So for those of you still interested, my flight to Paris was delayed by about an hour, so by the time we landed & taxied in, I had all of 47 minutes to go through Passport Control, get my luggage off the baggage claim (because I was flying on two different, unrelated airlines and apparently if flying from JFK to CDG on American Airlines, they will not check your bags through to your final destination if you are finishing your travels with Aire France), print out my boarding pass at a kiosk in another section of the airport, wait in the wrong line to get through security, get to the right line all the way on the other side of the terminal, get my bag checked onto the flight I needed to catch, and get myself through security and onto the plane. Caveats: my new luggage made it super easy to spot coming off the conveyor belt and its 360 degree wheels made it so much easier to run with it from one place to the next. Also, by the time I got to the correct line for checking my bag (and myself) onto my connecting flight, the guy running the line was bored of looking at foreigners and listening to the varying ways in which they butchered his native language, so it took me longer than it should have to make him understand that the flight I needed to catch had started boarding 10 minutes ago and waiting in that line was not gonna cut it. To his credit, once the fog of general French disdain lifted, he not only whisked me to the next open counter to check my bag, but he got on the phone with the ground crew (and had the guy at the next counter calling the flight crew) to make sure that both myself AND my bag would make it onto the plane before it tried taking off. I have this face I make (and I don't know what it is because I've never seen it. I just know it exists because once my face does this expression - whatever it is - I see a change in the person I'm talking to and they immediately want to do whatever they can to make me happy). I guess the face was working that day. To my own credit, when I need something from someone, I always instinctively smile and use please and thank you in nearly every sentence, and sometimes when there's just an awkward pause, I'll throw in an extra "thank you so much" for good measure. A lot of people have thankless jobs and I try to make it less so when they're trying to do me a solid. I was the absolute last person to sit down on the flight and we were literally in the air within ten minutes.
Frenchy-Frenchy Granddad picked me up at the airport on the other end and drove me out to his and his wife's summer condo on the beach in LaBaule where my work babies were awaiting my arrival. Their parents had departed on a train to Paris (and from there to Hong Kong) about an hour before my flight landed, so Frenchy Grandma was on her own with the two of them for a few hours. As Granddad and I were approaching the lobby door from the parking lot out in back of the condo, I could see my kids on the other side of the glass. Too much to be cooped up in the house any longer, Grandma was taking them for a walk. Once I opened the door, I was immediately tackled to the floor by my three-year-old big girl. And the two-year-old jumping up and down waiting for her turn and shouting, "*s, we're all together now! We're all together! I miss you so, so, so much, *s!" And this is why I love my job and I'm willing to duke it out with Frenchy Grandma every summer over the most banal of child-rearing differences, and also why I'm willing to uproot myself and my plans for babies of my own to follow these two (my eldest two babies) to the other side of the world for an indeterminate amount of time. I love these kids. And if I can't have kids of my own, the last thing I want to do is give up raising these two to be decent human beings. I've been with them since the big one was 3.5mos old. The younger one has never known anything different. In any situation where her mother is not present, I am her first choice (and even some situations where her mother is present). In talking with my friends or other nannies about work, I sometimes refer to her as My Baby Mama. She's their mother and there's no replacing her (regardless of what any nanny tells you, or how any overworked mother who doesn't get to spend enough time with her kids feels, there's no replacing a mother in a child's universe), but they are my babies. And for now, that will just have to do.
Anyhoo...Grandma took the kids out for a bit while I unpacked and decompressed a bit in my condo-adjacent studio. Then they came back from their walk and a good deal of the day was just business as usual. Lunch, nap, wake-up, find something to do, bath time, dinner, pre-bedtime routine, and finally bedtime. I stayed for another 30 minutes or so the make sure they were really asleep before retiring to my room for the evening.
I made myself a cup of tea, went to my room, sat down on the bed and just started crying. Through all the apartment moving drama, and relocation craziness, and boarding my cat at the kennel, and insanity trying to make my flight from Paris to Nantes, I had been on the brink of a breakdown for days. Maybe even weeks. Culminating in a Big Fat Negative on an HPT, getting my period, realizing I would be going to France and Hong Kong without a baby on board, and hoping things worked out in HK because if the universe doesn't push my dreams of motherhood into being, these two kids may be the only children I'll ever have. And every time I was on the verge of tears at any point in the weeks leading up to my arrival in France, I would just shake it off, blink the tears back, and remind myself that I had too much to do to sit around feeling sorry for myself and whining like an idiot. But now I'm here. In France. Mothering two children who aren't my children, in the home of their grandparents who are not my parents. Not pregnant, and not sure when or if I'll have another chance to even try again before biological timing makes it impossible. Wondering if I made the right choice both in taking the job offer to move to Hong Kong and in deciding to have a baby on my own in the first place. So, yeah, I cried. A lot. And it was not pretty. It was real, real ugly. By the end of it I felt a little empty and nauseous. I brushed my teeth, washed my face, wrapped my hair and fell into a deep sleep.
I awoke the next morning feeling kind of like sh*t and realizing that I'd even cried in my sleep a bit. I brushed my teeth, took a shower, and dressed. I sat down to my laptop, logged on to FertilityFriend, and started comparing my forecasted December cycle with my forecasted two-week Christmas holidays...could be promising.
Stay tuned...
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