10 (16!) years later, 12 months in: we made it!

This week Xman finished Kindergarten, my husband and I celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary (we’ve been together for 16!), and my kids and I have been in the US for exactly 1 year.

This confluence of milestones presents a good time to reflect on how far we’ve come.

A continental move has highs and lows and everything in between. There are four stages of culture shock, described as elation, resistance, transformation and integration. Everyone goes through these stages differently.

Elation is the honeymoon phase – you’re a tourist and your move feels a bit like an extended holiday. You’re amazed and enamored with living in a place where the predominant culture is pop culture.

Resistance (aka rage) – you are annoyed with everything and everyone. You accuse America of having the emotional maturity of a teenage girl. Your husband almost picks a fight with the IRS at the IRS office. Your son loudly complains that “these American crayons suck” because they keep breaking in his hand. You mutter under your breath that “Ariana Grande” sounds like the name of a Starbucks latte. You feel lost and alien in your foreign-ness.You panic and worry that you’ve made a huge mistake. Thank goodness it’s just a phase!

To help this phase along, I implemented a strategy I call “kick the darkness till it bleeds daylight*.” It’s amazing what exercise does for the mind, body and soul. You are stronger than you realize in so many ways.

We are currently somewhere in between the transformation and integration stages. We’ve reached the point where we’re no longer first timers or the new faces at everything. We are “restabilizing” (I don’t think it’s a word, but you get the idea.) We’ve created new comfort zones and routines. I can adapt my pronunciation when it matters (wah-DuhR). I have people I can call in an emergency.

I miss some of the stuff we left behind. We bought all the basics at the insta-house store IKEA (a retail experience like no other!) when we arrived. Everyday things, like my favorite mixing bowls and serving dishes or my sentimental trinkets are all gathering dust in storage. Maybe this is why I’ve been putting off decorating and buying a blender and mixing bowls. Do we really need two of everything? Even if they are on different continents?

My six year old now speaks with two accents, depending on the audience. He also counts in Southern. I suspect he gets that from his teacher 🙂

For a while there he refused to speak any Afrikaans (some people in the transformation phase go to the extreme of rejecting their own culture). A couple of days ago, he told me he sang the national anthem six times that day because he missed South Africa and rugby (fancy fact: Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika is sung in five difference languages.) I didn’t realize how hard the switch must have been until, the morning of his last day of Kindergarten, he tells me: “Mom, I didn’t give up once!”

We are so proud of how hard our boy worked this year. He had a lot of catching up to do. US kids learn to read much earlier than their SA counterparts. He jumped six months ahead because the school year isn’t a calendar year (i.e. we left half way through the SA school year). Plus, they teach things a little differently back home: in SA the focus was all lower case and letter sounds, but he didn’t know his upper case letters, which is where they start here. Thankfully he has good genes when it comes to numbers (not mine) and maths and science are his favorite subjects. We were blessed (not a word I used flippantly) with a great teacher and a wonderful group of children.

In the transformation phase, you review your identity and origins – kind of like an international identity crisis. I’m calling it our “what if” phase. I wonder, how American will we become? How American should we become? How much American is just the right amount? What if we have to go back and we don’t want to? What if we want to go back and we can’t?

I believe you will always be an amalgam of your past and your present. There’s also very little I can control about tomorrow. And if option A doesn’t work out, we’ll kick the shit out of option B**.

I put a couple of other strategies in place to help with acculturation even before we landed in the US. One strategy was to create a sense of normalcy for the kids by continuing activities that my son is passionate about. It also forced me to get out of the house, drive on the wrong (right) side of the road and speak to other adults during the very long hot summer days in those first months.

The second strategy was to not seek out other expats. A friend who had some knowledge of the extent of the change I was about to throw myself into gave me the best advice: don’t be afraid to put down roots.

I read recently that traveling is a journey into the self. Moving countries (for me, at least) has been like an extreme make-over of my life. If nothing else, it has been a journey into myself. I am pleasantly surprised with what (who) I discovered. I am also really lucky to be wandering alongside my husband and best friend. Cheers to the next 10 years!

xoxo

*Stolen from a song lyric about a reference to a song lyric:
Heard a singer on the radio late last night
He says he’s gonna kick the darkness
’til it bleeds daylight
I…I believe in love
U2 – God Part II.

This is the lyric referenced:
Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight
Got to kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight
Bruce Cockburn – Lovers in a Dangerous Time.

**Sheryl Sandberg – read her letter about marriage, grief and loss here.

An American Spring

It’s Memorial Day weekend. Summer is here! I love that we have all four seasons in the Carolinas, all neatly predictable in three month slots. Three months of Spring was filled with a visit from the in-laws, a test of my gardening skills and Spring Break.

With love from South Africa

Growing up, we lived too far from family too see them more than once or twice a year. Most of my closest relatives lived about a thousand kilometres away from Johannesburg or as far as the distance between New York and Charlotte. We would road trip to the farm or to Cape Town once a year, usually around Christmas time, sometimes for Easter. Not wanting to miss any birthdays, my Grandmother sent us surprise packages that usually arrived around birthdays. Even though I can’t recall their content, I can remember the excitement and anticipation of opening those cardboard boxes and poring over the tiny details on the postage stamps. Whatever treasures came out of those boxes always smelled like my grandparents’ house. Sometimes when I open one of her recipe books I can still smell that house in the aging pages.

In this tradition, I love getting care packages from home!

My in-laws brought wine, Bar Ones and Woolies rusks. I will pay good money to get my hands on a recipe for these Muesli Rusks from Woolworths*!

*A South African version of Marks & Spencer – not the Woolworths you’re thinking of.

Spring Break

Having family around was also a great incentive to go exploring. We did a spur of the moment road trip to a strip of the North Carolina coast called Outer Banks. This area is a long and in some places narrow stretch of islands that separates North Carolina from the Atlantic ocean. The slogan on our NC number plate is “First in Flight” – the reason for this is that Wright brothers made their first successful flight in an area called Kill Devil Hills in Outer Banks.

The Wright Brothers museum

Outer Banks is also famous for wild horses on beaches only accessible by 4×4. As our luck would have it, my current status as Real Housewife** means that I drive from car pool lane to Harris Teeter to play date to Taekwondo to the park in a Ford Explorer just perfect for this occasion. Driving on Corrolla beach was certainly a bucket-list experience.

** Some of you will find this fact amusing. For your entertainment: I just served Xman an after school snack of banana bread still warm from the oven. Made from scratch. Ha!

Now, marketing material will sell you “Wild Mustangs”. We did manage to spot a “wild horse”. LOL. I suspect that my idea of a wild horse was constructed by the covers of romance novels I used to sneer at in Exclusive Books while heading for the business and marketing aisle instead. The wild horses in Outer Banks are descendents of Spanish Mustangs, also known by their not suitable for marketing name as “banker ponies”. Wikipedia describes them as small, hardy, and with a docile temperament. Indeed.

“Wild mustang.” Not quite what I had in mind, but a memorable and fun experience nonetheless.

Driving North / North East  is very interesting. We drove over amazing bridges, through a swamp (with swamp people!) and past an alligator in said swamp. There are plenty of towns I want to return to, but also many places where, as my husband puts it, at least they have a sense of humor even if they have nothing else.

As far as road trips with kids go, ours behaved relatively well. (Trust me, we’ve experienced the awful kind too, like the time our baby girl threw up all over herself in the middle of nowhere, miles and miles from a gas station. Fun times.) I can highly recommend his and hers DVD players, if your car doesn’t have them already.

We fit in another (shorter) drive on the Blue Ridge Parkway just before Ouma and Oupa returned to SA. The plan is to see “America’s favorite drive” in every season, we saw the forests on fire in the Fall, and then we met a snowstorm coming in for Winter. For our Spring trip, we drove through the clouds.

Above the cloud. Image credit: My father in law.

Inside the cloud. Image credit: My father in law.

Yard is a four letter word

Some people don’t like cooking. Others don’t like Coldplay. For me, it’s gardening. The words “yard work” give me hives.

I come from a long line of green fingers. My maternal grandmother could grow anything. My paternal grandfather had the greenest grass in the hard, unforgiving vlaktes of the Northern Cape’s Karoo. My parents and my husband’s parents have beautiful gardens alive with birds and blooms. Even in winter. I have never been able to keep even a potted house plant alive. I am the reason landscapers and garden services exist!

So Spring holds a special kind of terror for me: The expectation of things going green.

There are few things that irk neighbors more than an unkempt yard. If you could see the Facebook tirades on out of control weeds you’d fear for your life.

An unmanicured lawn will get you branded as a bad neighbor. Nobody wants to be a bad neighbor.

Thank goodness for family. My gardening angel of a mother in law saved the day (and the shrubs). Even with her ankle still healing from a bad break she made all the difference in what could have been downright ugly. I am so incredibly thankful for that! All that is left for me to do is to remember to water the garden. (Easier said than done. I have one kid that wants to water the driveway and the other is entertained by my horror as she tries to escape into the direction of the road.)

The start of Summer.

The last weekend in May marks the official start of Summer. The pool opens, the air is filled with the gentle hum of lawnmowers, and grills are dusted off for the official season of outside entertaining***. Memorial Day is also the day Americans remember those who died while serving the country’s armed forces. Flags fly high outside homes and most will continue to fly until the end of Summer (isn’t it interesting that most homes here have flag poles?). We’ll see the fireworks in South Carolina from our North Carolina house (due to differing state laws about fireworks and the fact that we literally live across the road from SC).

***Our grill doesn’t get a chance to get dusty. A South African knows a good braai has no season.

My sweet boy has been learning about Memorial day at school too. Today, as we were driving past a graveyard, he suddenly said: “Wait. Is this were they plant the soldiers?”

You’ve got to love the innocence of childhood.

TTFN.

8,000 miles from normal

It’s almost exactly one year ago that we made the call to move to the US. I still can’t believe we’re here.

Nothing turns off the autopilot on your life like moving countries. There is so much that is new and fresh and interesting and different.

 

Johannesburg in Feb. (I grabbed this photo off Facebook. No copyright infringement intended. If this is your pic, let me know so I can link/credit.)

 

North Carolina in Feb.

 

 

There are plenty of things we come across in our little corner of the USA every day that you’d rarely find back home. (You might not find them all over the US either, certain habits tend to be regional.) It turns out there’s a rather long list of experiences (9 months worth!) that stood out and either amused, embarrassed or annoyed me:

1. Cars don’t have front number plates. Some use this real estate to personalize their cars. Driving here is different too. People generally keep their following distances, stop at stop signs and for pedestrians. In fact, on the crime map for our neighborhood the biggest recorded crimes were three stop sign violations. You won’t last long in Jozi if you think cars are going to stop for you, your shopping bags and your kids as you walk from the store to your car at Pick ‘n Pay Olivedale.

Even the police!

Proudly South African!

 

2. You can buy a beer and a pack of cigarettes when you stop by the drugstore/pharmacy to collect your script. I guess medicine is a relative concept?

3. People think it hilarious that we call shopping carts shopping trolleys. Anyhow, here in the US they have cup holders. Guessing this is for that Extra Large Carmel Latte. Starbucks annoyingly named their festive season only caramel latte “Carmel”. Something about this irritates me beyond reason. Which leads me to my next point.

4. America drinks a huge amount of coffee, however; America and I have different priorities when it comes to coffee. Flavored coffee is bigger than “plain”. In every flavor you can imagine. If you’re a fan, you’ll be in heaven. (They’re a little too sweet for my taste. I prefer my fix freshly roasted, single origin, ethically traded and organic. No sugar.)

Preach! My favorite brand of coffee is called Counter Culture. Fitting.

 

5. Motorized shopping carts (trolleys) and people who actually use them: People drive their shopping carts around the store. No kidding. There certainly have been a few sightings of the “People of Wal-Mart” phenomenon. However, my Dad, who has a bad back, loved driving through the grocery store, sending little Xman to collect things off the shelf for him during their holiday here.

6. Free soda* refills at fast food restaurants. *Soda is the collective noun for Coke, Sprite, Fanta etc. here. I remain surprised that people can be trusted to stay honest and not bankrupt the establishment.

7. You can’t just ask for tea in a restaurant. You have to ask for ‘hot tea’. Tea here is shorthand for Sweet Tea, a cold brewed tea that I understand is a uniquely Southern invention. It is insanely popular and people up north pine for the stuff 🙂

8. US standard paper size is not A4. You can imagine the fun I had trying to figure out the settings on our new printer and trying to fit my A4 copy onto the smaller US size.

9. Central heating and cooling. This is a lifesaver. Most people here cannot imagine living without aircon. Many are surprised to hear that most suburban homes in SA are not climate controlled and that we all live with our windows open all the time during summer. If you do have aircon at home, it’s one or two rooms at best.

10. Many a day is a comedy of accents. On a trip to the Zoo, Xman was looking at bees inside a beehive and a guide wanted to know if we could see the coin. We were baffled. What’s a coin doing in a beehive? A few moments later the penny dropped through his Southern drawl. Queen. Could we see the queen bee? Haha.

Most baffling is that I get mistaken for Australian all the time. All. The. Time! Sometimes people guess British, but mostly, it’s Australian. This is highly amusing to me, because Saffas and Aussies sound nothing alike! I did some research and discovered that I am not alone. There is even a (really boring) Quora discussion on the topic (here)! We have 11 official languages in South African and plenty of accents to place you in different regions or cultures or both! I figure that I get mistaken for an Aussie because people here are perhaps not familiar with the South African accent(s).

11. The accepted tipping amount is 10% in South Africa. We tip our car guards (sometimes), our servers in restaurants, our petrol attendants (sometimes). Here you tip the hair dresser and the woman who does your nails. 15% – 20% in North Carolina. 20%+  in New York. There are no car guards or petrol attendants here***.

*side note: if you are wondering what a car guard and a petrol attendant is, allow me to explain: a car guard is a guy who keeps an eye on your car when you park outside the grocery store or on a public road. A petrol attendant is the guy who fills your gas tank while washing your car windows and checking your oil and tire pressure.

***that’s a good thing. 

12. You wait** to be seated in restaurants. Unless it is fast food, someone will show you to an available table. Waiting for a table for 10 minutes is nothing unusual. People just stand in line, patiently. **Remember when people wanted to boycott Tasha’s for making them wait?
13. February is fitness month, because you climb into the candy at the end of October, make your way through all the pie, turkey and gravy in November and then again in December, culminating in the grand finale of America collectively eating 1.25 billion chicken wings on Super Bowl Sunday. The temperatures and number of daylight hours are on the up too, so no more excuses to just hang out on the couch!

Here are a few more happy snaps of awesome finds across North and South Carolina.

 Slow as molasses!

 Nope, didn’t even try to taste this.

Huge popcorn! Teeny tiny packet of salt.

Snow for Valentine’s day

It’s been a rough week.

A note to other expat newbies: In your second 6 months you are supposed to feel homesick. It’s totally legit. A friend explained to me that it’s a completely normal way to feel around the 6 – 9 month mark. You will feel out-of-place. Out of touch. Not just out of touch with people and events from home, but also not unfamiliar with the local culture. You’ll make the dreaded cultural faux pas. You’ll say something wrong. Someone will probably be offended. You know what? Some days are better than others. You’ll get to know new friends. You’ll take up new fun challenges. You’ll see your children’s resilience and independence grow. You’ll have dance parties in your PJs with your kids in your living room. You’ll find new community. Your husband will finally find a way to stream the Super 15 and that little cricket tournament that’s happening at the moment.

Take Valentine’s Day weekend, for example. It’s not a day we celebrate. I’d rather be appreciated a little every day of the year than a lot on only one specific day.

This year, however, marked the start of a new tradition. A Valentine’s mission.

My husband gave us snow for Valentine’s day. Another cold snap is coming our way, so we drove up to the mountains and we were greeted by our first flurry as we stepped out of the car at our lunch destination. We followed the winding Blue Ridge Parkway as the snowfall became steadily heavier. We opened the car windows and the kids giggled as snowflakes blew into the car.

Love is about presence, not presents.

He also bought me my favourite flowers. This man knows my heart.

A different kind of South (1)

There are so many things that strike me as remarkably different or surprisingly similar as we settle into our routines here in the US. It’s unfair to compare but difficult not to. In the next few posts, I’ll share a few of these ordinary moments.

Trash collection is on Fridays. Next to the large trash can is the recycle bin for cardboard and plastics. A great new habit. My friend Jacky will be proud. She’s probably the only person I’ve ever seen recycle properly back home. She picked up her habit while living in the UK.

These are the days of our lives.

TTFN

Mich.

Mama told me there’d be days like this

So it turns out that feeling sorry for yourself alternated by general crabbiness are both symptoms of transition shock. I Googled culture shock. It explained a lot.

Last week I felt really, really far away from home.

My husband had a work thing and that meant no 6pm break for Mama and no help at all until we saw him again 48 hours later (he leaves for work before we get up). On days like these I’d usually head over to my parent’s place or organise a playdate to give all of us a change of scenery.

It sucks being new some days.

I didn’t really have anywhere to go. There was no back up plan. I had run out of ideas. The kids were irritable. I felt isolated.

Feeling isolated sounds little ridiculous considering the bigness of everything here. (If America had a special power, it would be biggering.) Sadly, it was a very very dark week for humanity so silver linings were in short supply.

Our adventure has had it’s tougher moments. Almost everything is different and although different is exciting, it can also be stressful. We try to take these challenges in our stride. But not every day is an episode of Friends.

Learning to drive on the right side of the road, for example, takes some getting used to. In fact, your entire muscle memory has to be rewired. Oncoming cars are not coming at you from the side you expect. You have to silently remind yourself “keep right, keep right, keep right”. Left turns are the trickiest! Add to that both kids choosing that exact moment to become desperately unhappy about a dropped bottle/blanket/snack/toy and you get the idea. Stressful. After six weeks? It’s a cinch. Now I have to (rather urgently) get my NC driver’s license. (Nope. International licenses don’t count. It’s the law.)

My lesson? I realized that while it’s ok to enjoy my adventure because I’m away from home, it’s also ok to have bad days because I’m away from home. It’s to be expected. No one can prepare you for “foreign-ness”. Another lesson: there’s a strength to be found in understanding (embracing?) a difficult emotion. I should do that more often. My final realization was that I need to plan some me-time too.

In related news, I submitted my X-man’s Kindergarten admission forms and started shopping for school supplies as there’s only about a month of Summer vacation left. At least they’ll all be new kids! I’ve also started researching preschool options for Little Miss Babybelle (they start preschool from 2 years old here.) They also have “mom’s morning out” programmes here that I am considering until then. These groups offer playgroup mornings for babies so moms can have a couple of hours for errands etc. I suspect it’s the only way that I’m ever going to get my hair or nails done (ever) again. Lots of research to do!

On a lighter note, I saw a hummingbird in my garden yesterday! Mama told me there’d be days like this…

TTFN.