I haven’t written recently because the strongest feeling now is “waiting to start.” Even when we get out and explore, it feels like a holding pattern, not an adventure. We’ve paid money toward our flat, but don’t have a contract yet. Without that, I can’t start applying for the boy’s schools. We haven’t figured out how we’ll furnish our flat for the month before the rest of our belongings arrive, and move-related paperwork still demands our attention.
We feel unsettled, which is wreaking havoc on everyone’s mental and emotional states. Weyland suffers least — he has preschool-targeted TV, has his family to snuggle him or play with him, gets carried out and about in his familiar (rather worn) Ergo carrier, and gets fed. We ride trains and buses to visit parks and museums, all of which delight him. He pushes buttons in the lift and plays preschool games on my Android phone. With his mommy nearby, he’s his usual happy self.
Garrett is clearly stressed but trying to stay aware and helpful. He heard our conversations about the difficulties transferring money from our US banks, how expensive things are, and how annoying/expensive it was to get cash (we now have UK debit cards and everything is easier) and began to freak out when Tom and I discussed ANYTHING financial. I finally got through to him that we are fine, we just have to think about money a lot more than we used to. Leave it to the adults, we’ll be OK.
Maybe Garrett is slightly happier now that I have an established pattern for getting our groceries at a discount — I’m sure that feels familiar to him! About every other evening we all go down to the Mark & Spencer Simply Food and pick up an assortment of items that are marked down because they must be sold that day, and it’s close to closing time. We sometimes get fruit, milk, bread, and prepared food items like meat pies and pre-breaded chicken (never would buy them normally, but they’re working for us now), but always an assortment of pastries, donuts, and cookies. The kids LOVE that part.
Garrett is a bit worried about going to school, but he’s sick of my pestering with spelling lists. He’s engrossed in Harry Potter — just finished the fifth book today. He wants to read it everywhere, even carries it on the tube when I let him. Garrett bickers with and picks on Tallis a bit more these days — it would be hard not to, we spend all our time within steps of each other, and almost never see any other kids to play with — but otherwise, he’s holding in there.
Tallis is not. This move was horrible for him, and this extended wait for our permanent housing excruciating. He hated the London adventure as soon as he realized that friends and home would be left behind. He worried while we were in the US, but since we’ve arrived, he’s been almost impossible to be with, much less please. He’s moody, angry, picks fights with us constantly, has no sense of humor, cannot be patient (and yet is constantly asked to be as we establish ourselves here and learn how to navigate London), and refuses to take delight in any adventure we can conjure. Our situation got so difficult that we sought professional help designing behavior management techniques for him, and we are seeing improvements, but oh, this has been a hard road to travel.
Tallis’s moods overshadow every outing, every meal, every day. Some mornings I have offered him breakfast and had my greeting returned by a surly bear certain that there is not a SINGLE pleasing thing to eat in the entire flat. No fantastic museum, no interesting bit of architecture, no historic “oh wow” moment, no novel experience, no familiar entertainment, no beautiful view will get past his stubborn resolve to NOT HAVE FUN. He wants to go to school, make friends, and start playing football. Which I cannot provide, no matter how I want to.
Tallis concocts his own misery, but he is a master at the art. For example, he refuses to try English foods. Garrett and Tallis took quickly to fish and chips, roast, meat pies — unfamiliar things that we find everywhere here. Tallis persists in ordering the most American foods he can find on the menu (burgers, pizza, waffles) and they are consistently sad imitations of the food he desires.
Tallis’s moods swing so widely, so rapidly, that I cannot keep up with him, much less anticipate his needs. One day last week he entered a museum with us fairly fuming, spewing a hatred of all that he saw and demanding to be taking home immediately. He would not engage the exhibits, would not remark on the ornate architecture, would not select some other exhibit he would prefer to explore. I dragged and coaxed and ignored, and we sped through many a hall in which I would rather have lingered. Then we stopped at one of those hands-on carts with two silver-haired ladies behind it. He and his brother fully engaged the activity, tested themselves, probed for answers, learned things. Before we made it to the cafeteria for lunch, he expressed such delight and joy in this museum that he wanted to donate all his pocket change to it.
One ray of sunshine with Tallis: he loves having STUFF. His desire to accumulate toys cannot be satisfied (at least, not as long as he has parents like us who are so opposed to the prevailing consumer culture) and is a frequent source of conflict. Just before we flew, he discovered his friend Eleanor’s bottle cap collection. Bottle caps are free, can be found all over the ground, are shiny with diverse colors and designs, and make a fantastic sound when rattled around in a pocket or a bag. So he now has a new hobby: collecting bottle caps. He has also experimented with other entertaining refuse, but bottle caps are the most reliable source of delight. Childhood memories of enduring my brother’s and father’s soccer games and road races by playing with nearby trash (the stuff you can score under the bleachers at a high school is AWESOME) make me rather sympathetic to his new hobby.
That’s our life these days: stress, paperwork, delays, boredom, and a steady stream of learning, exploring, discovering, understanding, experiencing, deciding. Most of my effort is focused on living: dressing children, potty training a toddler, moderating screen time, concocting meals, picking up and cleaning up, soothing raw nerves. I rely on Facebook for connections to people and things I care about, and on hope that we will soon move into a flat and find a routine in which we all can blossom. It’s an adventure all right.
I’m glad you got some help for Tallis! Is Garret reading the UK version of HP? There’s different spelling and vocab which is kind of fun when you see it.
PS, do you think Tallis would engage with a project like creating a newsletter to send back to his friends? He could be in charge of taking some pictures with a cheap camera or something. I used to LOVE writing long letters home…but I was a grown up and enjoying where I was.
I never bought the US version of HP, because I knew they’d made changes to the first book and Americanized the vocabulary. Tom brought me a boxed set of the first four books from Canada, and after they started printing the Canadian books on 100% post-consumer recycled paper, I figured that was a good enough reason to order the 5th book from Canada. I never bought book 6 or 7 — we just picked up a British copy of #6 from an Oxfam books yesterday. So he’s been reading the original spellings and language all along!
Hmmm…Tallis engages his friends in a visual, tactile, little-boy way. When they’re together, they pay total attention to each other and have the best of times. When they’re apart…they sort of cease to exist to each other? The only message he’s had any desire for me to send back home is to tell his best friend that “London sucks, it would be more fun if you were here.”
Well, how is Tom’s job going? I’m sure things will get better once school is established. Corbin misses Garrett SO MUCH! He checks his e-mail daily to see if Garrett has written.
Tom is doing great. His job gives him challenges and rewards and comes with a supportive and fun Googler culture, plus all the snacks and drinks he can eat. Although he will have to work some late evenings (required so that they can have conferences with people in California) on those evenings he can just eat dinner in the Google cafeteria, which makes it a minimal disruption for us. It is pretty cool being near one of the larger Google offices! Garrett isn’t on the computer as often since we’re down to one machine in the flat, but I’ll be sure he writes more often. Yes, everything will be much better once everyone is in school.
Does your budget run to engaging a sitter now and again? If you can find a trustworthy one (Tom’s work connections?) perhaps it would be worthwhile to leave Tallis home from some of your expeditions. I know the move is hard on him and his misery is understandable but if he is absolutely determined to NOT HAVE FUN when you go out perhaps it would be best to let him do it alone and not allow him to keep punishing you for doing this to him by spoiling your fun as well.
Um. I hope I didn’t step over the line there…and I could be ENTIRELY misreading the situation…but I have an 8 yo nephew and they do tend to use this type of logic…
Paying a sitter would be OK with me, but finding one is a headache and a half! I was bad at finding sitters back in NC, and here? Where I know NO ONE? Hah! I’m not paying a professional service all the startup fees for a once or twice trip out, and most of the advice I find (and that Tom gets at work) is focused on getting a nanny or au pair, both of which are totally foreign concepts to me. I’m hoping that once we move into our flat, we’ll find a neighbor teen or two to call on. Until then, he’s stuck with me.
You have my profound sympathies, my dear. It’s a wretched situation, no mistaking it.
Re the sitter, I was thinking perhaps Tom had a co-worker with a reliable older teenage child or university student who would not be adverse to earning some extra pounds on a weekend afternoon. Either that or had a friend or neighbor with one they could vouch for. It shouldn’t be terribly onerous an assignment, just sit around the flat and play video games, no? And you could even inquire ahead and stock some of their preferred snack food.
From what I remember of Tom, it seemed like he, mmm…tends to live in his own head a lot and so perhaps asking co-workers this sort of thing is a bit more down-to-earth than he is accustomed to thinking about. But he’s a smart guy, I’ll bet he could manage. 🙂