We're back

Ok, so the majority of my blog readers are people I am lucky enough to now see or at least talk to every day. But still they ask me, where is my blog? Tell us how you're feeling about being back, they say, even though I've just answered that question while sitting across from them, on the kitchen floor, drinking a glass of wine, ignoring the children. I guess everything is just more real in writing.

I feel fine.

Seriously, I feel very good. We aren't home yet - our house if full of renters so we're staying at a friend's house across the park. Most people tell me we must be feeling so lost and strange to not be in our own home, but it's quite the opposite. The vacation still isn't over but this time, we aren't millions of miles away from our people. And it's spring in Minneapolis. Our people are happy.

In one of these blogs, way back when, I wrote that it had taken me six months in Brazil to finally feel comfortable with the fact that I am a mother. There has been this part of me, since before I even got pregnant, that missed the partying, the politicking, the hanging out at all hours and flirting and getting passionately involved in this or that issue, going to conferences, feeling important in the specific way that parentless adults feel important. I still miss it, but finally after six months in Brazil, I don't grieve it. That's how I feel about being back. It is lovely to be in the mist of this sloppy mass of children and adults when the kids are acting like idiots with each other followed by real sweetness, their semi-sibling status rubbing up against them the hard and right ways. I am so happy to be parenting in community, so proud of Luca and how she is handling this newest change, so proud of the way that the other children have just opened up the Luca space in their lives again.

But I'm not back all the way yet. So I'm not changing the heading on this blog. Brazil is still informing our days, even while we're collapsing back into Minneapolis. Maybe I'll be all the way back when Luca's english is all the way back, or when our tans have faded or when we look at each other across the hungriness of our crazy days, and wish again for quiet by the beach.

Flying Today

After six months, we are leaving this afternoon for Minneapolis. I'm going to have to change the heading on this blog - if I even keep writing it to the same extant. My partner, Rocki, always had the most apt way of describing this six month period: the days would go by slowly while the months flew by.

There is this part of me that wants to write some kind of lofty conclusion - it's the ritual junkie within. But I don't have a lot to say. So many reflections are still half-baked, waiting for home where comparisons and conversation will turn them into life narratives that then get told to everyone over and over again, refining and mixing until, years from now, they have the same kind of automatic timing that my childhood has.

Right this second, Luca and her tio Mauricio are playing in the apartment. She is climbing on him, dancing for him, making up songs about leaving in her little sung-therapy way, kissing him, eating apples and pears, and prancing between Portuguese and English. It's funny, that instinctive self that is bringing her English out to air in the sun, getting it ready for proper use when we are back in Minneapolis. Rocki is wandering around the apartment, rearranging things, cleaning things, checking on things, passing the time. I move from Mauricio and Luca to the computer to the bathroom where I can shut the door, sit on the toilet and pluck my pubes. This has been my bikini-line activity since living in Brazil and I must admit, it's turned into an addiction.

Soon we drive to Rocki's mother's apartment in Lagoa where we will eat all of our favorite dishes, some friends will come over, we will be watching the clock and trying to be present at the same time. When it gets close to leaving time, Dona Iara will get abrupt, not wanting to cry in front of us, Rocki will either get crabby or detail-oriented, Luca will get clingy and I will probably cry. Mauricio will probably get quiet.

And then we will be gone, taxi-ing to the airport to begin our twelve hours of travel time before heading back to our other home.

Until the next blog...

Music makes the people dance...

One of the things that Raquel loves best about living in her home, in Rio, is that when we're driving in the car and switch on the radio, it's Brazilian music that greets our ears. So many of those songs she grew up with, those evocative moments that make you melt into nostalgia, drift into the car and she starts singing words to songs I've never heard before.

All of the music you hear on the radio isn't from Brazil. Like most places, there's a mix of American-Canadian-British- Australian top ten hits, past and present. Everytime I've been here, I've noticed how popular 80s club hits are in Brazil. Wham, the Thompson Twins, all of that new wave high hair flourescent makeup stuff hasn't gone out of style. It's curious - I mean, the 80s are making a comeback in the States as those who were adolescent back then start to face middle age. But it's a timing thing and wasn't true five years ago nor will it be true five years from now. But here, the 80s haven't gone out of style.

I finally asked a group of friends about this and they just about knocked me over the head. Hel-lo, Susan, end of military regime, opening of Brazilian culture, move away from third world space to developing world, freedom. According to Marco, Neiva and Elsa, all aged between 32 and 48, the 1980s were a time when the future finally felt possible again, after decades of being stuck and afraid. The 1980s are, for Brazil and particularly for Brazilian leftists (a huge number of mainstream and not so mainstream people) a time of opening and liberation. For me, the 1980s make me think of Reagan and the music makes me want to weep for the 1960s and 70s.

Funny this music thing. With I-Tunes, I've started to download songs that make me do whatever - weep, soar, feel, freak. A friend of mine who was recently visiting from California laughed to realize how much I lean towards angsty white boy music: Nirvana, Kansas, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Led Zeppelin, Emminem, and so on. Maybe it's just because I grew up in angsty white boy world or maybe because there is an angsty white boy hiding deep inside me.

Body language revisited

Luca, my four year old, was prancing across the floor the other day, her hips making like a metronome, when she stopped, literally flounced and swirled around to face me. "Do you know how walks like that?" she asked me. "Tia Neiva. When she walks her butt is always dancing." And she swirled back around and started the metronome. "I think it's pretty," she said, literally throwing me a coquettish look over her shoulder.

With the millions of physical gestures available for consumption, it is fascinating which beats these children pick up. In the lovely perpetual heat of summer, one of Luca's favorite activities is to face the mirror, naked as the day, and dance. If there is no music, she sings. If there is music, she still sometimes sings her own song. Her moves run from nice square physical kinds of motions to these new curvier things, many of them gathered around her pudenda.

I keep trying to think back - have Rocki and I ever shown a particular interest in her ass or general mound of Venus? (I'm sorry - even my feminist self has a hard time referring to Luca's pussy as a cunt. Even pussy seems sexualized. She still hasn't really started masturbating yet, so I'll keep it Venusian for awhile.) I don't think we have. But when she is dancing, all things centered between her hips get quite the work out with the back and forth and the wiggle wiggle wiggle. She doesn't watch MTV or anything beyond school where she might have learned this. She does watch assorted Carnaval videos over and over again, fascinated by the samba and working hard to get her feet to move that fast. Watching her dance, it seems like there must be something else at play.

Is it just that body physics work that way - around your core are the hinges that make up your body and if you're dancing, it's fun to move those hinges? The center stays still or else it is wiggled with intention.

Watching her body makes me pay more attention to mine - both its aging aspect and how well I wiggle my mound.

Bring me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses

Driving from our house to the grandmother's house, we stopped by a gas station to get cash and pao de queijo. Brief aside - pao de queijo are these little round cheese breads made from three different kinds of manioc flours and fresh cheese. They are the junk food of choice here - you eat them in the movies, at the bakery, when you just need a quick pick me up. I will miss them when we move back to Minneapolis NEXT WEEK.

But anyhow, we stopped by the gas station and while I was waiting for my friend, Anthony, to get money out of the cash machine, I browsed the post card rack on the wall. Now, post cards racks here usually mean advertising. Upcoming plays, movies, new products get advertised on lovely glossy postcards that are free and many of which you can actually use like real postcards. How cool is that!

One of the glossy numbers caught my eye because of the return address: www. quebec.immigration.br On the front it said, in Portuguese of course, "Quebec invites you to immigrate! We are open for you!!" Then, if you turn it over, there is a little introductory paragraph about how lovely Quebec is then it says, "Why immigrate? Because.." followed by bullet points, "You will be respected for who you are here, it is safe, we speak French, you can get training for work and there are plenty of jobs." Then the postcard directed you to a website where you could take a quick online test and find out if you can pack your bags and leave Brazil for Quebec.

I have never and I mean never seen an advertisement for immigration. Change that - I have seen signs in Ireland inviting Irish ex-pats to come home. I have seen flyers when living in England telling you how easy it was to work for a few years in Australia, here's how you do it, but don't stay more than two years. I have seen many many signs asking people to stay, please, don't emigrate somewhere else. And, of course and not only recently, I have seen millions of signs saying we don't want immigrants. But I have never seen a postcard advertising easy immigration.

It makes me think of the 19th century - posters posted in southern and eastern Europe begging folks to come do the cheap ass jobs. Land rushes and false advertising.

Rocki and I talked about going on line and seeing if we could immigrate to Quebec. But then we got nervous: what if we filled out the forms and the Quebecois found us favorable. What if we then disconnected without following through on the immigration. Would someone show up at our house, banging on the door, "Hey, you said you wanted to come live with us, we have your apartment and job ready. Where did you?"

It's a strange thing. This world of begging-immigration. I've never seen it before and, seeing as how we're returning to the States NEXT WEEK, I don't expect to see it again.

The price of motherhood

Yeah, it's real for so many women but this morning I sat by the pool with my daughter, another child her age, that child's newborn brother and their nanny. The nanny is 25 and has three kids of her own, ages 6, 8 and 10. The nanny lives three hours away, takes the bus on Monday morning and stays here, with her work-family, all week and then goes home late Friday night. Three hours on the bus again. Her mother lives with her and takes care of her three kids while she is taking care of someone else's kids. Her job is to get up all night with the newborn, including bringing the new baby to the mother so that the mother can nurse. Meanwhile, papa sleeps on in the bed. Nanny is exhausted in the way of new mothers - no sleep because of a crying baby, all day long with a baby and a four year old. New mother was sitting by the pool in the early part of the morning getting some sun. Papa came in from surfing, riled up the two children, and then went upstairs to take a shower, leaving nanny to deal with the now squirrely children.

Nanny goes home on the weekend and mostly catches up on sleep.

This is so typical. So insanely common. And everytime I meet someone for whom it is their reality, I just want to grab my daughter, Luca, and hold on tight.