My Country ‘Tis of Thee

Conservatives: trigger warning. Anti-patriotism ahead.

I know this is going to make me sound like a Debbie Downer, but I have to confess that the pull of traveling isn’t the only reason I want to leave the country. It’s the push of the country itself. Maybe it’s because I’m a science teacher. Maybe I read too much politics. Maybe it’s because I know what else is out there, and I’ve read “if you don’t like it, GET OUT” screeds one too many times and have decided to do just that.

In no particular order, here are reasons I wish we could leave for good:

1. Helicopter Parenting and its sidekick, Internet Shaming. Now that people women are actually getting arrested for leaving their kids in cars or at parks, I want no part of this madness. Our culture has been moving away from the supportive community model and it’s turning into an environment of paranoia where everyone is a creep. The internet has provided a place where parents can one-up each other over who is being more protective (and therefore a better parent, natch). The expectations and norms are starting to choke me, and seriously stifle the growth of an entire generation of kids. The irony is, it defies logic and facts.  Click on that link. Click it! I’ve seen people just about plug their ears and “la-la-la-la” about these statistics.         

2. Few government services and crappy public transportation. I cannot stand the every-man-for-himself attitude. Everyone is so isolated and suspicious. Is it a coincidence that so many people in this country are depressed? This is a country where some think people should be left to die if they don’t have insurance. 

 3. There’s so little appreciation for art. For that matter, there’s little appreciation for life. My daughter’s elementary school gives them 15 minutes for lunch and 15 minutes for recess. All day. That is criminal. I wrote a letter to the superintendent about it and was promptly ignored. We bemoan the childhood obesity epidemic, but do nothing about it. Science and history are not taught in her school. She’s apparently lucky to have any “specials” (art, music, etc.) at all; many kids in the US have none. They sit and do reading and math, reading and math, all day long to try to “catch up” to other schools around the world that actually let their children play. We can’t make that simple Point A to Point B connection? And again, is it any wonder that so many kids are medicated for ADD/ADHD? They can’t sit still because their little bodies need to move.

However, this doesn't stop our sports practices from being six hours long. I've driven home at 8:30 pm and seen a little league team playing a game that late, out in the rain. What is wrong with us?

4. Vilification of teachers and public schools. Yes, let’s cut more funding, that’ll make ‘em improve.

For me, American culture has boiled down to this:

Not working hard enough. Not exercising enough. Not doing enough with/for your kids. Sleeping is for the lazy. Health care is a luxury, nobody deserves anything, everyone is so entitled. The poor are just lazy. Everyone is lazy. "Oh yeah? You worked 50 hours last week? Well boo-hoo, I worked 80!"

I am exhausted.

Tick... Tock. Tick... Tock.

It is really hard to motivate when everything is on hold. I could be, and should be, purging and Freecycling the contents of my house, running, or planning lessons in the subject I hope to be teaching next year (Geography). Instead, I’m doing a lot of sitting. Mulling. Ruminating. Dreaming about traveling, while both awake and asleep. Last night’s dream was interrupted by a truck blaring its horn at me to wake up and move ahead in traffic. It was a dream-within-a-dream that made me bolt straight up in bed to realize how frustratingly accurate it was. 

I cannot describe my hatred of our commute. I can only be grateful that it is helping me get over selling our home as my loathing of the traffic outgrows my love of the house. Changing jobs here is out of the question. I love my job more than any other I’ve ever had. The entire staff is on the same laid-back, happy wavelength. The administration is incredibly supportive. I have genuine affection for my co-workers. This job is a rare gem.

Which brings me to money: in an earlier post I mentioned the possibility of us leaving here for good. We did crunch the numbers, and there is no way we can do that if we ever want to retire. Ugh. I am already mourning having to come back after two years; the thought of it gives me an unpleasant twinge in my chest, but it is what it is. At the very least, we are residents of one of the best states in the country in many categories. Hopefully we can save enough money that we’ll be able to travel during subsequent summers. Right now our traveling is almost nil—and it IS nil if you take out family visits. When we’re no longer paying over $1100 per month for Sophie’s daycare, even at our current salaries we’ll be able to go again. 

My “where do I want to go” obsessions are as fickle as they come. Over the past two weeks, I have sunk my claws into several different locations, thinking “I have to go THERE it has to be THERE oh my god what if we don’t get jobs THERE because THAT’S WHERE I WANT TO GOOOOO.” I studied them on Google Earth. I looked up apartments. I calculated possible commuting distances. I scoped out possible running routes. I learned that so many of these schools are far enough out in the sticks that we’d need to get a car there, which we want to avoid. I did extra research on each school, which helped me take one school off the list when I discovered its teachers are currently striking for better wages and working conditions (!). I found out that another school is broken up into three campuses, so our girls would be going to school across town from where we’d teach. If one of our biggest selling points to them is that we’ll all be in the same school, then that one’s out too. So here is my current  list of Most Wanted Schools, in no particular order:

1. Vienna. There are two schools there, both accessible by public transportation. Great city, German-speaking (a big plus for me). The only downside would be that it wouldn’t be a great money-saving salary.

2. Prague. Centrally located to Europe. My closest friend describes Prague as a cross between Germany and Russia, both places I deeply love. Biggest pro? The potential to save tens of thousands. Con: it's in the 'burbs of Prague, which look just as vanilla as they do here.

3.  Paris. I never had much interest in Paris; for all my years in Europe I only changed trains there once. I don’t know what has changed my mind. Maybe looking up its location in the city? Not much money-saving potential, but it would be two years of living in beauty. Cramped, expensive beauty. We could drown our claustrophobia in low-budget wine, bread and cheese.

4. Luxembourg. Perfect mix of central location, the school is in the city (no car!), and the salary is good. I just get a happy vibe from that place whenever I’m researching it.

5. Rabat, Morocco. Morocco was one of my top choices when this teaching-abroad idea was in the fetal stage. Now that I’ve looked at all the school locations there, many of them are way out in the scary booneys. Rabat’s school is central and the town looks incredible. A bonus? A Southern California climate, much cooler than the rest of the country due to its coastal location. Dry sunshine all year. The food! And I have fallen hard over the beautiful pictures of Rabat. 

There are also a few other schools in rural Bavaria and Switzerland (this is the picture that haunts me when I think of Switzerland) that I wouldn’t turn down, but that was the list. There were five places, the end. 

Then… I got Taya’s e-mail. 

Thailand was, for a few days, where we were both convinced we were going. It was our Number One Choice, to the exclusion of anything else. I had the map memorized, sights researched, vacations planned, greetings practiced. Then Nick watched an episode of “Vice” about the police state there. I didn’t see it, but it really spooked him. He said "there's no way" on more than one occasion.

I had written my friend Taya to ask her about Thailand since she knows it well and has said many times that it’s her favorite country. She wrote back an enthusiastic gush that sold me all over again. Now, Thailand is back on the list. The downside is that it’s not Europe. There are huge benefits to living there, like the travel opportunities, the food, and the money we’ll make. We will save enough money that after we return, we’ll be able to spend a few summers in Europe anyway, so it would eventually be a win-win. We certainly couldn’t do the opposite, to live in Vienna for two years and then afford to go to Thailand on vacation. I am apprehensive about the heat, having been to Ghana where the heat kind of horrified me with its power. But the upside would be that I’d be ready to return to cooler weather after the two years, and maybe I’d be less sad about having to come back. We’re very excited to experience something almost at the polar opposite of the globe from where we are now, both geographically and culturally. All of this dullness I feel about life right now… I feel like Thailand would wake me up abruptly. 

I’ve been trying to write this disjointed post for eleven hours now, so I will have to write more about that dullness next time.

Impatiently Pouting

I am grouchy with impatience. I want to feel like we're making progress, moving forward. Most of the stuff in the house, we can't Freecycle or sell until the spring. The job offers aren't really going to happen for another 3-4 months. Some have been trickling in, but it's a trickle. The job updates e-mail comes in every night at 5 pm, and it's like opening a tiny gift with a few clicks. Most of the jobs available now have been in places we're not interested in, like China and the Middle East. A few came up last night for Sudan. I clicked on the school's link, curious about what they'd have to offer to get people to teach there, and the answer is everything. Salary, huge housing allowance, laptop, even a car. They had to emphasize that it was a safe place to live. I wish them luck, but I think I'm all set with a place where "hacking by machete" is a top cause of death.

I spend any free time at school on Google Earth, looking at school locations and trying to imagine where we'd live (I am so glad that my lessons are time-tested enough to just pull them out and go). One of my top considerations is living somewhere we wouldn't need a car. I love the idea of taking public transportation to work, and this is reinforced for me twice a day when I'm stuck in my 18-mile, hour-long commute. Yes, 18 miles... one hour. The traffic is mind-numbing.

In Germany last year, I met up with an old boyfriend of mine from high school who basically never left. Although he was as American as they come back when I knew him, he is a German citizen now, and even speaks English with a slight accent (because he's so used to speaking German) which blows my entire mind. He said something to me that stuck firm like the Sean Penn relief thing. He said he couldn't stand the car culture of the US. You have to drive everywhere. When he comes back to visit his parents, within a few days he and his wife will look at each other, usually in the car stuck in traffic, and say "I want to go home." He doesn't own a car. He says that he likes the idea that he can walk out his front door to the bus stop, and from there he can go anywhere in the world. I suppose this is also true with a car, but there's the issue of parking and insurance and BLECCH. We're selling our cars when we leave and we sincerely hope that we won't need to buy another for many years.

I think about this every day as we creep, creep, creep forward on our way to or from work. Car culture. It is soul-sucking and exhausting, and by the time we get home we're irritated and tired. Even half of the ads on TV and radio-- and the most shouty, annoying ones-- are car ads.

Begin at the beginning

I think it started with “Mamma Mia.” Yeah, the movie. 

Obviously the seed had been there for a long time; since 1982, to be exact. That was the year we moved to England. We spent the next nine years in Europe. When I left at age 19, I cried all the way to the airport in Munich. The cab driver said, “But you’re going home!” I blubbered, “No, this is my home.” I didn’t return for 22 years. 

Cut to 2008, in the movie theater. It was a beautiful and fun movie, of course, but that’s not what was on my mind. How did she live on that Greek island for so many years? Where did she have her baby? Where did she get her groceries? Did she have a bank? Who were her friends? When they showed her daughter’s school picture, I thought, where did she go to school? Was it on the island or a boarding school on the mainland? 

How can I do that?

2013: I was awarded a trip to Vienna for a science conference. The whole ten days I was in Europe, I was weepy and sick to my stomach with excitement and emotion. By the end of the trip, I knew I had to come back. I had to find a way to make it happen. There had to be a way. 

And that’s where I am now. 

A few months ago we approached our principal and superintendent to ask for permission for a two-year sabbatical to teach abroad. The only thing we asked was that we have jobs when we return. They said yes, and were actually enthusiastic about it! The idea is that we come back and finish out the minimum years required to access our state pensions, then go back to teach abroad for the rest of our careers. This will just be a break in the… I hate to use the word “monotony,” but I have to be honest. That’s what it is. 

Last spring, I had a moment in class where I wasn’t sure if I’d taught a particular concept yet. I looked over at my aide (who had been in my class for several years) and asked her if I had. She couldn’t remember either. I looked it up, and it was still weeks away. That incident bothered me. The years are starting to run together in one big blob of sameness, we have reached the point of total comfort, and that’s when the time starts to go too fast. That’s when you look around one day and go, “Holy crap. I’m 65. And this has been my life.” I have never wanted that to happen. I just got lucky enough that I caught it midway. They say life is a journey, not a destination… Well, we reached a destination years ago—fantastic house we’ve customized ourselves; living in a state we love, in a great neighborhood, near family; two fantastic daughters; satisfying jobs-- and it’s perfectly lovely, but it’s also perfectly uninteresting. I understand how spoiled that makes me sound, but… It’s like the end of a story. 

I’m only 42. I’m not ready for the end of our story. 

I am the kind of person who does things. I have an idea, and I say, “Well—why not?” And I try to make it happen. As I get older, I realize just how little there is to lose—and how much there is to gain—by DOING these things. A wise person once told me that I’d regret more the things I didn’t do rather than the things I did, and he was so right. Sometimes there are mistakes, like the time I renovated our kitchen pantry and drilled a whole line of holes into a drain pipe from the shower upstairs. It flooded our basement and cost over a grand to fix. But the mistakes are just part of the story; usually they’re the funny parts. 

So here we are. We are working with an agency that hires teachers for schools around the world. It’s still too early for us to know where we’re going to go; we have a few months before these schools know what jobs will be open for next year. To say that I am obsessed is an understatement. I am constantly Googling (or Google Earthing) potential places. Where do I want to go the most? Prague? Switzerland? Thailand? Chile? All of the above?

Since we got permission for the two years and activated our applications with the agency, we’ve gotten a lot more information on each school. It appears that some of the salaries are very generous compared to the costs of living, and we can expect to save quite a bit of money in most places. Knowing this has kind of changed the game a little. If the estimated savings is truly what they claim, it might be more than that state pension we return for. If it is… do we still need to come back? And would it make things easier to just sell our house instead of rent it out? We’re crunching the numbers now, and we still have the safety net of our jobs back in two years. But. There is a possibility that we could go for good. Now that… THAT is a life. Now we’re talking. It would be, literally, a journey. 

Selling that beloved house is going to be a killer. We’d sell the house and almost everything in it, and move with little more than suitcases. As I look around my house, I try to steel myself for the difficulty of selling meaningful possessions. But one of the things propelling me forward is something I read in a Sean Penn interview a few months ago. His house had burned down a few years ago, and he lost everything. He said that there was an odd sense of relief when that happened. Relief. It keeps surfacing in my mind. Do I even know what’s in that trunk at the foot of my bed? If I got rid of all those clothes in my closet that are waiting for me to drop ten pounds, would I even remember what was there? Would I miss all of my books? The furniture that I bought when I got my first “adult” paychecks? Yes. Yes, I probably will. Will I miss them enough to turn around and stay here with them, giving up my dream? No.  

It’s terrifying. The details are scary. Health care. Banks. Cell phones. Visas. The day we say goodbye and take those steps through airport security. Just thinking about that moment makes me feel cold with fear. 

This summer, Nick and I went ziplining in Vermont. I learned something about myself. I have a slight, healthy fear of heights. As I climbed through the course, I figured out a trick: focus on what’s in front of you, don’t look down, and don’t think. Just DO. I did best when I did nothing to psych myself up to step off that platform and dangle my legs 100 feet off the ground. No deep breaths, no counting to three, no pep talks. I’d hook in, grab the handle, and go. So far, that’s working everywhere else, too.