Mixed marriages

This ad and in particular the Guardian article written about it moved me because it found a way to put into words the only adult life I have known.

For better or worse both my marriages have been to 'immigrants' and as the spouse, you too are caught up in a life that is very different to the lives of those who simply married the boy or girl next door. From my eighteenth birthday on, Xmas was spent shuffling, overheated in a winter coat and rucksack from bus to train to ferry to Eurostar, from plane to plane sitting often for hours on the floor in airports waiting for the snow to stop or the plane or runway to be de-iced. Although you are one in an enormous anonymous crowd, you are also comrades in arms and you often found yourself chatting to other families of mixed souls like yourself. Xmas '96 saw me almost alone on a Boeing 747 departing Frankfurt. I remember watching from the window as an airport worker sprayed down the wings with some de-icing product while the captain explained that they were using such a large aircraft into Heathrow that night as the smaller ones could cope with -18. As I looked down through that snowstorm they confirmed they'd had to shut the airport after my departure. Xmas '97 found me sitting with a four month old baby waiting for a mini-hurricane to die down once again before flying nearly 24 hours late into London sideways through purple skies forked with lightning. Xmas '06 saw me clock up 18 hours in Stansted with numerous children while I waited apprehensively to lift off for my first ever trip to Denmark - me a not-yet fully divorced woman trying desperately to avoid bumping into my soon-to-be ex husband who was also transiting through Stansted that day.

That is the life of the mixed marriage... the warning no one puts on the label when you choose that spouse.

In 1997 I gave birth to my first child. I knew his family knew no English so painstakingly spoke to him all day every day only in the language of his family, far away who he'd see maybe once a year. My language took second place to my attempt to build that relationship and had I not, there would have been no relationship. Our family sat round the table speaking three languages at all times - French, German and English. We mixed customs and traditions and each of us became richer for it. It was my perfect life, but not my perfect partner. So second time around I chose willingly to repeat that part of the formula in my new relationship. Back we went to living between several countries and several languages - now Danish was added to the dinner table and this time the challenge was mine. I had two years of rusty, written Swedish in the far recesses of my mind from 16 years earlier. The Swedish did help me to pick up the gist of the headlines on the local newspapers but to be honest it didn't help me with sitting at a table where everyone spoke quickly around me in Danish - learning to understand that has taken many, many years of work, and I'll still be working on that till my dying day.

So I have been in this man's situation... learning a language to keep a family together, I have been in the situation of teaching a language to keep a family together. I have been the one who flies abroad with the whisky and haggis and I've been the one who sits here asking people to bring delicacies that remind me of my other homes - Mont Blanc desserts, confiture de lait, ymer and ymerdrys, pålægschokolade... 

If this is the only upbringing you've known, you often find the next generation repeats that pattern and the family becomes an even greater, more wonderful and more diverse patchwork. Both Thomas's mother and André's father had also married foreigners and lived this life. Thomas's sister has also married a half Dane half German like herself. I know there is very little likelihood all five of my kids repeat the pattern but I'd also be quite surprised if none of them goes down that route. Once the culture mix is in your bones, it's hard to escape fully. Maybe they will pick up a foreign spouse, or maybe it'll manifest itself in the form of a Scottish mixed-cultural partner - I don't know. But I think this is at the heart of why I feel more devastated by Brexit and the lurch to the insular right than many of my like-minded compatriots. I feel it is almost a personal attack on my life and lifestyle. It feels as if someone is saying that what I did with my life should no longer be a legitimate option. I feel someone is trying to force my kids into a box that is very alien to their upbringing... other languages, other passports will no longer be allowed under their roof. Their children will be forced to be monolingual. Never again will a member of my family sit in an airport waiting for a family reunion. It is as if my life choices are being outlawed and I find myself wakening some nights bolt upright in bed, panicking, desperate to scream and run away to one of my other home countries. For my sanity's sake, I only hope this mess can be sorted out in a way that makes my life choices a continued valid option.

Coping with accented characters

Charlotte: I might make something from my chocolate cookbook. (Picks up this book) Come see my book. Can you read it, Amaia? What's my book called? 

Amaia: I dunno. 'G' smiley face? Awwwwh!

Lily Hamster 9?-9-14->30-11-16

Little Lily has gone.

Whereas Rosie was a bright and wild escapologist, Lily was a cuddly, loyal and sweet pet. She loved to be taken out and stoked and put back in her cage. She never once escaped or even tried to (unlike Rosie's weekly escapades in the early days). We could even take her into our bed once the kids were asleep to play with her!

She's been noticeably aging since the end of July, no longer running for hours on her wheel and the last week or so she's been rather wobbly. On Wednesday, I thought she was older and wobblier still. I noticed she was struggling to get up her ladder, so I lifted her up and gave her a wee pat. She was quite content. Later she was sitting in her jar breathing faster than usual so I gave her another wee pat. But at dinner time when I passed she was lying motionless on her straw looking a bit too peaceful for my liking.

She had died some time in the previous hour because I had spoken to her an hour earlier.

Now we have the dilemma that Amaia is crying hysterically and claiming she can't go through this pain ever again so never wants another pet, while Anna is crying just as hard and saying the only thing that will help her get over it is - you guessed it - a new pet!

As for me - I'm going to miss my wee beast. Soft and gentle and a good listener. Already last night Charlotte was eating a pomegranate and I was upset at the thought that I never gave Lily a piece of pomegranate and now it's too late. Silly, soppy old git.

Interesting interpretation

Anna is sitting flicking through the Guinness Book of Records with Amaia. So we now know the oldest person, the person with the longest nails, the tallest dog, the smallest hamster etc. Anna read the stats out for each of these, then turning the page read out to Amaia: The longest living reigning Monarch is Queen Elizabeth the 2nd.

Quick as a flash Amaia replied: And how long is she exactly - 1 metre 50? 1 metre 60?!

Breaking

Seven or eight years ago when Marcel's voice broke, I have to say I wasn't really aware of it happening. Was I too busy with life, or did I simply not know what to look out for? Maybe he was simply quieter about it? Léon, on the other hand, is in full swing and it's so obvious he might as well have a flashing neon sign on his forehead. He's really loud, often making me jump out of my shoes if he speaks to me from outwith my line of vision and every single word he utters grates and screeches like a cat's claws against metal. I hope to god this is a swift process because it is hurting my ears!

A favourite thing to do

Sadly the Scottish climate doesn't often lend itself to marble making. It can be miserable for months on end in winter but it's usually not very cold miserable, just wet, dark or blowy miserable. But this week we've had below zero temperatures for about three days so the girls were out like a shot. First, Home Bargains for a budget pack of balloons, then, Aldi for food colouring. The coloured water was mixed and put in the balloons and then they were chucked out for the night. 

So far only the smallest one has set but hopefully it'll stay cold long enough for the rest to solidify. If not, they can stay outside till real winter hits!

Anyway - if only it was a wee bit more consistently cold this is more the effect we're aiming for!

Misheard lyrics

I showed the kids Sunshine on Leith the other week - they all love musicals, they all love Edinburgh because their big brother lives there and the littler ones are definitely interested in the linguistic differences between Scottish and English. They couldn't really fail to be, given how often it is the main topic over dinner. And I for one needed a night off the nightmare that is Brexit - for sanity's sake I needed a happy, feel-good night off. Almost instantly Léon fell in love with the Proclaimers and started trying to work out how to play the songs from their greatest hits on his violin. He's taken the cd out to the car and has it on repeat. Unsurprisingly his favourite is I'm gonna be/500 miles . Today instead of playing it on his fiddle, he was singing it. It was then I realized he was actually singing:

But I would walk 500 miles 

And I would walk 500 more 

Just to beat the man who walks a thousand miles 

To fall down at your door

He must think it is some kind of race or competition between two different guys - maybe the twins!? It lends it a whole new meaning.

Parenting

Parenting in the early years is all about paying attention. If you don't, you miss the sweetest gems...

Today's school run was done with the car registering -6 degrees.

Amaia: 'Look mum! I never noticed before but Chuggy has furry mirrors. Do all fiats have furry mirrors?'

Oh, the irony!

Amaia comes out of school today and I ask as always how her day has been.

Amaia: Well, I fell out with X (one of her best friends) - he was being a right pain!
Me: What did he do?
Amaia: Well, he had the cheek to call me a wee grassbag!
Me: What did you do to annoy him?
Amaia: I've no idea, but when he said that I just told on him and the teacher put him on an amber light!
Me: And what do you think he meant by grassbag?
Amaia: Dunno - Beats me!

Multi-cultural life

"Anyone who risks a life with someone outside of his in-group — not only across lines of nationality, but also those of religion, race and class — becomes a participant, whether he knows it or not, in a global experiment in developing empathy. The awareness and negotiation of small differences add up to a larger understanding about the complexities of the world." 

I read this today in the New York Times and thought it summed up my life quite nicely.

Henson

I can't have been a very confident child. I was never brave enough to ask my grandparents to explain half of their Scottishisms when I was a small child so constantly sat puzzling over what they were on about, as I mentioned recently.

Another amusing misunderstanding was my Gramps's name for my brother. I'd say up for 90% of the time when we were little Gramps called Derek Henson. Obviously the other 10%, he actually called him Derek.This confused me. You see, Derek's middle name is Henderson (my Granny's family name). So, what went through my eight-year-old brain was something along the lines of - Isn't it odd  a) that Gramps calls my brother by his middle name? (I don't have a middle name, so had no precedent to compare this to) b) that my Gramps gets his middle name wrong when it is after his own wife? I think I was about twelve before it suddenly dawned on me. Being a wee Glasgow man, he called me hen. Being a wee Glasgow man he called Derek son, but through habit came out with hen first (I had been around for three and a half years before Derek showed up so he was more used to addressing a grandchild as hen than son) then corrected his own mistake. So he wasn't calling Derek Henson, he was calling him hen...emm... son! D'oh!

First Bus 4

It's been a long week. No, in fact, it's been a loooooong week.

When you work from home and you have five kids, albeit only four at home term time, you need to schedule your time down to the last minute to fit everything in. You need to write to do lists all over your house so you don't forget that school meeting, that kid's party, that dental appointment, that presentation... You know there's something to hand in by the date specified somewhere... somewhere in one of those letters in one of those piles on the coffee table, or was it the dining table... or did someone stick it on  the fridge door? I swear there are weeks when I am hanging on by the tips of my fingernails and as I reach the end of my forties, I find that if I don't have my phone appointment system remind me everything not only when I waken in the morning but again ten minutes before an event, then I am doomed. And the kids - they need to all pull together or we're never going to achieve half of what is on that to do list...

So when First Bus Glasgow (grrrr, spit) gave us less than a month's warning before removing the bus (No 4) that Charlotte (and Marcel before her) has used every day since starting high school to go to and from school, I was fuming. This week marked the start of my new life with no bus. I now have to get all the kids up earlier - just what you need coming into winter. The latest we can be outside is fully 25 minutes earlier than it was last week so lunches, clothes and bags now need to be prepared the night before - but of course, there is now less, not more, time for that as we have to go to bed earlier now, to get up earlier. This is no big deal but it is a change to the routine of the last nine years (plus). And I really felt like changing a routine that has worked well for years. In the afternoon I pick up the wee ones at three and now have more than 35 minutes wait on Charlotte coming out. That's just enough time to drive them home and turn back and go back to school. That works on days Thomas is working from home but not if no one is home. On those days we all have to sit in the car and listen to the kids niggle each other. They are too tired straight after school to take out their homework books. They are too fidgety to sit and wait so if it is dry they can run round in circles, I guess but if it is raining we are caged for half an hour. Then we finally get home about 3.55... one hour and ten minutes to do a trip that used to take me thirty minutes. That's forty lost minutes every afternoon.

I'm sure after a few weeks it will be our new norm and when I have a lot of work on, I'll no doubt be found behind the wheel, in the high school layby on my laptop. But I ask you? Wasn't my life complicated enough without screwing up all my schedules? It's just so tiring.

Ironically, Charlotte herself is the only one not affected - she now gets up five minutes later than before and gets home half an hour earlier. She no longer needs to battle the elements on the way to the bus stop, because there is no bus stop. She's probably been quietly petitioning First Bus for years to drop their service!

I am considering running a minibus twice daily given how many groups of soaking kids I've passed on the 45 minute (plus) walk of the old bus route. It'd probably pay off.

Amaia's shopping list

Amaia was on dinner tonight so came up with a list of what she needed to make our meal. I miss this phonetic spelling stage once they get further into school. It has a sweet charm to it. I should savour the last months of it while I can as I sadly won't be going there again, I guess.

Trying to become Marcel

I feel these days like we're just clinging on the last seconds of childhood with Léon.

First it was his distinct lack of interest in play parks last year. He's stopped playing with all the younger kids in the street who always used to come in for him, usually claiming he's busy with some household chore. Of course, he's also grown to almost my height in the last year and has moved up four shoe sizes since Easter.

Then he and some school friends made a 'band' because it is ok to hang out with girls and talk to them on Skype as long as you have the excuse that it is because you're all in the one band.

Last week Marcel dropped by for dinner. He asked Léon if he'd like a designer t-shirt he'd grown out of. It was a size S adult, so there I was ready to put it in the loft (in a bag marked boys' clothes ages 14) when he put it on and it fits fine - arg! Mind you, I now think he might need more than one, given he's been wearing it three days solid, as he's so pleased to be in something his cool big brother recommended! I doubt there will be any further use for t-shirts with cute dinosaurs or skeletons now he's discovered plain teenager ones.

But I think yesterday was the real eye opener. He asked to go to the hairdresser... alone! And came back looking like this. It's not a huge change but I can definitely see where he's trying to go.

It is very sweet to see who his role model obviously is!

Never again

I probably didn't have my glasses on, and I like lilac so would have lifted this in my shopping rush based on its colour more than anything.

I can only assume it was possibly conceived as one of the tasks on The Apprentice or some similar show. You know, where they stick half a dozen enthusiastic but inexperienced people in a room and tell them to come up with a new fragrance, or a new shampoo, or the likes. Well, let me assure you, where lavender works well, rosemary most definitely doesn't! When you've just washed your hands, a overwhelming scent of rosemary is beyond appalling. You quickly develop a feeling greasiness, like you've been stuffing a leg of lamb for Sunday dinner. In fact, you smell like you need to wash your hands! You wouldn't use garlic or lovage in a hand soap, and I'm not sure rosemary isn't in the same category! As for using it to wash any other part of your body, I can't even imagine what experiences that could conjure up! The lipstick kiss on the bottle makes me shiver at the very thought!

Tories

I've done precious little work today and it's all the fault of those fucking Tories.

I don't remember the last time I swore in the first line of my blog. I doubt I ever have. But I have a husband who is pacing up and down, fuming and my husband doesn't fume.

Four days is all the Tory conference lasted but in those four days I have learnt that my husband has the privilege of being one of the government's famous bargaining chips, so they sure as hell are not going to reassure him he can stay despite being the father of British citizens and being half way through paying for a house here. Human shield mentality - I'm sure that's been used before in Kuwait... I have learnt that the 62% of Scotland who voted to remain in the EU and for that matter the 48% of the rest of the UK who did are not to be listened to. And despite no one even explaining what Brexit meant before the vote, she apparently now has a mandate not just to go all soft and Norwegian on us, but to go full-out isolationist with no trade deals in place for our kids' future. By the time the kids are my age, they might just have a few deals in place, so everything will be hunky dory. Companies are threatening to pull out of banking and the car industry left, right and centre but who gives a toss - we have Union Jacks and the Queen! Who needs to work with scientists, doctors or academics from all over the EU if instead we can send home the doctors who are currently saving even Tory lives in England but only till 2025, when they can fuck off back to BongoBongoland (I think that's Boris's term of endearment for where they come from.) Then they'll all be replaced by nice white English doctors who will be fined £220K should they happen to fall in love on their holidays in Tenerife and try staying there... but of course they won't be going on holiday any more because the pound has fallen about 30% already in just 3 months. Then this morning I learnt I'm to inform on my business partner for being a foreigner employed by a UK registered company that I happen to own - the fact that he set up that company, is co-director/owner and the fact that it brings money into the UK from all over Europe and the world counts for nothing. Well you know what, Theresa? He's my husband so you can fuck off. I will be clyping on no one. It's time for civil disobedience. I will not be dancing to your tune. Then I heard at tea time that she wants to run a nationalist party with the values of socialism and ordinary workers at its heart. Now where have I heard that one before??? Maybe we could call it the Nationalsozialistische ... Arbeiterpartei. Hmm, that has a nice ring to it... FFS! Hey, here's an idea - maybe I could cut out the middle man and start sewing a symbol of her choice on my husband's and my children's clothes in case any one happens to take them for fully British. We can't have that, not compared to us ethnically pure Brits!

It's reassuring at least to know the opposition are right on their backs and trying to sort it, or actually did they not bother debating Brexit at their conference? It's a shame that they don't seem to have the time to sit up and notice that the new PM is an escaped nutter.

It's why I love him

I was always fascinated by language. Even before I was taught any French or German at school, I used to spend my weekends at my grandparents' house analysing his Scots (Did he just ask me to pit ma jaiket in the press? WTF is a press???) and her idiosyncratic idioms (Jesus wept and tore his waistcoat... or was she actually saying Jesus wept and Tories' waistcoat? - well it was the late 70s, so how was I to be sure if she was discussing Maggie Thatcher or damage to clothing?... I was never really sure Jesus had a waistcoat but I was also too shy to inquire, given my heathen upbringing... It did occur to me occasionally to actually ask my grandparents what exactly they were talking about, but he'd have told me to haud ma tongue and she'd have rolled her eyes and muttered something odd about my arse being in parsley, so instead of asking, I sat in my own wee bilingual Scots/English world trying to make some sense of it all. I religiously learned all my Gramps's odd words for everything, though of course, I never used them. I learned at a very young age that young ladies from Newton Mearns (in the 70s) weren't allowed to say dug or semmit.

So when I found my first husband, a native French and German speaker, I thought I'd hit the jackpot. I forgot that just because you grow up speaking other languages, you are not necessarily interested in languages. When he got a programming job in the dictionary company where I worked not long after we married, I was more than disappointed to realise he had no interest in the linguistic side of his job whatsoever. To him, language was simply a communication tool. And when the kids came along, he'd no idea how to make them bilingual, despite his own mother speaking to him in German when he was growing up. I was the one who read up on bilingualism and spoke to the kids in French to ensure they were fluent, albeit with my flaws and accent. Anyway, at least I got to speak French at home for the next thirteen years, so that made up for it for a while.

Then one day a real language nerd dropped out of the sky and into my world. Someone (I still don't know who, though I thank them from the bottom of my heart) decided the best person for me to share with after an office reshuffle was the great Dane (as we affectionately referred to him behind his back)! He was the kind of language nerd who lists 'Danish, English, German, Esperanto, Georgian, Russian, Czech, Basque, Swabian, German, Japanese, Italian, French, Dutch, Nynorsk, Swedish, Sanskrit, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic, Yiddish and Scots' under languages he speaks on his facebook page. Of course he hasn't broken Scots up into Doric, Orkney and the likes and he hasn't mentioned things he only knows a wee bit of such as Old Norse, Icelandic, Ancient Greek, Latin and Mandarin Chinese, etc. He never ceases to amaze me when he picks something up in an exotic supermarket and can actually read text printed in Hindi out loud... or at least that's what he claims he's doing... maybe he's just making it up to impress me! Hmmm, that never occurred to me before! He lives and breathes language. When we watch programmes like Trapped, he actually pauses it to explain genitive forms of peoples' names to me and we both giggle in excitement when we understand bits from other Scandinavian languages we know better. We close our eyes and see how much we can follow without the subtitles. Our winter Saturday nights are invariably spent watching something foreign together - I'm not sure we've ever watched a movie or series in English!

And now he's gone and bought all the translations of the Gruffalo for us to analyse together in bed at night. I can see the winter stretch out before us as we look at every nuance of the words for an owl, or the woods or even the boring old definite articles. I know that isn't probably most people's idea of fun in the bedroom... but maybe we just both found the right person at last, or perhaps just the only person that could put up with each of us. (And it isn't the only fun we have - we're not that old or sad yet!)

I guess I'm just in a rather pensive mood today as I am celebrating ten years and a day since I moved into his flat. Ten years ago today I woke up to the first day of a new life. Did I make the right decision back then? Yes, I made the perfect choice, for me, anyway!

Siblings

There's nothing quite as acerbic as a smaller sibling!

Anna bounced down wearing this T-shirt earlier. Amaia read it slowly, shook her head and stated: I'm not sure why you're wearing that because you don't, you wake up moany!

Black and White

Today Thomas and Amaia went out rollerblading together. Amaia is just learning so wanted me to take photos. Afterwards, as I was uploading them to my computer, she crawled up onto the bed to watch. I decided to edit one to black and white for fun. The original was fairly bland and colourless, I thought... But kids have a great way of putting you in your place:

'Oh that's nice, mummy! Are you just making it black and white because you're more used to that because that's how photos looked back in your day?'

A well-needed break

I should probably get round to blogging my holiday (in instalments, for posterity) at some point before it is next summer, but I'm just drowning in work at the moment - both work work and running the family work, of course.

We went over to Denmark at the beginning of July. I had no real awareness of my mental state before I left for my holiday. I had been working hard trying to copy-edit a full book which was quite technical, I had been overwhelmed by the double life you have to lead in June when you are supposed to attend numerous school music and sporting events while working full-time, on top of dealing with your kids stressing about exams, teacher changes, new subjects and all the rest. In addition, there was the Brexit referendum, and I've already touched on how that was making me feel in my blog posts of that week. But I had not actually taken a minute to analyze me - there is no 'me-time' in a life with five kids and a job, not really.

So up we got at 5-30am one day at the beginning of July and off we went for a train, a bus and then a plane from Edinburgh airport - a boring old Easy Jet to Copenhagen. I spied it across the tarmac with no obvious feelings either way - I've been on way too many planes to get excited... We went through boarding and walked across to the stairs. I hadn't been away from home since July of 2014. I hadn't left Scotland once since the Summer of Independence. As I reached the top and stepped into the aircraft, in an almost lightning-bolt moment, I became acutely aware for the very first time just how stressed I had been since the Indyref back in September 2014, with the very fears that had led me to vote Yes back then being realized in the Brexit vote of this June. I had always assumed that if we didn't gain our independence in Europe back then, England would drag us out of Europe endangering my family's very right to exist, together in the same country. I had always assumed the newspapers' desire for survival would lead them to print whatever of Farage's fantasies it took to stay afloat in a dying market and I had been proven horrendously right. Here I was suddenly facing the real possibility that my husband would not be allowed it stay in Scotland, when at the same time I would no longer be allowed to move elsewhere. My worst nightmare had come true. In an instant, as my first foot landed inside the aircraft a feeling of overwhelming relief hit me - for the first time since 18-9-14, I was escaping the madness that is the UK. I was leaving behind the worries and stresses of the politics of home and quite frankly at that moment, I never ever wanted to return. I hadn't realized how much I needed to leave until I did. I felt a euphoric lightness of mind and spirit as the plane taxied down that runway taking me away from all that stresses me, for however short a time. And to be honest, I am still not sure how they managed to get me on to the return flight three weeks later.