Paradise Lost



courtesy of Jean-Luc Virot

 I do finally understand people's utter fascination with life on the islands, whether it be because they actually live here and enjoy the slow paced, laissez-faire, year round sun and sea that big company salaries and /or expendable income (read riches) can provide, or because they do not live here and their dreams of paradise are far better than actually living on an island every day.  I fought and I fought hard against Barbados.  My slightly schizophrenic, obsessive-compulsive, reading-frenzied, brain-racing, artistic, chaotic brain just couldn't slow to the pace.  I was bored.  I didn't have my own group of friends and I didn't have my husband who worked all the time.  Every honeymoon story, cruise story, island hopping tale from years ago...I loved it.  Mount Gay Tour, Banks Brewery visit from the cruise ship, I feel you.  But living here after a life in a city that welcomed me as no other had, hurt both physically and emotionally.  It is beautiful here, someone's paradise.  But not mine.


I love the sea.  I love picking mangoes and limes and coconuts in my garden.  I love the strange fig bananas that look like regular bananas but have to be cooked to reveal their yumminess.  I even love the sun, just not all year 'round.  I have adjusted to the heat.  Foregone my best friends for new.  Traded cute clothes and haircuts for sun dresses, flip flops and ponytails or buns.  I wore no make up.  At all.  To the grocery store.  To a restaurant!  But this could only have been a temporary stop on our life path.  (I mean, I love clothes and make up too much.  I kid.)  Barbados, any island really, is for me, a place to settle down when all you were meant to do in the world has been done, or can be done from your home.  I don't think that is the case for me. I hope, no I expect that we will look back and smile about our time here.  After nearly two years, we are going "off island" for good.

Suddenly, I am looking at things nostalgically, recalling our first drive in from the airport in the middle of the night on August 7, 2009, waking up in a queen-sized bed sweating my face off with all four members of our family, one of them a 3 1/2 month old Virginie, cramped together being eaten alive by mosquitoes.  My friend Eva, in a gift that could only be given by God, just happened to be visiting Barbados and she witnessed with me, firsthand, the insanity.  Eva is a world traveller.  She has been everywhere and I could see on her stunned face that this was going to be a challenge. 

Our house had no screens, AC in the bedrooms only, no fans, save two poorly placed ceiling fans probably put in some time during the disco era, hard tiled floors, bars on every window and door wide enough to keep out people (did we need that?) but not wide enough to keep out curious monkeys, lizards, geckos, bats, moths, and blood-lusting mosquitoes.  They tried to kill us.  No really.  Drain our blood and make us look pock-marked so no one would love us, or at least recognize us.  We slept under sauna hot mosquito-netting, getting tangled in the middle of the night for diaper changes and bathroom breaks.  Didier worked for hours at a time and I was alone in the jungle with two little girls, one a baby, the other a terrified toddler who wanted clues from me and I had nothing to offer it seems other than hugs and a completely bugged out expression on my face.  I had no friends and no one wanted to call me from home because it was crazy expensive and I just cried and wailed all the time.  Who wants to talk to that post-partum inflicted, mosquito-bite covered, incredibly tan and shiny wench complaining about life in the tropics?  I got it.  I get it.  I have just always needed to sound it out.  I need to talk about it, process, figure out stuff and I need to run my mouth to do it. 

And so it happened that I started to meet people...running my mouth, as they say down South for "talking too much."  Didier put screens on the windows after much debating about whether or not this was even possible.  (Let me remind you that anything is possible.  Anything.)  We kept doors sealed at night after 6:30 pm to keep out the humidity and the house cooled down.  Lily went to a wonderful pre-school and then reception class where she met lots of great kids and I amazing parents.  We found a hot little spot for good music, dancing and sushi on the beach run by a sexy young couple, she is Guyanese and he, Iranian--HOT-- with whom we became friends.  (Shout out Cassareep!) 

On breaks and days off, we explored the island, though there is still much we would like to try before going--the submarine tour, swimming with the turtles, Aerial Barbados Zip Tours, a dinner at Cariba, maybe cool pics at some of the rum shops.  But honestly, it still felt like an extended vacation, a break from reality, a little bit like a black hole.  Professionally it did nothing for Didier or me, but it gave us better focus as to who we really are and who we really want to be when we return to the surface.  Yes, there was turquoise blue water, calm seas (usually), and a very laid back lifestyle, but it did not seem real. 

And now we are leaving.  Heading back to "home," wherever that mythical place is, to start again.  Start.  Not much is planned and we are excited, nervous, anxious, thrilled.  We are certainly preparing better than we did when we came here.  We know what to look for now, what works for us and what doesn't.  But what we have this time that we didn't have last is a sense of steering our own course.  I think a lot of people who come to Barbados do so to do just that.  Get off the grid.  Control their destinies.  Make their own paradise.  We came here for work in a pretty tough set up, and that as much as anything else shaped our minds about the place.  For us, Barbados can never be paradise, but somewhere else can.  I think it hovers in the space between us, all four of us, where we feel safe and loved and connected and free.  Let's see where that takes us.

courtesy of Jean-Luc Virot

(c)Copyright 2011. City Mom in the Jungle.

The Royal We

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On an island that was once under rule of the British and where nearly 80% of all tourism comes from the UK, it should come as no surprise that the wedding of Prince William to Kate/Catherine Middleton would cause a little stir and excitement.  There were cafes and bars that hosted early morning or all day events with traditional English food and Pims cocktails, hanging of the Union Jack in shop windows, as well as a denial by many of any interest whatsoever in what the royals were up to.  Of course I was told by a few that the Americans were more interested than they in the nuptials and then saw that played over and over again on many news outlets when royal wedding tourists from Tennessee and Oklahoma ended up being interviewed in tiaras and feather boas outside the Palace.  Nice.


I won't lie.  I watched the wedding at 5:45 am after a long night with very little sleep and lots of wake ups from the kiddies and would do it again, even knowing that it would be rebroadcast one hundred times that day.  I did the same for Princess Diana's funeral, rising at 4 am after my wake up call, from my dad, and sitting quietly sobbing in my tiny studio apartment in Boston.  I'm not ashamed.  My excitement was not really because of an attraction to all things royal, nor to things British, though I have often had a soft spot there, but because I am so moved by witnessing someone else's destiny.


Princess Diana was to the manner born and though she could not have known that she would be chosen an appropriate mate for a future king, it wasn't out of the realm of possibilities.  But Kate Middleton, how could she ever have guessed this?  Maybe she dreamed it.  Maybe she willed it.  Maybe it was written.  I'm not sure; I am still working on that.  But I think often, probably everyday, about how I am where I am moment to moment.  A black girl from Freehold, NJ with southern family roots married to a Frenchman who'd moved all over France, to Belgium, travelled abroad, lived in different parts of the States and together made two beautiful crazies.  I consider fate and destiny every day when I think of our future and what we will do next and how we will do it and how lucky we are to do it together. 


During that period a few months ago when Dan Savage's "It gets better" campaign for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered youth got underway after a series of profiled suicides and humiliations came to light, I thought of how true this is, or can be, for us all.  I thought of how I could never have known I would find such happiness, but that also in tough, ugly, humiliating times, I could find a voice and a place where I could trust myself over the noise and the nonsense.  When I saw Kate Middleton in that gorgeous Alexander McQueen dress, I didn't want to be her, didn't even envy her.  It's just that she seemed truly present, truly accepting of that moment in all its facets in her life.  We watched and loved her and hopefully felt love.  Just love without all the other stuff, judgments, considerations, calculations.


When I first met Didier, on that first day before he was DIDIER and was just Didier, the chef at the restaurant I'd just started working, I saw a glimmer, a flash, a second, split second, and I sucked in my breath and said, under it, "Oh boy."  I just knew there would be a "we."  Some nights, say when I am running from our bedroom to the girls' room and then back after hearing one of them shouting, talking, crying on the monitor or when the girls are snuggled up under my arm reading a story complete with Lily's interpretations of all images, sights, and sounds or when, once they are fast asleep, Didier and I just look at each other across a paper and crayon strewn living room with a knowing look, I am stunned by the fact that we are, indeed, a "we."  My life as I'd known it has changed and my commitment to these people and to life has been made ever stronger. 

So when I watched the royal wedding, as when I watch any wedding really (you should have seen me bawling my face off at my brother Jeff's wedding to his insanely fabulous betrothed), I am excited by and reminded of hope, that moment when we trust in the good, suspend disbelief for even just a moment that the fights, poopy diapers, fatigue rage, and all kinds of things, serious and not so, will eventually enter into the picture.  I am tickled by the fact that two people, whoever they are, came together in that moment as their best selves (hopefully) or at least their best projections.  I am floored by destiny.  How did these people find each other in the rough seas of souls surfing killer waves all over the planet?  I am a sucker, I know.  But I'd rather be a sucker for love who held out for my prince, warts and all, than a tight, closed fist of a heart looking for all that is wrong instead of all that is right.  Even a cynical fool like myself, Depeche Mode/Cure sure that I was fated for loneliness am part of a royal "we."

(c)  Copyright 2011.  City Mom in the Jungle.