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After a seemingly long day spent with Virginie and Lily, home from school, I decided to take the girls for a swim in the pool. They were both so excited to show off their new tricks and a swim usually calms us all down enough to pass out pretty quickly at bedtime. There were a few downpours this afternoon so I feared the water would be chilly, but it was gorgeous. Calm and relaxing and the sun, by now preparing to recede on the horizon, was not too bright or intense. Lily got in first, wearing her floaty bathing suit with a few floaties removed. She didn't want to wear it, but it is too hard for me to keep my eye on them both in the pool and this was a safety net for Mommy really. Virginie and I followed and she immediately started her paddle, paddle, paddle, kick, kick, kick routine from swimming lessons.
As they practiced jumping in the pool and swimming to Mommy, I noticed a small audience forming on the roof of the guesthouse. My eagle eyes are trained for any sudden movements in the landscape and I homed in on them immediately. Monkeys. Seven of them. Two of them were tiny blue babies, but they were still watching us. They were all pretty curious as the girls screamed with delight jumping and swimming and floating on their swimming noodles. The mothers with babies were cautious, but realized that we were pretty far away and harmless.
This was a week of milestones. Lily swam underwater without her floaty swim suit. Finished her first year of school in Barbados. And graduated from Blossoms Nursery School. She will start primary school in September at St. Gabriel's School. I am so thrilled with her progress and excited about the prospects for her future.
When Lily was born, she was the best thing to ever happen to me in my life up to that point. I love her in ways that I didn't even know existed because I had never felt so loved. One wants to give one's children things they missed in their childhoods and often it seems that it is the material things that are most considered. But I want Lily to feel loved. Every day. And not because she does the things I want her to, but just because I love her. I want her to feel a sense of herself and her place in the scheme of things in life. And to believe that she is capable of anything. I know that it is my job to guide her in this discovery and it is here that I think I am failing her.
Seriously. This is not a plea for people to tell me what a good mother I am. I am a good mother. But I can see that my struggle is taking its toll on my little girl and that makes me feel horrible. As tough as this move has been for me, Lily has been with me the entire time, watching, waiting, hoping that I was going to be okay. I can see it in her big brown eyes. She wants me so badly to be the woman I was before we left New York for ports unknown. I want to be also.
I watched her singing at her graduation from Blossoms and she was so sweet and innocent and shy. She kept checking for me at the back of the room where I was rocking a diapered, but unclothed Virginie on one hip and taking photos with my free hand. I was waving at her, blowing kisses, smiling, welling up with tears. My baby was graduating from nursery school and I couldn't have loved her more. I hope she could see in my eyes how special she is to me and not the sad, mopey monster I have become as each day passes here.
Lily loves Barbados and the friends she has made here, many of whom will go on to St. Gabriel's with her. It is so sad to me that on this, we cannot see eye to eye. I know that going back home will return her to a small apartment or a house in the suburbs, yikes, outside the city. I know that going back home presents us with the financial challenge of providing her with a good primary education given the state of many US public schools and the cost of the private. I know that both she and Virginie will lose their private garden and their sense of freedom wandering around and discovering nature in their own backyard. But I also know, that my children shouldn't have to live with an emotionally and spiritually stunted mother. In the long run, they are better in a small corner loved completely than running around with ample space and feeling emptiness in their hearts. The worst gift I can leave them with as they graduate through life is a sense that they were not loved enough. That would break my heart and leave one more notch on the belt of Barbados for the destruction of my life and family.
My sister said to me last night, "When it's good, it's really good. But when it's bad, I know she hasn't taken her medication." She wasn't talking about me. But she very well could have been. I started this blog because I needed a way to sort out all I was feeling in this new country with all its issues and limitations, as well as its beauty and offer of escapism. It has been easy to share stories about the monkeys and the bugs and the creatures that freak me out. It has even been easy to talk about my marriage and my children and my hopes for all of us. It has made people smile and laugh and think about their own lives, I hope. My circumstances have been made more difficult by the post partum depression that wracked me and floored me for over a year. A feeling of loss and abandonment made more crippling by the fact that I truly was lost here in Barbados and did feel abandoned by everything I knew to be true in the world.
The girls and I arrived here in the dead of night on August 7th, 2009 and it was stifling hot. I was at least 15 pounds overweight, had endured endless nights of a colicky baby and demanding toddler who felt as confused as I was, and I was still not sure how we had come to the decision to relocate. Of course I knew, but I was tired and cranky and had just had a baby three months earlier! The monkeys, open floor plan of the house that let anything in, the heat, the sun, the lack of amenities that I had grown used to due to a life as a spoiled American girl just twisted my already tired brain.
Didier was gone for 10, 12, 14 hours at a time, trying to get a kitchen that had gone without a chef for 5 months together, and a hotel that had gone without true leadership for years. I sympathized. I sympathized with everyone really--my overworked husband, my tired, scared, mosquito-bitten children. There had been no time for myself. None. We knew no one, didn't know anything about this place and spent much of those first months in our own bubbles trying to breathe let alone communicate or share with each other. Then the craziness started.
I dared speak the word, but I knew what it was. I wept openly every day. Was scared to death of something happening to the girls in the garden. Had a terrorizing fear of driving the car. Only got out of bed so the girls would not think they had a crazy mother, which I believe they suspected already anyhow. My biggest fear was the girls living a childhood with a mother they could not connect to or trust, so I threw myself into their lives, giving them no chance to feel abandoned, ignored, unimportant. We read stories, drew pictures, went for walks, went swimming, had dance parties and tea parties, played in the paddling pool. I kissed them good night every night and told them I loved no one more than them. I answered every cry in the middle of the night and made silly faces when they seemed hurt or down.
I rubbed Didier's back and got pissed at the people at work who let him down. I talked with him about the troubles at work, made sure he got to visit the sea on his days off. Let him sleep later every morning and took the girls out of his hearing range so he truly could continue to sleep. I hoped for answers to his struggles here and tried to be supportive where I could.
So here we are now. Post partum has paved the way for a more amorphous type of depression. When it's good, it's really good...and I write about how much we love one another and how we are trying in the struggle to maintain. I see the beauty in the island and truly believe we can live this last year here happily. But when it's bad, you'd never know...because I keep smiling, but it's bad. More to come...
(c)copyright 2010. Citymominthejungle
Last year at this time, Didier had already left for Barbados and the girls and I were in New York getting ready for our relocation, first to Florida and then to Barbados to start this new journey. Virginie was two months old and on the verge of a colicky freak out that would last months and put me and my parents on the edge of sanity. Lily was confused and scared as our apartment slowly transformed itself into a storage unit of all of the things she recognized and held dear. We'd SKYPED with Didier early in the morning as it was, even then, our custom to get up at the crack of dawn, and chatted. It was our hope to keep things as normal as possible for Lily since her papa was gone and the life she knew and had finally gotten comfortable in was about to change.
Today, Father's Day began with a torrential downpour that rumbled through Barbados late in the evening and continued all morning. Because we are not tourists, we welcome the rain. It's great for the garden and offers a reprieve from the exhausting heat and humidity. Of course, once it stops raining, the heat will rise from the ground and we will all be drenched with sweat in our little bubble. The girls showered Didier with love at 6:55 AM, which was a break from the 5:45 wake up and I was able to sneak in a quick kiss and snuggle before the day went into overdrive.
While it continued to rain sporadically, Didier and Lily found a small window to get in the pool and play while I put Virginie down for her nap. Father's Day is different than Mother's Day in that we are trying to allow moments for the kiddies and Papa to be together and on Mother's Day, it's all about keeping Mommy free of kiddies! Still planning our menu for this evening while Lily and Papa fly paper airplanes and Lily floats paper boats on her imaginary stream. Didier is wearing his #1 Dad badge so proudly I think I might cry. You never know what kind of dad your lover is going to be when your lives are all about yourselves. And while he is not really into the domestic stuff, ie housework, tidying up, morning or middle of the night wake ups, Didier is surprisingly spectacular and comfortable in the imaginary world Lily has created for them. He is like a little French-accented guide into Playland who cooks and draws and paints and even dances when called upon. (This is a big deal as I have almost never seen this man move his butt!)
The kid in Didier, which is so available to those who know him well, but is often hidden in his professionalism and French politesse, is raging on Father's Day. I told Didier this morning that the plan is for Lily and Virginie to think he is the #1 Dad even when being number one in their lives becomes more challenging. When they find new distractions and interests and begin thinking for themselves. When it might seem easier to turn away and ignore what they are interested in than try to understand. He will be their first love forever and if he does it right, he gives them a better chance to not only believe in themselves, but to love themselves...and that would be the best Father's Day gift of all.
(c)copyright 2010. Citymominthejungle
