This version of Thursday’s Child is hereby closed.

Just across the street, it looks like there’s people walking on the roof, heads floating just below the roofline, though I know it’s workmen on the next house back and slightly up the hill working on the back deck of another home there.

This window, is my favorite part of our house and I love the view it gives me of our neighborhood. It’s a nice little neighborhood, quiet, with pleasant, if reclusive neighbors. I like sitting here watching life go by outside and the weather changing, the wind moving the trees.

Sleep deprivation + sickness + overexcited children = Recipe for Cranky Christmas Morning.

Still, we’re trying to just take it easy, relax and enjoy the morning and let the peace from yesterday evening before J’s fever spiked up scary high, stick with us.

The living room looks like a happy tornado blew through with wrapping paper everywhere and gifts perched on every surface. Vic is absorbed with his new Playmobil castle, Julien’s likewise absorbed with his new Leapster LMAX. He doesn’t really know how to use it yet, but he likes to hold Vic’s whlie the games run and in a couple of months he will be able to play the simplest games so it didn’t seem like a bad idea to ask Grandmere for one. Given his absorption, yeah, s’all good.

In a little while, we’ll head over to my folks’ place to hang out and open more presents there, have Christmas dinner and enjoy each other’s company. The bounty from Grandmere and her friends was much appreciated, but in the end what’s most important is being able to spend the uninterrupted time together.

I’m hoping for a nice relaxed afternoon with my family, good food and watching some of our favorite movies. Maybe we can do a Lord of the Rings marathon and drink ourselves silly. With hot cocoa.

And yet I am merry anyway.

The lights are shining all across the neighborhood, twinkling in the Christmas Eve air.
Welcome Christmas.

Mom says I’ve got bronchitis now. Me, I’m just sick of the hacking cough and feeling like my lungs are going to crawl out of my chest when I do. She came over last night and made us dinner though which was very appreciated. She also cleaned up afterward so my kitchen is nice and clean and there’s a pretty plant on the table and cake to enjoy with hot cocoa or tea. Dad wrestled with the tree stand and got our tree up so we can decorate a little bit later. Vic is so very very excited about the tree and has taken responsibility all on his own for keeping it watered.

Sick as he is, once the Motrin took effect he got up out of bed, wandered into the living room and informed me very solemnly that it was “time to check on his plants”. He hunkered down frog-like to check the water level in the stand, then stood up and turned to me again, with that same very serious look on his face to tell me that the tree was just fine, had plenty of water and we’d check again later. Then he sighed and smiled, face all alight, eyes shining. “Mama, I love our tree. I want it to stay forever.”

I started to try to plant the seed of the idea that the tree was going to have to leave the house eventually, but he was very resistant so I opted not to push it for now. The disillusionment of a cut tree can come later. For now, I’ll let him enjoy nurturing it while it lasts.

Right now the atmosphere is quiet, a little depressed and not at all Christmassy. I’m thinking it’s time I really tried to change that and bring some of the holiday magic into our home. So I will try to put the tree in the stand and I will buy bulbs for our candle lights and put the string of multi-colored lights up around the windows. When the kids get home, I’ll give them their stockings to hang on the decorative shelf that stands in for a fireplace and hopefully their faces will light up with the fun of it and it’ll start to feel a little like Christmas.

It’s the tree that usually does it for me, so bringing that pretty green tree with the blue silver under the needles up into its corner in the living room is a good idea. It’ll bring the scent of the holiday into the house at least and I can sit in my armchair after the kids are asleep with a cup of hot cocoa and the lights on the tree winking at me and let the peace of the season descend on me.

Tomorrow though, we really need to make that stop, get the tree up, put some lights on it and try to infuse the house with some holiday cheer. I guess we’re all suffering a little from post-move blues, the actuality of having traveled 3000 miles to resettle back in my ‘hometown’ finally hitting us smack between the eyes.

Vic’s the one who’s feeling it the most of course. His mood keeps deteroriating further and further, his frustration levels rising as it gets colder and colder outside. This morning he spent about 15 minutes crying about wanting to go back to California where it’s warm. He’s alternately limp and tired or hyper and stimming like crazy, hands flicking rapidly against his knee and waving in the air. Autism sucks. It just does. I hate seeing my son getting locked back up inside his own head when he was just starting to emerge again after a lot of hard work and access to the right program for him.

I guess in the end, as much as the joy of the season ought to make us all feel better, I’m having trouble finding it. There’s too many loose ends untied from this move, too much going on and day to day it’s a struggle to remind myself of all those things I know I am thankful for. The little improvements that make this decision to move here worth it.

So, tomorrow we’ll find a tree and we’ll find a star for Victor to put on top because he asked and hopefully that will make his face light up for a little while.

He ran out into the back yard after school to take advantage of the two inches on the ground, putting together snowballs and sending them flying with sparkly-eyed delight. Now if only it would snow more to help him get through the rest of this first winter in the cold.

We moved to Brussels in the summer of 1979 when I was five years old. I spent the summer exploring our new neighborhood and feeling homesick for our house in Providence, Rhode Island which we’d left a year and a half earlier, with the promise that we’d be going right back after my father finished his assignment in Paris. Things didn’t work out that way and when the company he worked for went through some upheavals, he left, following his boss to a new position at a new company, headquartered in Brussels. I remember vaguely the house hunting before we moved into a little white brick twin set back from a cobbled, dead-end lane in the town of Uccle just outside the city proper. I remember clearly walking up and down that sandy, graveled driveway all summer long, watching my shadow grow longer and longer in the afternoon, tall where I was small.

I met the kids from the house just in front of us, also expatriates, but from Argentina. We had no common language: I didn’t speak French yet, they didn’t speak English, but somehow we managed to communicate and become friends. I spent long hours in their yard or running around the neighborhood playing make-believe games, coming to the sorts of agreements that children that age do through whatever means that we could. It was a good summer overall, in spite of the continuing homesickness and the inherent uncertainty that came with no longer knowing when we were going home.

In the Fall I started kindegarten at a local French-speaking private school with a progressive curriculum. My uncle, my mother’s younger brother, had died just a few weeks before school started and my mother was in the US for the funeral. Dad and I got by, struggling with my misery at not being able to talk to anyone at school and his inability to fix my hair the way Mom did and overall missing my mother and being two fish out of water in a new place, new situation. I can remember sitting there in class trying to understand what was going on around me, though Madame Donnay did her level best in her broken English, to include me. Eventually, through immersion and a lot of visual cues, I absorbed French, going from non-speaker to stumbling novice over the course of just a few weeks. Within a few months, I was jabbering away with my classmates as if I’d never not known the language and I remember being good at recognizing words and spelling as we tackled the beginning stages of writing.

I still can’t quite remember that moment when I went from being an English-speaker to being multi-lingual. It just sort of happened that year while I sat alongside my classmates trying to follow along and do what I was supposed to do in school. Later, in third grade, we all started to learn Dutch. Most of my francophone fellows struggled with the sounds, the shapes of the words. As an English-speaker, picking up Dutch was a piece of cake for me. It was the one subject other than drawing that I excelled at. I can remember being able to carry on conversations with the locals when I went to dance camp at the seaside in the summer in the Dutch-speaking part of the country. I became the go-to girl anytime my family was traveling through Dutch-speaking parts of Belgium or into the Netherlands.

Sadly, when we moved back to the US, I lost my Dutch, through disuse and the lack of instruction of the language on this side of the Atlantic. French however, stayed with me, my parents made sure of it, by sending me to a school where I could take high school level French even though I was still in middle school. I went back to Belgium in the early 90s to intern at NATO, renewing my connection with friends there. Even then I was blissfully unaware of any divisions in the country, enjoying my month abroad by working days in the NATO library and hanging out with friends in the afternoon. In college I spent a year in Switzerland, another small country in Europe with strong linguistic and cultural divisions and overall neutrality in terms of politics in relation to the rest of Europe. I was more aware then of the cultural lines, but while I read the news and absorbed the commentary on these topics with interest, it’s something I didn’t engage with personally, likely due to the transitory nature of my stay in the country.

Reading that news article today struck me with dismay at the news itself (in spite of the slant of the article) and a vague sense of unease about how out of touch I’ve been. It feels like one of the underpinnings of my childhood is slipping away. At the same time, I realize that my own experience growing up there is sort of emblematic of the problems the country faces. I lived in Brussels, went to a francophone school, spent all six years that we lived there largely in the French-speaking part of the country, my only exposure to the Dutch parts of the culture occurring during vacation visits to the seashore and through the required Dutch classes that didn’t start until the third grade. I’m still processing the news, reading up more about it and what happened, absorbing the idea that sometime in the future, the small part of me that still feels a little Belgian might not have a home any more. I also wonder about my old friends, the people I knew there and how this affects them.

Him> Hey big sis
Me> Hey little bro!
Him> How are you?
Me> (Long babbling stream of news about the kids, the weather, my job, etc.)
Me> How are you?
Him> Okay. Trying to get email to work. @&#*%
Me> Can I even ask you what you’re up to?
Him> You can ask. But if I tell you then I’d have to kill you.
Me> Yeah. So, whatcha up to?
Him> I’m flying. A lot.
Me> Gotcha. How’s the desert.
Him> Dusty.
Him> Got to go.
Me> Fly safe.

It’s lunch time here in Berwyn, it’s cold and raining and disgusting outside, my kids are clamoring for lunch, but I’m thinking of the cold in the desert night instead and my little brother gearing up to fly out there somewhere, doing goodness knows what, goodness knows where.

Fly safe, brother. Fly safe.