Littlest, who is six now, asked me this afternoon why I’m an English teacher.
How do you say to a six year old,
Because to meet and know the other is to meet and know yourself?
Or, in French, Pour les faire voyager. Because of what Anaïs Nin says, « Nous voyageons pour chercher d’autres états, d’autres vies, d’autres âmes. »
Hint: I did not say it either of those ways. He seemed satisfied with my response though.
J lost his grandma a couple of weeks ago. She was his last living grandparent and though I lost mine a few years ago now, something felt different about this death. We were fairly close to her and Littlest enjoyed going to see her on Sundays. In fact visiting her was our first outing with him when he was a newborn. We knew as she approached 90 years old that we were going to lose her at some point—she had lived a long and happy life, except maybe for the mixed bag of the last fifteen years that she had spent without her husband.
Part of why this death has been different is that I have been explaining it to Littlest who is now six years old. The French ceremony was a typical one with the viewing of the body laid out for several days, as well as the “mise en bière.” Her funeral and burial were on a day I don’t have class so fortunately I was able to go. She had been in the hospital for hip rehabilitation and had had a scare very recently so J and Littlest had been to see her recently at the hospital when she seemed to be on the upswing, with plans to move into a nursing home as soon as she got her strength back up. But she wasn’t eating and it’s hard not to think that she had decided that it was her time to go.
I’ve been answering as best I can all the questions from Littlest, explaining to him what a body is once a person has died, and that going to see “Mamie E” didn’t mean seeing someone who would talk to him and hear him. For that reason it was important to us to take him to see the body, and he even wanted to see the nailing of the coffin.
Death felt very close for a few days, and it was odd going to a funeral in the middle of the week and then returning to work the next day with the heaviness of goodbye lingering. I wonder, as I think many people do, if we showed her enough how much we loved her while we had the chance. At the lunch gathering at her house after the funeral, we found this poem (“Savoir vieillir”) hung up behind the door in her bedroom, and these lines especially, about the younger people in the family, stood out:
Se résigner à vivre un peu sur le rivage,
Tandis qu’ils vogueront sur les flots hasardeux,
Craindre d’être importun, sans devenir sauvage,
Se laisser ignorer tout en restant près d’eux.
I hope she felt she was close to us. We certainly felt that she was, though we often didn’t go see her for weeks at a time if the boys were sick, and we made do with phone calls during the worst of Covid.
I took advantage of having her death certificate in hand to reconned to Ancestry.com and fill in a few details on J’s side of the family tree. I fell into a wormhole on the German end of my mom’s family since a link had been made since the last time I’d been online, taking me generations back into our German ancestry. Seeing all those names from all those places made me think about all these people who have lived lives that are now over, that led us to where we are today. Along those lines, I have one of my paternal great-grandfathers’ memoirs, in which he writes about the birth of my grandmother and how she was actively crawling around the house. The space from birth to death feels so brief when looking at these timelines of people who’ve come and gone. J’s grandmother had lost twin baby girls in her first pregnancy (stillborn), and I wondered if that was one of the things she thought about as death approached.
There’s also something striking about seeing a dead body, in this case, one that had probably been on display a day too long, in a way that makes it clear that the body has no longer any real link to the person we loved, and that death makes our physical selves irrelevant. That part of the conversation with Littlest has been long, since he keeps asking how long the body lasts underground, why they take out the blood when they’re preparing it, if the bones will still be in the ground when he’s an adult… the cogs are clearing turning in his little mind.
So, where am I going with this? Approaching 40 has made me realize that the number of possibilities before me in my life are lessening, even if incrementally, and that there are choices I may have to make. Typical midlife realizations I imagine. But I wonder more about what is worth spending our time on earth on—acts of love, time with my children. What kind of clarity does impending death give us? Because death is always more or less impending, isn’t it?
Not sure who’s keeping up with this blog, since it’s definitely fallen to the wayside, and potentially really over. But in case some are still stopping by for the concours, teaching, or nationality topics, I thought I’d give an update.
I’ll be changing schools this coming year after 11 years at the same private (privé sous contrat) school. I passed the agrégation externe for the public system finally and will be leaving the private system. It is a bittersweet success even though I worked so hard for it and am really happy to have gotten it. It’s strange leaving the place where I really became a teacher, had two babies, got married… I made a lot of friends there and it became like a second home to me. I’m trying not to see it through rose-colored glasses either, since like all places of employment it had its flaws.
Unfortunately it seems like I do have to go through the whole rigamarole of being placed in a position for a “stage” year (though I will be full-time and apparently without much, if any, training) and then having to point my way back into this region through the whole teacher movement system for next year. Fingers cross that works out because I’d really rather not move. Just in case, I’ll also be keeping an eye on university positions for next year, which I can now apply for, since I am a public school teacher!
Again, if someone out there is wondering about this or a similar process, don’t hesitate to comment or send me a question (there’s a contact form on my CAFEP CAPES guide page). Here, for some basics, are some of the things you can do as a public school teacher that you can’t as a teacher in the prive sous contrat:
Apply for university positions
Apply to teach in French lycées abroad
Be a teacher trainer (outside of Formiris)
Pass a concours to become an inspector
Be a chargé de mission for the inspection
It’s been months. Lots has happened and at the same time not much has happened, compared to last year anyway.
My parents came back at the end of July. We spent a few days in the north of the Dordogne and went to Lascaux where I tried to keep Littlest engaged (not too hard really) and Even Littler snuggled on his grandpa in the baby carrier. Then the four of us went down south for a rock-climbing trip with friends. Even Littler mastered his crawling skills on the uneven terrain at the bouldering sites (Targassonne). One of our friends commented that in 20 years Even Littler will probably be on Man versus Wild. It’s true that people tend to worry that he’ll hit his head on things or tumble when I know from experience that he’s pretty tough and been practicing not doing such things for months.
He turned one at the end of the summer and started walking a couple weeks after that. He’s slowly getting steadier and faster, going up or down a step without crawling. He likes to bring us a book and ask to look at it. I get the feeling though that he wants to see one specific thing in each book because he’s rarely interested in the whole story right now.
Littlest went back to school (Grand Section) and this year with both his teachers they are doing 30 minutes of English a day. I of course didn’t learn this until the parent meeting at the end of September. Apparently he loves it (says, again, the teacher—Littlest would never tell us such a thing…).
His American accent is perfect. His syntax is sometimes a little weird, copy-and-pasted from French or some invention of his own. Like when we take turns during a game, instead of saying, “It’s your turn,” he’ll say, “It’s at you.” And he hasn’t figured out questions: “Have you got can see me?” for example is pretty typical. So my little bilingual experiment number one is still giving me interesting data.
He turned five two days ago. We were going to take him to Paris today but the SNCF struck again (see what I did there?). Fortunately it was a surprise and we hadn’t even told him before we got the message that our train back was canceled, so we had to cancel the trip, for now at least.
In any case we are going to the US for Christmas, planning a couple days in NYC since my parents now live only two hours away. Littlest is looking forward to it. I’m hoping there won’t be any strikes to get in our way and that we won’t be too exhausted. But it’s high time we saw my parents’ new house and my nephew who was born in … January 2020… who I have yet to meet.
I thought I’d give an update on our grandparent situation, since I’ve written about it here. My mom did successfully come to France for about 9 days, and go home. It wasn’t much trouble at all to get her an antigenic COVID test at a pharmacy two days before her flight, with a print-out of the results.
It felt so good I wasn’t even sad when she left, if that makes sense. Littlest was, though (sad). We had a really wonderful time with her getting to know our family routine again, and seeing how much he’d changed over the past 16 months. Things I’d forgotten about, yet that we’d worked on, like dressing himself.
She took care of Even Littler during the day and often went to get Littlest at school on foot. She noticed things about a baby that only a grandparent notices, like the way he plays with certain toys or raises his arms in the air.
Scheduling worked out such that I picked her up at the station, dropped her things off at home, and then we went to get Littlest at school at the end of the school day when their teacher brings them to the front gate (COVID rules) and calls them one by one. He was so happy to see her. (She’s not the only grandparent in that kind of situation—I chatted this past week with a couple other grandparents who were dropping their grandkid off at school for the first time this year.)
She’s supposed to come back with my dad and my aunt at the end of the month. Fingers crossed the Delta variant and the voluntarily non-vaccinated (WTF PEOPLE) mess with that trip as little as possible.
Littlest has now finished Moyenne Section and is on vacation for the summer, and very confused about timelines. He keeps saying that he’ll be in Grande Section tomorrow or the next day, or that we’re going to Nanna and Grandpa’s house this weekend (we’re going for Christmas). Or that his trip to the farm is this afternoon (it’s next Monday). It’s so different to be little.
Things are opening up here in France in terms of lockdown and it’s revealing to me that we’ve been living in a kind of limbo. Not unbearable but not great either. In fact I think once things get back more to normal (see, I avoid saying “normal” because I’m starting to think it won’t ever really happen) it will be clear how many things were missing from our lives during this time…
J and I really tried hard to limit the number of people we saw through the second and third lockdowns, and even in between, since things never opened up all that much. We even wondered if we should really be seeing his parents at all, especially since they got COVID from a painter who was working un-masked at their house in February. J saw a few friends climbing outdoors. But I can’t recall us ever inviting anyone over to the house, besides some masked friends around Christmas time.
So now we are finally able to eat out (we went to a restaurant patio twice already, since they opened first), go to the movies (I took Littlest to some animated shorts the first weekend theaters were back open), and have friends over for meals. Of course now that it’s nice out it’s actually possible to do that last one outside.
On top of that, I got my first Pfizer dose early May and am getting my second tomorrow. J finally got his first one a little over a month after me. Lots of people are suddenly getting vaccinated and it’s been that way for about a month.
Of course the most important thing is that my mom is coming to visit in less than ten days. It’s a little hard to believe for now, given all that’s happened over the past year. But soon she’ll be holding our special littles in her arms again! So I’m trying to get things whipped back into shape downstairs for her stay, since I let things fall into a bit of disrepair given how I felt about her not being able to come last year. We also have friends coming mid-July for New York with their little boy. And we’re planning to go to Philadelphia for Christmas. It’s a difficult mental exercise making plans for the future. We’re not used to it being possible. Like I said, limbo.
Something wonderful has been happening lately. Littlest has been starting and maintaining conversations with me in English! He still speaks very often to me in French, but I’d go as far as to say it’s about half English these days. He even likes to speak English with his grandparents, cousins, and friends on Facetime.
He got very mad at me recently when I interpreted something he was saying wrong during one of these calls so I’ve decided to try hard to not interpret anything anymore. It’ll be a hard reflex to fight since I’ve been interpreting toddler talk for a couple of years now, and also I have a tendency/have had to interpret between family members for so long.
He’s definitely figured out who speaks English and who speaks French so I also won’t be telling him to speak English with certain people anymore.
It’s remarkable but it’s also clearly sensitive. I don’t want to discourage or embarrass him. Speech is so personal and so validating. He’s had to find his voice in two languages and he was a late talker in the first place.
As for Even Littler, he mostly just says “Wah.” He has 7 teeth and is crawling, pulling up, and climbing over things so I think he’s set to follow in Littlest’s footsteps of being more into gross motor skills than language.
A Landscape Selected at Random 