Living in the negative space

 

Tuesday I dropped everything, strapped on my helmet and pantleg elastic, and rode off to the FS training centre to take the Transitioning Home from Life Abroad course. I got lost twice. First I rode up one steep Gatineau hill, only to realize I must re-descend, then l did it again with another.

I hardly noticed the forest alongside but I knew it was there. I'd run its trails during a year of German training eight years ago. l arrived almost but not late to the course.

The pre-course readings included the usual graphs about the emotional stages of transition. It's okay, then bad, then slowly better. You'll just feel wrong. Then less wrong. No one cares how you've changed. Remember that they've changed, too. All this in much more eloquent words, all mostly accurate.

They included an article called That Discomfort You're Feeling is Grief. It was the first sign that someone understood, that all this could be understood. I read all the articles out loud to my husband.

An FS has to do many very different things, often on short notice and without preparation time or training, and must do them more or less competently. They must have this flexibility, self discipline, desire to learn, judgement and ethics, all without subsuming to the internal stresses these flexions create internally.

And one must do this for decades, through children, spouses, sickness, debt, neglected friends and family - all the many things that characterize normal life, while moving from country to country.

It’s very thrilling to satisfy one’s curiosity and fernweh, as the Germans put it - farsickness, as opposed to homesickness. It’s also exhausting. No wonder so many of us end up eccentric or divas, on the boards of one think tank or another, or alone. That’s another way of saying, there’s no way if knowing where this leads.

Another way of describing a life of change and discovery is to notice that new beginnings happen when things end. The things left behind can't be brought along, or not in their fully present way. They leave absences, holes so ragged they can't be stitched up in words. Or I can't.

My phone gives me the option of a typeface that is new to me, called Bahnschrift. This is German and it means, trainwriting. Writing of the way.

My Berlin life in Ottawa

The cheese man in the Byward Market tells me it's tough running a cheese shop in the Market. McDonalds is gone, he goes on, soon Timmies will leave, too. I exult that he sells Tomme de Savoie and Kaltbach, two of my favourite cheeses, but I'm sorry there's no Rote Teufel, which means red devil in German.

When I moved to Germany in 2015, I didn't know cheese. I liked Havarti and cheddar. For my first five years in Germany, I made no progress beyond this. Then, my friend H started invited me to join her on her Saturday morning trips to the market at Winterfeldtplatz. That means, winter field square.

There's a Turkish cheese seller, beloved among market stalls, who plies young customers with lollipops and serves up cheese samples to their elders. He has a smile, gives my change to my son, is always ready with a recommendation. And the prices are good. Sometimes we wait twenty minutes for our turn, canvas bags weighing us down. I don't notice. I'm strong from getting everywhere on foot, my backpack a permanent fixture over my spine.

H teaches me French cheeses, a wealth of information gained from paying attention to her French husband's relatives. Slowly I learn what I like. It takes all of my remaining three years in Berlin. Savoury sheep's cheese with coriander seed, hard oily Manchego threaded with truffles, the softer, younger Swiss mountain cheeses - Kaltbach. I like Brie de Meaux, my husband goes for creamy Delices de Bourgognes, my son likes Red Devil. I learn that I like mostly everything when eaten off the back of the cheese mongers knife. And that I get pickier at home, and as the days elapse since I visited the market.

I have H in my ear today as I pore slowly, lovingly over the cheese in the Byward market cheese shop. In Germany still, she's spending her afternoon watching Germany beat Serbia in the FIBA. We compare first weeks at school for the kids.

I'm alone in the store. Tourists fill the breakfast joints nearby. But the crowd of marketers I remember from Before-Berlin is gone. No one else is loaded down with bags.

During my first month back in Ottawa, I visited the Lansdowne market The crowd is lovely, it's a good market. The sellers are happy, they're selling. The fruit seller with the ponytail practices his German on me.

But the cheese and deli meat selection is spare. So, I'm branching out.

#condoliving #consolidation #ottawa
#ottawa #Berlin #tiergartensued #tiergartensuedcomics #comics #myottawa #bywardmarket #cheese

Dreaming of Canada

 

Next month I am moving back to Ottawa, and I don‘t want to go. There‘s no use telling the Germans. But, Lia „Kanada ist das Traumland!“

A dreamland.

They‘re thinking about mountains, Mounties and multiculteralism, and, by God, they‘re right about that.

For me, Canada is the place where I never felt as comfortable as I do in Berlin.

After being forced in Germany to live in a European way, and learning to love it, I realise that in Canada, I lived how I thought I was supposed to live.

Not only did I fail to live the way that I want to live, worse, I didn‘t even know how I wanted to live. I knew I was unhappy. I didn‘t know why.

The sin is people pleasing.

Even though people pleasing makes the world go around. Just ask anyone trying to keep a relationship going, any kind of relationship! Putting your needs and wants into perspective is healthy. We need to meet people halfway, at least partway. We can‘t always get our own way.

But failing even to know what our needs and wants are, like, in the first place? Cringe, says my inner teenager.

Here is what I have learned from living in Germany. I live to move and I need to move. I need stairs, cycle paths, a nearby park for strolling with friends, running or calisthenics.

I need to be able to eat well. I need a good and healthy food supply, and I need time to cook it at home.

I need to know where I live, to understand it and to have a connection to it. I need time for my family and I, for my thoughts and for my friends. And I need time and energy to care for my community. I need a nearby kind of life that I can live without a car.

I don‘t want to move to Canada because I am afraid that I cannot live this way in that country. I feel like my culture has let me down, by favouring concrete and ashphalt over nature, coveting ever-larger homes and cars, fixating on things instead of ideas and culture, putting the bottom line in urban design above people.

But Canada has lots of precious qualities. First among them, people who are warm and open, people who want to be kind. It‘s a very good start, right?

And my family can speak English there, when language has been such a barrier here, despite all my excellent language training.

So I hope that with a little bit of compromise, I can bring this late-in-life knowledge of how I need to live to the next phase of my life in Canada.

This time, it‘s not a house in the suburbs and two cars. Instead, we found a modest apartment downtown, near the farmers‘ market and shops, public transit, schools and library. It‘s not gorgeous, needs work, and I know that for years to come, Canadians will walk into our small home and look around quizzically. Um, so tell me again why you guys decided to live downtown?

I hope it was the right decision. I hope I can proudly say, well, I know it‘s not big and that we can‘t barbecue or play in the yard. But we moved here because we can walk to the brew pub or the theatre or the parade. I pick up food for our meals on my way home from work, instead of spending Saturday morning at the Superstore. We leave the car to languish in the garage. Our kids make their own way by bicycle to school, and they take the bus anywhere they want. They don‘t depend on their parents. We‘re all free.

Maybe once I have settled in at work, I can offer a free comics workshop for kids again, or start up a comics Meet-Up group for adults.

I don‘t know. I hope so. I hope it all works out a bit like I hope.

Have you been able to figure out how you want to live? And could you manage it?