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nine months in and we’re doing it again

I celebrated our ninth month of living in Abu Dhabi by visiting New York.  Not intentionally but as it happened, the only time I could line up doctors’ appointments, business meetings, and a flyby visit with my mother and sister in the wilds of New Jersey coincided with the nine-month anniversary of our arrival in Arabia. (Arabia. It sounds so much more evocative than “Abu Dhabi,” doesn’t it? Like maybe I’m going to ride off with Omar Sharif or Peter O’Toole at just about any minute.)

Nine months. If I continue my pregnancy metaphor, we’re due. When I was pregnant with baby #1, people with kids would say “your life is going to change…” and I would nod and smile and think to myself “maybe your life changed, suckahs, but I am a superior form of human and my life will go on like always, except I’ll have this charming bundle to look after.”

Bwahahaha.  Hubris, my friends, pure and simple. Babies kick your ass (and mostly we love them for it); they make us better people (except when we have to read Thomas the Tank Engine for the 458th time); they are little flesh-wrapped bundles of hope that will, I think, despite what Dr Sears says, flourish even if we occasionally put them down or let them cry.

Nine months ago, when we told people we were moving to Abu Dhabi, they said “oh wow, Dubai sounds really cool.”  The next question, inevitably, was “are you going to have wear a…y’know, a thing?” and they’d sort of flap their hands around their heads. They meant “veil,” but it looked more like “goalie mask” or “diving helmet.”  And always, always, they’d say “wow, that’s going to be a big change.”

I’d nod and smile and say “mmhmm,” but inside my brain there was no hubristic nonsense. Instead there was “HOLY CRAP WE’RE MOVING TO ARABIA WHAT THE HELL ARE WE THINKING ARE THERE CHICKEN NUGGETS IN ARABIA MY KIDS ARE GOING TO STARVE.”

Despite my chicken nugget anxiety, we moved. Figured out how to move twelve huge suitcases, four people, and assorted carry-on bags half-way around the world (why yes, that was me you saw crouched in front of the departures counter at JFK, madly tossing things between suitcases trying to get the weight allotments right), figured out how to negotiate the grocery stores, figured out how to drive in a world where traffic laws are more like traffic suggestions, figured out that trying to make a strange place feel like “home” is almost as exhausting as having a newborn.

Nine months ago, if you’d asked me if we would stay in Abu Dhabi for another year, I would have laughed at you with the same incredulous laugh that you’d hear if you asked new parents when they were going to have baby #2: “We’re barely hanging on,” they’d say. “And you think we should do this to ourselves again?”

But then, you know, the baby smiles, it coos, it pats your cheek. It sits, babbles, drools, shoves oatmeal in its hair, crawls, and becomes generally the cutest baby ever in the history of babydom.  And then one day, as you watch this Platonic specimen of babyhood scooch across the floor, the thought bubbles to the surface: why not another one, because if this one is so damn cute, what would a sister/brother look like?

And so it was a few months ago that I started to think, oh good lord, we just figured out how to live here. Now we’re going to move back? Liam no longer believes that we ruined his life by switching schools; Caleb can read rudimentary Arabic words; Husband loves the work he’s doing here; there are chicken nuggets in the frozen-food section of the grocery store.  Being a typical mom-type person, I feel settled now that my family feels settled–and besides, if we moved, I would have to scrap this beautiful new blog design.

Do I really want to uproot again, move back to New York, give up our adventure before we’ve even really gotten started?

No.

It’s been nine months; the new baby has gotten cute; we’re doing it again.

We’ve not officially told the kids, but our contracts are signed, so…expat life? Here we come again – or rather, here we stay. I guess I’m going to have to figure out a different metaphor for next year’s adventures.

 

one of the lovely support systems (safety nets? escape hatches?) that helped me adjust to life in Arabia has been the community at yeah write, curated by the amazing Erica (she of this blog redesign).  click over using this button and see what’s brewing at yeahwrite this week…then come back to yeahwrite later this week and vote for your favorite posts

read to be read at yeahwrite.me

Read full story · Comments { 11 } on May 21, 2012 in Abu Dhabi, expat, family, moving, UAE

How Much Tuition is Ten Toes?

This post first ran in the World Mom’s Blog, where you will find a writers from all over the world chronicling their experiences.

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There’s a conversation that happens in expat-land that sounds a bit like what prisoners in a jail yard might say to one another: “what brought you here?how long have you been here? when are you leaving?”

Sometimes people answer these questions with slumped shoulders and a shake of the head, which usually means that a) they’ve been here in Abu Dhabi for far too long and aren’t leaving any time soon; or b) they just got here and still haven’t figured out the basics, like getting the vegetables weighed in the produce section before they get in the checkout line.

The most cheerful answer I’ve gotten thus far to these questions has been from a woman named Janice, who is here from the Philippines.  Her good cheer surprised me because at the time of our conversation, she was energetically applying a pumice to my heels.

Now, as feet go, mine aren’t hideous but they are feet and I’ve been using them for more than forty years, so they’re not exactly pink and baby-soft, either.

Janice was mid-way through my lovely pedicure when we started our “how long have you been here” conversation, so her answers were punctuated with “rinse please madam,” and “file or clip, madam?” (One of things I’m not yet used to, after almost nine months here, is being called “madam” by anyone in any kind of service job.)

Janice has been in Abu Dhabi for six years, working in this same salon, sending money home the entire time.  I say something inane, like “that’s a lot of feet.”  She smiles and says “is okay, madam, I am sending my brothers to college, madam, and the tuition….”  She rolls her eyes as if to suggest that it’s a lot, switches her attention to my other foot, pushes at the nails.

“But I am lucky, madam, because my brother, he is a scholar and get a discount, so that instead of 30,000 pesos, tuition it is only 15,000, and my other brother, he take a test and get a discount now of 25%, so is only 15,000 also. I send home 300 dirhams a month, ma’am, is not bad.”

My pedicure will cost me about 65 dirhams (a little less than $20).

The Manhattan cynic in my soul wonders if Janice is telling me this story to beef up her tip. I immediately swat the cynic with my mental handbag. No one could lie this cheerfully while rubbing someone else’s feet.

“No, ma’am I finish only the tenth grade,” she says, scraping at a nasty tough bit near my toe. “My parents, they say they are lucky because I do not think of myself only, I do not get married like my cousins do, at 16.”  She laughs a little. Do I imagine she sounds happy to have escaped marriage at 16, children at 17?

“But boys, is important. To work construction, like my older brother, is too hard work, dangerous. He does not complain, but we know.”  She inspects my toes for flaws, clips an errant hangnail. “My brothers, they will be men with families to take care of, and is better if they not work construction. One brother, he is training for the customs inspector, for the airlines. Is a good job. The other brother, he just starts, so, we do not know what he will be. Every month, is something else!” She giggles, rubs delicately scented lotion into my feet.

Kneading my calf muscles, she sighs. “But madam, I visit last month, first time in one year, and I saw all my nieces and nephews, I have 15 of them, madam. Some are just babies…and there are no babies here, madam.”

With deft fingers, she starts to apply the polish to my toes. I’ve chosen a pale pink, almost invisible. She looks up at me for a minute, then bends her head to my toes. “When I came back here, I was alone in the house, and I was all day crying because I miss them.  I am homesick, madam, I think to myself.”

She sits back and admires her work. My feet look and feel wonderful.  I thank her, and say “I hope your brothers work as hard in college as you’re working for them.”  She looks slightly shocked.

“I am lucky, madam. My brothers, they are good boys. They study hard. I want them to have a better life.” She slides my flip-flops onto my feet and guides me to the drying lamps.

Her brothers had better do more than study hard. They’d better graduate at the top of their class, get great jobs, buy their sister a huge house overlooking the sea, and consider spending all their free time rubbing her feet.

As for me and my pampered toes? We slunk out of the salon, uncomfortably aware of our own privilege and unsure whether, if we were to swap positions with Janice, we would be able to be so cheerful about spending our days bent over other people’s feet.

Read full story · Comments { 30 } on May 8, 2012 in Abu Dhabi, expat, Feminism, Politics, UAE

a mall of contradictions

So I was at the mall.

I’m at the mall because “everything” is at the mall: grocery stores, bookstores (or at least stores that sell book-related products), the Walgreens-equivalent stores. These malls are vast echoey spaces designed to entertain: each mall has big toddler play areas; there are ice rinks, bowling alleys, fountains galore. In Dubai, there is a mall with a huge aquarium in it, and another designed around a series of canals, ala Venice.

The malls depress me, not only because I have to drive there but also because they are filled with chain stores, usually fair-conditioned to meat-locker levels, and because they celebrate consumerism as the pinnacle of civilization. (Now, granted, malls everywhere depress me, and for the same reasons; the Gulf doesn’t have the corner on garish displays of consumer culture. Mall of America anyone?)

Unlike Mall of America, though, the malls here offer a fashion parade of abaya style. I am fascinated by abayas, which is the word used here for the long black robe worn by Muslim women. The scarf covering the face is the niqab; the scarf that covers the hair and neck is the shayla, or, sometimes, the hijaab (but, confusingly, hijaab is also the word used to mean “modest,” and is thus sometimes the word used in a blanket fashion – yes, there’s a pun there somewhere – to mean “covering”).

Abayas in their plainest form are simply long black robes that sweep the floor.  Some women take hijaab to the utmost, adding black gloves and a full face veil, so that they are completely covered. I call this look the full beekeeper.  But – and this is where it gets complicated – I see women with abayas that look like a bedazzler has run amok.  Abayas with Swarovski crystals along the shoulders and down the back, like some kind of sparkly Hells’ Angels design; abayas with Louis Vuitton trim; abayas with spangled head scarves and peacock embroidery along the hemlines – abayas, in short, that are anything but “modest.”

I can imagine that for some women, a decorated abaya is a way to both follow “the rules,” and yet also assert personality – and status, because a custom abaya can cost thousands and thousands of dollars.

Abayas seem to me an embodiment of the complexity involved in being a modern woman in conservative Muslim country, and in the malls, easily half the women are wearing abayas – frequently abayas that I think of as “performance abayas:” abayas that are meant to be seen.

Here are three women wearing fairly subtle abayas:

Relatively modest.

There is another level of complexity, though, and it involves what’s under the abaya. The malls are full of shoe stores, and the shoe stores are full of women in abayas (some modest, some blazing with bling) – shoe love, it seems, is a universal female trait that crosses all national and ethnic boundaries.  I took pictures in three different stores of the shoes on display:

and these:

or perhaps these (note matching handbag):

I swear, if a hooker went to the prom, these would be her shoes.  Hijaab these definitely ain’t.

Wearing any kind of uniform forces secret, or semi-secret expressions of self to emerge. I just find it odd that hot pink, rhinestone studded platforms would be anyone’s form of expression, other than maybe Gwen Stefani or Madonna. But if we judge by good old-fashioned capitalism, these stores are stocking what their customers are buying…so someone is trip-trapping along in sparkly gold platform sling-backs under her modest black robe.

And I’m thinking that maybe I’ve already been here for too long because you know what? I think those pastel patent leather platform sandals are kind of cute, in a Japanese school-girl anime sort of way.  Just the thing for a day at the mall.

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What’s that you say? You don’t want to go to the mall, you just want to get away from it all? Here are a few suggestions from none other than The Bloggess, Scary Mommy, The Momalog, WanderMom…and me! (And hell yes, being on a list with these writers sort of made my week…maybe my month!) Click here for the article from Travel and Leisure Online, a great source for travel ideas all over the world.

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And if you are at the mall and you’re waiting for your kids to stop staring at the games in Electro-Land, then you should be spending your time reading yeahwrite – some of the best writing on the interwebs.  Read around, click around, then come back on Wednesday and spread some voting love. I’m using this great silver badge this week because it goes with the shoes. You know you want a pair. Just think what the other parents will think at the Saturday morning Little League games when you stroll up in your 10 inch sparkly platforms.

 

Read full story · Comments { 34 } on April 23, 2012 in Abu Dhabi, expat, Feminism, pop culture, shopping, UAE, What's It Like?