School zones stress me out. I am not sure of how to behave when dropping off my children. I’m used to more of a free-for-all, of cars jostling one another over mere inches of space, of people turning off their engines and leaving their cars in the middle of the street while behind them, everyone else leans on their horns in frustration. In this environment, I knew that there was basically no possibility I would stress out those around me by my risk-taking. I knew I was the uptight one. But this orderly, patient, and above all quiet procession of mini vans and SUVs through a wide loop that passes in front of the school doors unnerves me. It moves slowly, so I avoid it and pull to the side of the street to drop off the twins. A woman parked behind me shoots me a glance, a hint of shock and wonder in it, and I wonder what I’m doing wrong. I run through possibilities in my mind and come up blank.
I know I look normal to those around me. A mother, unshowered and in yoga pants (Elliot has to be there by 7:30; I’m more put together when I take the twins by 9), driving a mini van that you can’t tell is borrowed. No one gives me a second look. If I were to open my window and ask a question of the man in the bright yellow reflective vest, who is gesturing impatiently at me to keep moving while I carefully obey the stop sign, he wouldn’t blink twice. I look American. I sound American.
When I go into the schools and talk to the people in the office, I feel the same way. Lost, adrift at sea, in the fog. I tell them we’re new, but they don’t know how new.
I saw a sign in the window of a trendy upscale shop the other day: Do something that scares you every day. I thought it was one of the stupidest bits of advice I’d ever seen, come in with by someone in a cozy office who probably drives a new car with new tires and has insurance for every possible outcome. Things scare you for a good reason probably, unless you’re unusually timid. And the reason these school zones stress me out is because there are a ton of laws associated with them, and also I don’t want to be known at the school as Crazy Driver Woman. Or, this being Oregon, probably something less family friendly but expressing the same idea. I’m fine with going 20 (20ish) when the yellow lights are flashing and not passing school busses when stopped, but I don’t know if I can just pull up into the bus zone to drop off my kids, briefly, me not leaving the car or turning off my engine, or if I’m supposed to wait behind the car with the slower kids hunting for dropped papers even though Elliot is already inside the school, and I would pass on the non-kid side.
Maybe I’m scared of their looks. Maybe I shouldn’t be. But I just want to fit in. I’m tired of feeling overwhelmed in Target. (I mean, who feels overwhelmed in Target?) I’m tired of feeling so strange and out of place when I look so right.
Once we move into our house, they’re going to take the bus.
***
Yesterday a friend dropped by unexpectedly and took me out for lunch. We discussed in the car where we were going–sandwiches, Mexican, Indian buffet, which? We chose Thai food—spring rolls, panang curry. Afterwards we had iced coffees at Starbucks and wandered round a store when they had a plethora of fabric shower curtains on sale. If I could remember what my new bathrooms look like (we looked at a lot of houses in a few days), I would have bought one. I hunted all over Rabat—I believe I visited every single store there that sold shower curtains, before finally finding one in plain white. The shop keepers obviously thought I was fussy because I categorically refused even a hint of neon pink and green flowers, ducks, or navy blue and gold stripes. Fabric curtains weren’t even an option, and I bought the store model, literally the only plain white one in the city.
Sometimes choice is nice.
What do you do that scares you? Drive without insurance? Forget to pay your bills, just this month only? Walk into your kids’ school wearing the completely-inappropriate Marie Antoinette costume I saw advertised for Halloween? Or do you think the shop was talking about buying a pair of red boots instead of black? And are red boots even scary? Discuss in comments.
23 comments
September 22, 2010 at 9:49 pm
Antique Mommy
I feel that way all the time and I haven’t been out of the country in years. I never quite fit. Be that as it may…
What scares me? That my kid would get seriously sick, that I would be widowed again. The rest is just stuff.
September 22, 2010 at 9:55 pm
Mary
These days it is parenting older children, letting loose of their lives (or more truly, prying my own white-knuckle grip off them) and giving them the chance to sink or swim. To study or not. To drive carefully or speed. And a million other things.
It’s up to them now. As much as I love and trust their hearts, I know how easy it is to get off track, how quickly temptation can come, how a few moments of unwise thinking can impact years. Scary as all get-out.
I have to keep reminding myself that the resting place for my faith is not in them. It is in God.
Mary, mom to 10
September 22, 2010 at 10:17 pm
Miss Footloose
Ah, yes, reverse culture shock. Been there. Several times. It will get easier. I heard a story of a woman who’d spent years in a poor country, and after arriving back in the US went to the grocery store. She ran out crying and went home without groceries. Someone else had to go shopping for her because she couldn’t make choices . . .
I often feel like a stranger in my home country of the Netherlands because I’ve not lived there for ages. I just visit regularly. I speak the language, look like a “normal” Dutch person, but I get weird looks because I just don’t “get” things or know things everyone else does. I just joke about it and make fun of myself.
The hardest thing for me to adjust to after coming back to the US after living for 11 years in poor countries was the culture of shopping and buying and finding deals and sales and commercials. The huge stores and malls and restaurants are overwhelming because of the wealth, abundance and prosperity they portray.
I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to that again.
September 22, 2010 at 10:43 pm
Gail
What scares me? Stepping out of my comfort zone: speaking up when I’m more likely to clamp my mouth shut…confessing that maybe I don’t really know what I’m doing…volunteering to be first…telling somebody how you feel about them or something they did. Almost always I think afterwards, “Gee, that wasn’t so hard!”
September 22, 2010 at 11:28 pm
js
I, too, find the school zones confusing and I’ve lived here forever. It’s the signage. “20 mph when children are present.” Wouldn’t you stop if children were crossing? I would. Lights flashing, not flashing, signs that specify certain hours of the day. Hey, what time is it, anyway? And the lights on buses–when to stop, when not to stop. Seems to be a case by case thing, depending on the street, lanes, etc. I hate to be the first one meeting a bus, ’cause I’m afraid I’ll make the wrong choice (to stop or not stop) and have everyone else mad at me or worse yet, get a ticket.
September 23, 2010 at 12:17 am
Erica
Eeueuch! I remember this so well after moving back from Japan. Where I lost it most was when I was buying groceries and it turned out that in my years overseas every grocery store had switched from check writing to using those credit card machines, and I? had none of the right things with which to purchase my groceries. So I begged them to put my cart in the back while I drove home to rearrange my wallet and try for a do-over. They did, but they looked at me oddly.
That grocery store went out of business, so, you know. It’s all good now.
It’s so much easier, in a way, when you’re so obviously the foreigner. Everyone expects you to be the loser who doesn’t know anything. They just shrug and give you a pass. When you look like a native and are supposed to be one, they don’t. It’s so awful.
Today, and for the rest of the your? You have ‘the pity.’
September 23, 2010 at 12:18 am
Erica
Phooey. I meant for the rest of the ‘year.’ Maybe I need the pity back.
September 23, 2010 at 12:47 am
ShackelMom
Target, I so know what you mean! After four years in a poor country we stopped there coming from the airport… I was so overwhelmed I felt dizzy. The rows were not straight, but arranged so you had to go up and down every row to find what you were looking for, If you could remember what it was. I opened my wallet at the checkstand, hoping I would rememebr how to swip my credit card, and saw a wallet full of foreign money…
The scariest for me was pumping my own gas, something you don’thave to do in Oregon. I did NOT know how to do it, or where to pay. or when to pay…
No fun, being an invisible immigrant, but one does learn and adjust.
September 23, 2010 at 5:58 am
Jennifer (ponderosa)
First, I love that book! I read it when I was like 12, I think it was my first introduction to sex 🙂
Second, I also dislike Target. How much plastic crap can a person buy? Sheesh. And Costco! It gives me the heebie jeebies!
And c, heres what I thing about that do-scary-things placard, which I also see everywhere. You know how, when you go camping, the first half day you’re all, my hands got dirty! and my cracker fell in the dirt and now I have to throw it away! and my kids are more than 10 feet from me!! and then after 3 days you bathe in the lake and cut the mold off the cheese and figure if you can hear the kids screaming, theyre probably all rght… Well, thats all the placard is about. Its about doubting your assumptions of what will be scary.
PS red boots are not scary. I have a pair and I am SUCH a quiet little person.
September 23, 2010 at 8:17 am
Robin from Israel
Not only am I overwhelmed in Target, once on a trip to the US my husband and I walked into Whole Foods and were so completely knocked sideways that we stopped dead in our tracks – the greeter actually came over to see if she could help us because we looked so baffled!
Reverse culture shock is a doozy. You never quite feel 100% at home in either country.
What scares me? The big stuff scares me – losing a family member, accidents, disease. The rest can all be dealt with, maximum I’ll look a bit out of sync.
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September 23, 2010 at 9:51 am
shannon
Anything happening to a member of my family scares me. Driving in Malawi scares me, perhaps I will get over that, or perhaps that is basic self preservation kicking in.
I think the person that came up with that sign really meant do something that challenges you, or something out of your comfort zone. For me I will begin homeschooling one of my kids next week. That makes me nervous, but it doesn’t scare me.
Reverse culture shock. Yuck! At point will I feel I actually belong somewhere again? I am out of place at “home” in the states and I certainly don’t feel at home in Malawi yet, although that will hopefully come with time. I hope you adjust quickly, Starbucks should help. 😉
September 23, 2010 at 2:42 pm
Tonggu Momma
Becoming a widow… leaving my husband a widower… hearing that the Tongginator is seriously sick. Pretty much everything else is just stuff.
But in my quieter moments, I must confess I do worry… about whether or not I’m a good enough Christian, a good enough mom, a good enough ADOPTIVE mom, a good enough wife. I try to avoid those negative self-thoughts, but they creep in, sometimes when I least expect them.
September 23, 2010 at 8:16 pm
meredith
Crowded noisy places scare me. I can pretend I fit in here until I get into a crowded place and the rapid fire French all around me eventually becomes overwhelming and I slink away realizing that I have just been kidding myself…I’m still just a foreigner.
September 24, 2010 at 6:55 am
LG
I have done home assignment year or years before, but now after 17 years in Africa, I am home for a bit. Home enough that I need to work on my career, but remember, I have been working in Africa for a non profit for 17 years! Now at age 50, I am beginning my working life in Canada. And that terrifies me.
I am teaching two classes at a Christian college, got two toes in the door. But every day I teach, everyday I slink into my shared cubicle, I MISS Africa. I am just a contract prof. No one cares. But in Africa I was needed, I was loved or hated or both, I caused riots, I had fights, I wrote curriculum, I wished I could have spoken the national language so I could actually talk to my administration. But somehow, being here is so anticlimatic compared to that.
And what is really scary is, I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. I think I want to be over there, there being AFrica, but I am over here….
September 24, 2010 at 11:16 am
Jennifer@5 Minutes for Books
I love this post. Love it. And I too feel a bit off at times, but especially after a big move, everything is an adjustment.
Do something that scares you every day — Call a new friend. Go out on a limb and share your TRUE thoughts and fears with a friend. Yes, buy those red boots 🙂
September 24, 2010 at 4:17 pm
annie
As it so happens, I went looking for shower curtains yesterday….sigh. And also discovered that silverward trays don’t seem to exist here.
[P.S. I wrote my upcoming post before I read this!]
September 25, 2010 at 5:28 am
nonlineargirl
In my effort to continue biking into the fall and maybe winter, I am biking in the dark and in the rain. I am soon going to be riding in the dark and rain simultaneously. That scares me, even with the reasonably orderly drivers in Oregon.
Keep in mind Oregon drivers are more polite than they should be. New mindset, but even compared to other states, Oregonians are rather polite drivers.
September 27, 2010 at 11:56 pm
Carrie DeHart
Something that helped me get used to shopping in big stores again here was to realize that it was about the size of the entire Cinquieme market, (so really, you DID shop at big “stores” overseas!), and to treat each aisle like it’s a separate vendor.. . . though, you don’t have to haggle on the prices (which I never liked to begin with!). Just a mental perspective that helped me ease back into US living. Though I still like Aldi best—small, simple, and always the same (except for Christmas, when there’s lots of imported European chocolates!). Thinking of all the bounty we have here available can still get me choked up sometimes, though.
As for what I’m afraid of. . . right now, having a miscarriage. Long term? Of settling for a mediocre life–I want to look back and know that we (my hubby and I) followed God’s leading and left His loving touches wherever we went. Working on it, even here in little ol’ Ohio!
September 28, 2010 at 1:51 pm
Beck
I always feel weird and like I’ll never fit in. I’m used to it now.
Big stores freak me out, too. They’re just intrinsically weird. Man was not meant to have 500 kinds of toothpaste.
September 29, 2010 at 12:14 am
class factotum
I’m tired of feeling overwhelmed in Target.
I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Chile (not exactly an underdeveloped country) for two years. It was hard to choose shampoo when I got home. Too many options.
BTW, did you know Megan and Steve, parents of Henry and Norah, in Rabat?
October 2, 2010 at 1:32 am
Steph
ditto. I understand.
October 4, 2010 at 7:18 am
MaryWitzl
I get utterly overwhelmed in stores like Target. Going to K-Mart and Cost Savers with my cousin made me speechless — and few things can do that. I can’t get over the selections, the opulence, the people with their massive shopping carts all taking it in their stride, whining about what they can’t find. When we came back to California after ten years in Japan, I went into the olive section at my sister’s local supermarket and got dizzy to see that there were over fifty varieties of olives. In Japan, we might have had three. The pickle section was even more mind boggling.
And I don’t get the jokes anymore — the references to t.v. personalities, the political stories, the commercial jingles. People here often ask me about America and I feel like a charlatan answering them.
So hang in there — all of us expatriates are your nationality!
October 19, 2010 at 8:23 am
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