Impressions from my trip

I tried to call this post impressions from home, but I found that I couldn't type that. Not honestly. This is home now, this beautiful city, this new apartment, this place where R. and I are building our life and where Small Boy is discovering the world. (Have I mentioned that he's starting to "cruise?" He can walk along the couch now, holding on for dear life, stumbling over his little feet, but he can do it. He's starting to eat finger foods, and he's got a little vocabulary going. I'm very clearly "Ma-ma" and R. is "Da-da" and Cat is "eh-DAH." He's turning into a little boy before my eyes.)

When we got back after our trip it was so nice to open the door and come home to our apartment. To come home. So if here is home, which it definitely is, what is there? The place I come from? It's more than just that, but it's less than home. I don't know what that means. I don't what to say about that. I'm still thinking about it.

Our trip was mostly a trip to see family, to introduce Small Boy to his Uncle and Aunt and his two young cousins, my niece and nephew. We spent time with my sister-in-law's parents F. and H. , who - since my mother died just weeks after my brother married and my father had died four years before that - have in many ways been parents to me as well. I have spent many Thanksgivings and Christmases at their lovely home with the fire always glowing in the fireplace. They came to our wedding and F. played the role of host to R's parents. F. has recently been diagnosed with ALS, and parting was especially difficult. The future is so uncertain, and I am so far away.

I was surprised by how much my niece and nephew enjoyed playing with Small Boy, once they discovered that he was interactive. Once they realized that if you build a tower, he will knock it down, they were off to the races, building ever more elaborate contraptions and then getting Small Boy to destroy them. They taught him how to turn the floor lamp on and off (and I'm still wondering about the wisdom of that but as they say, water. bridge. under.), indulged his love of flashlights, and tried to help him learn to eat O's. It was wonderful watching them all play together.

Other than seeing family, however, the trip was somehow not what I expected. I'm not sure what exectly I expected, perhaps some epiphany, but whatever I expected did not come to pass. Something about the trip felt flat. I'm still thinking about that, too.

Superficial differences stood out immediately. The grocery store almost made my head explode. Huge, sprawling, too much choice. The baby food aisle - four brands and 72 flavors - almost did me in until a woman with a baby in the shopping cart seat happened by and heard me mumbling "Second foods? What are second foods?" (the baby food in Switzerland is labled with age ranges, "after 4 months", "after 6 months," that sort of thing) and helped me out. I bumped into her again in the dairy section as I desperately searched for real coffee cream, fat and all, and she had to ask "So where are you from, then?" "Switzerland. Home of the full fat dairy products. Do you know where they shelve the cream?" (By the way. Fat free half-and-half? If it's fat free, it's not half-and-half anymore.) I thought US-Americans were supposed to be suffering from an epidemic of obesity, but I practically needed a map and a Sherpa to find dairy products with fat in them. Then again, when we went out to brunch the portions were stereotypically huge.

Mostly I realized I've been away for a long time and that this is really home now, warts and all. I'm far more comfortable here than I give myself credit for being, and I guess it took a trip away for me to see that I really have created a life here - a life I'm still working on, still building, but a life nonetheless.

That feels good. It feels good here.

It feels good to be home.

Oh, and by the way, if you're ever tempted to cross 14 time zones in 11 days with a 10-month old baby, don't. Oh for the love of god and everything sacred, don't.