoped for this year is that Chloe would discover that studying and living abroad is not impossibly exotic. Today she half-jokingly said she wanted to go to college in Italy. She seemed to broach the subject as if I'd be opposed, but she'd temporarily forgotten that I'd asked her near the beginning of the exchange if she'd thought about going to college in Europe. She'd said yes, maybe for a quarter or something. I said no, I mean for a year or maybe even the whole time. No way, she said. Several months later, she's changed her mind. It's working: she's learned that her options don't stop at the state line or the US border. She doesn't have to go to college in Europe or Argentina, but she can if she wants to. And if she can find a way to pay for it.

Steve, on the other hand, very nearly had a heart attack when I mentioned this conversation. Then I reminded him that she still has a year of high school left after she returns, and if she studied abroad it probably wouldn't be until her junior year. That gives him enough time to prepare to cross that bridge. And then, don't you just know, we'll start again with the "But I thought it was just for a quarter!"

No lunch-making chat

"You wouldn't believe how many times a day I think about Chloe and wish it were time for her to come home." We've had unseasonably great weather, so all day long Steve is reminded that his sun-loving daughter is not here. While he's working he thinks of things that Chloe would find interesting. I mentioned that they didn't engage in lots of deep philosophical discussions when she was here, but he reminded me that their time to talk is in the mornings, while he's making her lunch and before he takes her to the ferry and way before civilized people get out of bed. I think this sojourn has given Chloe a greater appreciation for the fact that he makes her lunch every day. For most of us that us sheer drudgery, but Captain OCD really enjoys creating things to eat. Christopher preferred to buy lunch at school, so I prepared his by making sure, the night before, that he had lunch money.

Early morning before the sun comes up is the time that they don't have to worry about me inserting my opinions into their time together. I keep hearing about this alternate universe called early morning, but I'm not interested enough to investigate. For now, I'll just take their word that it exists. Everyone is happier that way and everyone gets fed.

Let's clarify some things

When Christopher was a baby I took many photographs of our first child, as first-time parents are wont to do. Most people will graciously look at a few too many snaps of the most adorable baby in the world (as all babies are, even though people other than their parents may fail to see it). But I had lots and lots of pictures, so I gathered them into a large album just for us, a place where we could look at them if we so chose, without inflicting them on anyone else. New babies and the promise of the future they bring with them tend to inspire stay-at-home parents to organize and catalog, and it was better than tossing them in a drawer (the photos, not the babies). I was fully aware that no one else would be interested in looking at our baby pictures, and intended to put a photo or two in my wallet to show anyone who might ask to see the baby. It's a good thing no one did, because in twenty years I've yet to put photos of our kids in my wallet.

One day my father-in-law asked if we had any baby pictures. I hesitated to show him the album because I wouldn't be interested in looking at a couple hundred photos of someone else's kid and knew full well that he'd be even less interested. So I said well, yeah, but this is all I have and they're all of Christopher and the book is meant just for us and I certainly don't expect you to look at all of them. About halfway through the album he said, "These are all of the kid!"

Dammit! I just told you that, so why are you making me feel like an idiot first-time parent when I've made an effort to not be that stereotype? Look, there are no photos in my wallet! I didn't yet grasp the extent of his dry sense of humor, but his comments were always tinged with a hint of seriousness.

This blog is like that photo album - a concentration of all things pertaining to Chloe's exchange, but by no means the focus of our lives. I can understand that not everyone will get the satire and teasing humor in many of these posts. I was shocked to hear that even my own mom thought that I had pressured Chloe into being an exchange student (saying goodbye was a lot more difficult than Chloe had anticipated). Besides being far from the truth, it's a bit insulting to Chloe that people (especially people who don't know her), are making judgments about her character and assuming that she's not capable of making the most of her exchange, or of telling her mom to back off if she thought it were necessary (just imagine what I don't record here).

I've gotten a couple of e-mail messages from exchange students who are concerned that I'm smothering Chloe and not allowing her to have her own experience; that I'm living this year vicariously through her. I'm guessing that there are more people with the same concerns who haven't written, so I'll try to dispel some misconceptions.

For the record, being an exchange student was Chloe's idea. I was surprised when, in eighth grade, she came home and said she wanted to be one when she got to high school. I told her then that she'd have to do the work to make it happen. She did, with our support.

A few exchange students are concerned that I've damaged Chloe's psyche by, among other things, talking about her failed attempt at making a cake. No, it wasn't a big deal, and yes, we tease each other, and if that were enough to crush Chloe's spirit she certainly would not have what it takes to survive as an exchange student. I'm happy that they are in a sense sticking up for her by defending her. But they are guilty of judging their perception of her exchange experience (based on what I write, not what she writes) against their own: if it differs from theirs, they tend to think she's not doing it right.

Someone else inferred that she doesn't want to learn the language but I can't figure out where I implied that. If I did, I didn't mean too - she's worked very hard to learn the language, even if she's been frustrated at times. And what kind of whack-job mother would send her child "freaking" bandages? The kind who sends them as a family in-joke, as was explained in the original post about that package. The kind who figures that as long as she has to send a package with the gift for the new host parents and the thank you gift for the last host parents, she might as well toss in a box of Sesame Street Band-Aids because it will surely bring a smile to the student's face, all for about a buck-thirty-nine extra.

Remember, too, that just as exchange students get to have their experiences, the parents of exchange students get to have theirs. This is an externalization of my thoughts. The focus of this blog is to record the information, thoughts, and emotions I couldn't find when I was looking for information about exchange students. The sole reason for its existence is to talk about being the parent of an exchange student. I'm not writing about writing, or the books I'm reading, or the movies I've seen, or items in the news that interest me, or the gate I just built, or the yard work I should be doing, or the puppy I'm training, or the great evening we had with friends, or the planning for a friend's law-school graduation party, or the weeks spent every day in the CCU of a hospital wondering if Grandpa Ike might make it out alive, or the logistics of my mom's upcoming double-knee replacement surgery, or my aunt who is dying a horrible death from a particularly hideous form of cancer. Because of its single-subject focus, I can see where readers might infer that every waking moment of my day is taken up with obsessing about Chloe's exchange, but in reality the blog takes up no more than 10 minutes of an average day and, despite what the time-stamp might say, I write most posts between 1:00 and 3:00 AM, not a time when I have too much else penciled in on my calendar.

As for living through Chloe this year, I've already written about my opinion on that here. You see, that's the problem with commenting about things after only a cursory glance at the material: you might miss the relevant bits.

It's not so terrible

People still ask me if we miss Chloe. Of course we do, but it's not something that consumes my days, especially as I pile up boxes full of Christmas decorations in her room and quickly shut the door, knowing that they can stay there for another five months. This allows me to ignore, for at least a little while longer, the fact that I have some serious shoveling and reorganizing to do in the room where all that stuff belongs. Chloe still misses home, too, but it's never been bad enough that she's wanted to come home early. She has, in fact, begun to worry about when the time comes to leave Pamplona.

After Alicia moved to her next family I was able to take all the Chloe debris that had been hastily stacked up in our room and put it back where it belongs - cluttering up her room. Bad news for Chloe: with the evidence filling many boxes and Space Bags - which I schlepped from room to room several times - her "I don't have any clothes" argument vaporized a little more with each back spasm.

So that Alicia would feel like she belonged here, we took everything off of Chloe's walls, but I promised Chloe that I'd put her room back the way it had been before she left. But I'm thinking now that I won't. She's not going to be that person when she gets back and she'll want her room to reflect who she is now. Besides, she wouldn't have room for all the stuff she's been collecting in Spain. Same thing with the clothes: many of them are not going back into drawers or the closet, at least not in this house, because they haven't been worn in years (Chloe, don't worry - I won't be purging your clothes collection). Yeah, that's it. I'm doing her a favor by not spending a day returning her bedroom to its predeparture state.

The first day I had the Web cam set up I showed Chloe the dogs and cats and outside the window, and asked if there's anything else she'd like to see. (I also held up one of my mom's Valentine cookies and that wasn't a very nice thing to do because then I ate it.) She said, yeah, her bedroom, but that's too far away from the camera. Good thing - she might be somewhat dismayed to see that her bedroom has not become a shrine honoring our missing daughter. Except the outside of her bedroom door. Most of it is covered with a white board and her friends write all over it. I keep thinking I should clean it off, but I can't bring myself to erase all those memories. It would be like erasing a part of her.

Valentine confusion

We had a few family members over for dinner for Valentine's Day. About five minutes into dinner, Steve or Michele say, after they've passed food over the bare plate, empty glass, clean silverware, and untouched napkin sitting between them, "Are we missing someone?" No, I counted and everyone's here: four of Aunt Michele's family, four of us, Mom, Dianne. That's ten. I know because I counted several times: four on each side, one on each end. Perfect. Then I realized: "Oh, that's right, there're only three of us!" That brought a round of "Ahhhs" and it was kind of sad. Michele cleared the table and said, "Are you done, Chloe? Can I take your plate?"

Five

Five months sounds a lot longer than four months, maybe because Chloe's just slightly past the halfway mark until she's done with school. It's hard to believe she's been gone so long, and yet it seems normal. Unlike Steve, I'm not a big fan of routine, so I don't usually miss routine moments like picking kids up at the ferry every day or making sure there's enough clean underwear to go around. I miss Chloe, but I ain't crying over the untaken trips to the ferry dock to pick her up, or the mountains of laundry full of sweatpants, flannel pants, and hooded sweatshirts.

One reason why Steve misses Alicia (besides the fact that he adores her) is because there's no need for his morning routine of making lunch and breakfast and driving a kid to the ferry. He finds comfort in routine and he likes to be useful, so not having Alicia there in the mornings makes the pain of the Chloe void even more acute for him. The other morning he decided that the bathtub and shower had to be scrubbed - before he got out of the shower. A clean shower works for me, but without the kid routine in the morning, he tends to get a bit obsessed, like scrubbing the shower or taking the dirty dishes out of the dishwasher and washing them by hand, just so there are no dirty dishes in the house (he never uses the dishwasher, and he does almost all of the dishes around here). Christopher calls him Captain Compulsion and I've called him OCD Boy. I won't worry about his behavior until he fails to see the humor in our teasing.

These are among the little things that Chloe misses by not being here: teasing Steve about being a compulsive freak. Hearing Steve and Christopher arguing about the best way to reheat the sloppy joes, both trading good-natured insults. The puppy growing up. Relatives dying. And all of the other shared experiences of both immediate and extended family that will be a gap in Chloe's family history.

But it's not the missing so much as the sharing. Even having to change the number on her cell phone seems more significant than it is. She said, "Now I won't be part of the family" (our numbers were within a few digits of each other). That would take more than a different phone number, but I understood her point. Most of us harbor a secret fantasy that the world back home stops turning until we return, and we're humbled and disappointed to find out that it kept on happily spinning without us.

Likewise, I will never have any idea of how Chloe interacts with her host families or with her Spanish friends. I will never know her teachers or the school administration. Or any of the people who are shaping one of the most formative years of her life. With Christopher, those changes in the parent-child dynamic have happened gradually as the years have gone by. I don't notice it as much because it's a natural progression toward independence. With Chloe, it happened all at once. One day she was here and didn't want to leave us. The next day, she was gone and was going to be gone for a long time. It hasn't taken long to realize that, although she misses us, she doesn't really need us. I wish she were here, but I'm glad that she's there.

How could they not?

I was talking to someone today who gets the exchange thing, and there are not a lot of those people around here. When I mentioned that more people than not ask how Chloe could be gone for a year but, more surprisingly, why we would allow her to be gone for a whole year, she was surprised. She didn't understand how someone could be so hung up on the being gone part that they would deny their child this opportunity. Don't they understand what the student will gain? That the residual effects of her experiences will unfold for the rest of her life? Don't they realize that living in another country makes the world smaller, and that it's hard to hate a country when you've been neighbors with a number of pleasant people who live there? That if the student is passionate enough to do the work necessary to make the exchange happen, she's ready to go? Many people don't allow themselves to think past the "I'd miss her too much" stage. That said, the day Chloe left will forever be a day that I'd rather not remember.

The most amusing referrers today: "pot leaves" "washing machine". On Chloe's: rolling papers smoking españa. Sort of makes one ponder the content of one's posts. Yes, I've discovered yet another way to waste time.

She's gone

We delivered Alicia to her next home and I've spent the evening being surprised that she's not here, or won't be here in the morning, and then remembering that it doesn't matter which weekend in February is the next RYE gathering because there are no more weekends on my watch.

The house is very quiet and the TV is still on Saturday Night Live even though I'm in another room. Is it too loud for her in Chloe's bedroom because she doesn't sleep with a fan running for white noise like Chloe does? Oh, that's right, she's not here so it doesn't matter if I get up out of this chair and go turn the TV off. I need to make sure her clothes are washed before school on Monday. Oh, no, I don't. Is there enough bread for Steve to make her sandwich on Monday morning? No longer a concern.

Having Alicia gone is more than just having Alicia gone. She was a tenuous yet tangible thread to Chloe, especially when Chloe lived in Alicia's house. Because of Alicia, we had a better understanding of the family dynamic that Chloe and Abby lived in. More than once I was able to explain something to Chloe that made it easier for her to understand what was going on. We had an insider's perspective on Chloe's school, her host home, her new friends. Even after Chloe moved, though, Alicia's mom and dad would still tell her what they'd heard about Chloe from the two new girls at their house. For example, did I know that Chloe went to Madrid today? We've lost that thread and I feel somewhat adrift. Not to mention that Steve barely suppressed tears when he hugged her goodbye and has been suffering a sense of emptiness in the teenage-daughter department.