Why does it matter that it’s spring in New York?  As I say to my students as they struggle with their essays, “what’s the so what of your argument?” I can hear you saying the same thing: what’s the so what of it being spring in New York?

Well for one thing, spring means that the semester is almost over.  Exams start May 10th and then the students leave for the summer, which means that my teaching year is over. But how can that be? I mean, didn’t we just get here?

And at the same time, haven’t we been here forever?

No. We haven’t been here forever; we’ve been here for exactly eight months, as of two days ago. On our four month anniversary, I wrote a post comparing that four month marker to the fourth month of pregnancy, which is (usually) when you can let out your breath after the worries of the first trimester. But by the eighth month of pregnancy, the novelty of being pregnant is over.  Your back aches; your feet (which you haven’t seen in several months) throb; you haven’t taken a deep breath in weeks because all your internal organs are resting on your lungs, displaced by the blob that ate Manhattan now cartwheeling in your belly;  you have the sneaking suspicion that you might, in fact, be pregnant forever.

And so. Here we are. Eight months into expat life, which now seems less like an adventure and more like…life. I drive to the grocery store in my little hatchback; I drive the boys to soccer football practice; I teach my classes, read student papers, work at my writing projects.  I’ve gotten used to the shower’s desalinated water, which is slowly turning my hair into straw that even Rumpelstiltskin couldn’t fix; I’m resigned to the fact that bookstores here sell lots of book-related products but not so many actual, you know, books.

Everything here feels like a life lived anywhere else; my daily existence seems regular, ordinary – just as waddling through life as a pregnant lady seems ordinary – and then you see yourself reflected in a shop-window or errant mirror and think “oh holy cats I’m pregnant!” You sort of forget: the hugeness of your body has become the norm and pregnancy seems like a perpetual state.

So too here. It’s just my regular life and then it re-hits me: I’m looking out the window at the Arabian Gulf. The grapes on the table come from South Africa, not California; and “storms” mean “sandstorms,” instead of rain or snow. Last week, in a beautiful moment of desert irony, the kids couldn’t go outside for lunch-time recess because it was “too sandy.”

Daily life means standing at the crosswalk next to three women wearing black abayas and shaylas, two older women in saris and shawls, four men in long cotton tunics and trousers speaking what sounds like Urdu, three guys in skinny trousers and pointy shoes talking in Tagalog, two French tourists, and a tall man whose impeccable white dishdash features huge gold cufflinks that sparkle in the morning sun (and yes, you could set that list to the tune of “Twelve Days of Christmas”). Daily life means seeing crowds of workers resting in the scarce shade of a date palm and knowing that they will be more respectful of me than would a similar group of workers in the US.  Daily life means marking the hours of the day by the call to prayer (which always makes me wonder how Muslims in non-Muslim countries keep track of prayer time if they don’t have this app). Daily life means sunscreen, sunglasses, sandals; it means fresh lemon juice served with mint and sugar; it means dates stuffed with candied orange peel.

Daily life means conversations with other foreign-born workers that frequently sound as if we’re prison inmates: “how long have you been here? how long are you staying? when are you leaving?”  People’s lives here seem more fluid; Liam has a friend who has moved nine times and he’s only 11.  Daily life means that we spend more time together as a family than we did in New York, which is both good (family adventures, family dinner, family conversation) and bad (sibling bickering ratcheted to “Hunger Games” kill-or-be-killed mode).

When we talk about staying here for another year, I think about what I like about living here: the weather, the water, the slow pace, the new perspectives that come from being an outsider.  And then I realize that the same items are on my list of miseries: it’s too hot; the water is polluted; there is nothing to do; I don’t fit in and I never will.  I miss talking to my sister on the phone while I do the grocery shopping;  I miss my mom always; I miss museums and public art; I miss the energy of life on New York streets; and even though I’ve made some lovely new friends, I miss my lovely old friends (old in the sense of long-time, not in the sense of, you know, old, because miraculously, we’re all still twenty-nine).

Eight months is a long time. And then again, it’s no time at all. As it turned out, I didn’t stay pregnant. But I’m not sure about this expat thing. It might be the new normal.

 the sidelines at a recent football tournament

**we’ve been in Abu Dhabi for eight months, but yeahwrite has now been in existence for ONE YEAR. Plus a week. So click over, link up, read through, then vote for your faves on Wednesday.

Some random person at a cocktail party: Great name for a blog, Manhattanmamma.

Me, trying to be patient: No.  It’s Mannahatta, not Manhattan.

Random stranger, uncomprehending: Um…yeah. ‘Scuse me, I need to [get a drink, pee, leave this conversation].

No one hears that funny little “a” in my blog title. And probably, if someone hadn’t grabbed manhattanmamma as a domain name before I got around to it, that would be the name of this blog.

When I started this blog, back in the dark days of 2008, just after the Republican National Convention unleashed Sarah Palin on the world, I wanted a name that would be “New Yorky” but not too cute.

Husband, bless his English professor’s soul, reminded me about Walt Whitman, and there it was: “Mannahatta:”

“I was asking for something specific and perfect for my city, whereupon lo! upsprang the aboriginal name!/Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane, unruly, musical, self-sufficient; I see that the word of my city is that word up there.”

Those are the opening lines of Whitman’s poem. I loved that his description from the mid-nineteenth century seemed still appropriate to my 21st-century city: contradictory, beautiful, specific unto itself.  Plus I figured that “professor” is one of the many hats I wear, in addition to writer, wife, mother, sister, practitioner of wobbly yoga, and so forth–so it seemed like a nice touch to have a “literary” touch, even though I had no plans to use this blog to write about anything “academic.”

Fast forward four years and lo! here I am living on another island, a half-world away: “numberless crowded streets…tides swift and ample, well-loved by me, toward sundown…the summer air, the bright sun shining…the city of hurried and sparkling waters, the city of spires and masts…”  These lines are also about Mannahatta, but they could also describe Abu Dhabi, surrounded by water, filled with the spires of mosques and the masts of ships in the port.

In four years of writing, I’ve stayed as non-commercial as ol’Walt himeself: once I made fifty bucks for writing about cereal, and once I got a kitchen ninja blender-thing as a promo. But that’s it.  I suppose you could say that I’ve stayed true to the real roots of interwebs and am writing just for the love of writing.

Or you could say that I’m an utter ninny who needs to figure out the difference between page views and page visits, become fluent in SEO-speak, and just generally get my blogging shit together.  When this blog was reviewed by blog-bash in January, the fabulous Alexis-and-Erica said as much (although they were very nice about it) – and they wanted me to change the blog name because they said it was hard to remember.

They’re right…but I resisted. What you’re seeing here, however, is the me getting smart enough to hire the yeahwrite team of Erica-and-Jeffrey (Erica also wears lots & lots of hats). They developed this beautiful header, which combines the NYC skyline and Abu Dhabi’s Grand Mosque; designed the new layout; and answered my endless questions, without ever once saying “good lord woman how long have you been blogging and you don’t know THAT?”  Please, dear reader, take special note of the lovely buttons on the nav bar (that’s computer-designer-speak for the thing across the top of the page that has buttons that link to different categories); the nifty box at the bottom of the page with links to different posts; and my newly updated Amazon book box!  Those were all aspects of the re-design that took lots of back-and-forth tweaking and tinkering.

Working with Erica and Jeffrey has been a great experience–and this redesign is beautiful solely as a result of their hard work and patience.  Thanks, guys–and now you can take down the dart board that has this blog site’s picture as the bulls-eye.

In Abu Dhabi today, it’s Sunday, the beginning of the work week. In other parts of the world, it’s Passover and Easter Sunday–would it be wrong to say something here about the “rebirth” of my blog?

Yeah. That would probably be in rather poor taste.

Fine then. I’ll just make introductions: blog page, please meet my readers.  Readers, please meet my redesigned blog page. Click around and see what’s here – perhaps consider “liking” this page on Facebook or subscribing to the RSS feed. Then you won’t have to remember that pesky extra “a.”

Whitman and I would both be grateful.

This morning, I got an email in which S. asked “Did you ever get huge pangs of “oh shit–what the hell am I thinking moving to Abu Dhabi?” And maybe in her email she mentioned that some people in the family were maybe crying a little bit about the thought of this impending move. I’m not saying there were tears, I’m just saying that there might have been.

It’s not a bad question, actually. In fact, it’s a question that, with a slightly different verb tense, I ask myself pretty regularly. Tears are also not unusual.

Here’s what I wrote:

***

Dear S.

Well DUH of course you’re going to cry. Maybe even daily, hell maybe even hourly. You’re moving HALFWAY AROUND THE WORLD.

I mean, holy crap, right?

And so there will be parts that suck a little and parts that suck a lot.

That said of course, as “hardship duty” this barely, barely qualifies.  Everyone speaks English, there is an intact government that doesn’t open fire on its citizenry (or at least not when the news hounds are looking), you can buy likker, wine, and bacon and really, what more is there?

But yeah. Plan to be exhausted for a while–weeks after the move is finished and you think you’re “settled,” you’ll realize that you’ve never been this tired in your life. Holding it together for everyone else can wear a person down to the nubs, so be ready to be easy with yourself. Sit a lot. Maybe lie down occasionally. Drink, if you’re a drinker. And kiss your efficient type-A New Yorker self good-bye for a while. She’ll still be there when you return. I’m finding that actually if you move more slowly, it’s okay. It feels weird but everything mostly gets done (mostly) and no one else seems to be moving super fast. It’s not a very efficient city. It’s not Rome, but it’s not Manhattan, either.  On the weekends, you’ll maybe hear about this festival, or that exhibit, or that kid-friendly event, and you’ll be all “okay! we are totally there and we’re getting there at 10am and really seize day, dammit.”

That’s a great idea except that all those special events open at like, 2.  Maybe 3.  But if you go to that event at 11pm or midnight? There will be tons of little kids running around having a great time.

You will be fascinated by the contradictions and weirdnesses of this place. I’m trying to dig deeper but it’s hard to find ways out of the expat bubble–and inside the expat bubble, it’s easy to float along with relative freedom. It’s not Riyadh; you’re not going to be stared at (or worse) if your arms are exposed or your hair or god forbid your knees.

That said, however, as KSB asked in this comment, it is a city that has different attitudes for different shades of skin. It’s a city with two or three (or ten) tiers: the one I live on, for white euro/north americans, is pretty comfortable. For others, it’s less comfortable. Husband, with his brown skin, is asked for ID every time he goes into the boys’ school, while I waltz by the security kiosk and no one even blinks. And a (white) colleague here has a wife who is from South Asia, and she is not treated with the same deference I am.  As for “locals?” Emiratis rarely cross paths with expats, unless you work in one of the corporate offices owned by the government.

So no, it’s not perfect by a long shot. But there are interesting people here doing interesting things–a group started a farmer’s market; there are people making art and music and working for conservation effots. And, as with anywhere, there is an idiot contingent, most of whom drive around in polysyllabic fancy cars that end in “i” – Maserati, Ferrari, whateveri. I don’t even blink any more when a Lamborghini pulls up next to me at the stoplight. I see a yellow one around a lot that always looks to me like the swiss cheese hats that Green Bay Packer fans wear on their heads.

Anyway.  It’s an easy place, in a lot of ways – which means the weirdnesses sneak up on you with a WHAP when you’re least expecting it. Little stuff, like WHAT DO YOU MEAN I  CANT BUY PURE VANILLA EXTRACT?  WHY DO FURNITURE STORES ONLY SELL CARMELA SOPRANO’S CASTOFFS? I NEED A LICENSE TO BUY BOOZE? VEAL BACON?  There are big weirdnesses too, but I’ll save those for later, after you’ve already bought your plane tickets.

Here’s the thing: the weather is (mostly) lovely; there are good restaurants; the people you’ll be working with are terrific; it’s a kid friendly city; you’ll do yoga on the beach and kayak in the mangroves; it’s safe and quiet and relatively clean.

And every day–even on those teary, exhausting, pull-your-hair-out-crazy days–you’ll get an absolutely gobsmacking sunset that makes you really glad you don’t live in the concrete canyons of Lower Manhattan anymore.

Yes, you’re going to cry, but mostly? You’re going to be fine.

Love,

Deb

(that’s really how the sunset looked tonight, I promise – no camera enhancements whatsoever)

linking up this post to Bees with Honey – thanks Bruna!

source

David Brooks wrote an op-ed piece two days ago called “The Great Divorce.” In it, he talks about Coming Apart, a book by Charles Murray, in which Murray argues that the US is increasingly a two-caste society. Brooks concedes that this argument isn’t new but, he says, “Murray provides an incredible amount of data” to illustrate his claims.

Okay, Mr. Brooks, first. Do you really need data to be convinced that the US is a society with a deep, deep fissure running down the middle, a fissure that’s looking more and more like that trench at the bottom of the ocean where various bad movies featuring Jackie Bissett and Ed Harris ended up?

If you’re a New Yorker who lives on 63rd street and the East River, the likelihood of you ever, ever stepping into a Wal-Mart other than on a whimsical Marie-Antoinette-as-milkmaid sort of errand is almost nil. If you’re a New Yorker who lives on Central Park West, perhaps facing the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the chances of your kids going to a school where there aren’t enough math books for everyone in the class is an impossibility.

You don’t need data to know that (although it sounds fancier if you do).

I mean, I applaud Mr. Murray for finding ways to measure the gaping chasm between “have” and “have not,” and his research challenges my own assumptions. Seems it’s the “Have” tribe who goes to church and operates out of a conservative ideology, while the lower tribe goes to church less often and is more likely to live in sin (probably because they don’t go to church).

But Brooks goes on to say that “the members of the upper tribe have made themselves phenomenally productive. They may mimic bohemian manners, but they have returned to 1950s traditionalist values and practices. They have low divorce rates, arduous work ethics and strict codes to regulate their kids.”

Hmm.

1950s traditionalist values. That’s a bit tricky, isn’t it, given what those “values” included? Segregation, sexism, homophobia…Middle-class white women didn’t work; lower-class women of color had to work; men of color were called “boy; mixed-race marriages were illegal. Yes, there was perhaps an “arduous work ethic” but what, exactly, does that mean? Other social scientists have shown that people in the late 20th and early 21st century are working longer and longer hours–and are less and less able to “turn off” work, due to all those iDevices that keep us tethered to work even when we’re, you know, relaxing with a martini brought to us by either Betty Draper or our crisply aproned help. (No names needed, just “the help.” After all, isn’t that a 1950s traditionalist practice?)

Okay. Okay, so we’ll let that slide…sort of. For me, actually, the real sticking point is when Brooks calls for National Service (which, actually, I think is a a great idea but mostly because after a year of mandatory services, then when/if kids go to college, they might know why the hell they’re there, instead of just using the next four years to dick around and drink beer).

Brooks calls for a National Service Program “in which people from both tribes work together to spread out the values, practices and institutions that lead to achievement. If we could jam the tribes together, we’d have a better elite and a better mass.”

Let’s overlook his assumption that we’re always going to have “the masses.” Let’s instead say to him that actually, the country already has a national program that could, potentially jam the tribes together so that they’d work together, spread out their values, learn from one another.

It’s called public school.

Thats what we want to restore. Not the fucking 1950s, for god’s sake.

Public schools. Public schools with sufficient materials for all children, with teachers who are given creative license to work with the people sitting in front of them instead of being told to treat these people like they’re widgets; public schools that have safe and inviting physical plants, regardless of whether the building is in South Harlem, Tribeca, Illinois, Nebraska, Oregon.  Public schools that haven’t been gutted by the imperious purse strings of Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and others, whose ideas about testing, testing, testing, seem designed to keep “the masses” as precisely that, and whose own educations (and the educations of their children and friends’ children) contradict every single policy they want to institute.

What if a “good” elementary school were free instead of costing upwards of 36K. No, that’s not a typo, Mr. Brooks. Your own paper, in your own city, reported that private school tuitions, for first-grade, frequently starts at thirty-six thousand dollars.  Which is cheap, I guess, because the kids are obviously finger-painting with liquid platinum.

Public education is uniquely suited to building bridges between these “tribes,” but Brooks ignores that fact, perhaps because he’s been one of the cheerleaders for more, more, more testing, and more “teacher accountability” and all the things that are rendering public schools absolutely incapable of doing anything other than…teaching the test.

And you know what?

Test scores make really, really crappy bridges.

Then someone who lives in Abu Dhabi read my blog (imagine! an actual reader who isn’t my mother or my sister!) mentioned Maria to me, and then a friend in my building mentioned Maria, and then someone else mentioned “Maria…” They sounded like maybe they’d found the Grail—a Grail made of masa, chipotle, and black beans.

Maria doesn’t have a website or a restaurant or even one of those New York-style high-end food trucks.  She’s more like having a friend who also happens to be a fabulous chef. To order from Mari, someone has to give you her email address, then she sends you a menu, you  put in your order, and then once a week, you go collect your delicious, home-made Tex-Mex meals.

Maria’s salsa makes even rice cakes taste good

When I went to pick up my order, I had a moment of cultural confusion: sitting at a low table was a dimpled woman wearing bright-red lipstick and wearing full hijab: black abaya, black sheyla. She was checking orders and handling the money while three teen-age boys in dishdashes gathered each customer’s cartons and containers.  The food smelled delicious—but how on earth had an Arab woman learned to cook really authentic Mexican food?You’d think that after almost five months in this part of the world, I would stop leaping to conclusions based on what people are wearing, wouldn’t you? Here’s the secret about Mari: she’s from Texas. Born and raised in El Paso—“you don’t get much more Tex-Mex than that,” she said with a laugh.

Mari took time from her busy cooking and catering schedule to have breakfast with me last week, because I wanted to know more about her story: how does a nice Catholic girl from El Paso end up in Abu Dhabi speaking fluent Arabic?

The beginning of her journey starts, as journeys so often do, with love. She met an Emirati man at Fort Bliss (what a name! what an omen!); they got married and moved to Abu Dhabi in 1989, when the tallest building only rose about ten stories (I live in a fifty-story residential tower, and it’s not the tallest thing on the skyline) and traffic jams were unheard of.

When Mari first moved to Abu Dhabi, she did not wear the hijab, but, she says, she dressed “modestly” out of respect for her in-laws, with whom they were living.  Her long-sleeved shirts and long skirts gradually were replaced by jellabia—long traditional dresses, “like nightgowns,” Mari says, and then, finally, she began wearing the abaya and headscarf.  Her mother-in-law was pleased, she said, when she finally converted to Islam, mostly because it meant that the grandchildren (five boys and two girls) were being raised as Muslims.  The lovely boys who were helping Mari the day I picked up my order are her sons—all of whom have helped out with “mom’s business.”

I asked if her mother-in-law, or anyone in the family, frowned upon her entrepreneurial spirit and she said not at all. Her oldest son, who is now twenty-three and working here in Abu Dhabi, told her “it’s your drum, mom, go ahead and beat it.”  Her mother-in-law supports the work Mari does because that extra income helps provide extras for the kids—and with seven kids, there are a lot of “extras” (not to mention shoes, books, diapers, and all those other kid-related essentials).

During our conversation, I fell victim to yet another assumption: that all Mari’s recipes came with her from El Paso. “Oh no,” she said. “I learned to make tortillas from a Latina woman who was living here but was originally from Seattle.”  Another assumption bites the dust.  It seems that when Mari moved here, she found an entire community of Latina women here, including some from El Paso.  Although Maria now counts herself as an Abu Dhabi “local,” she also says that it’s only in the UAE that she has justify being “American because she doesn’t have blonde hair and blue eyes.”

So how does a Tex-Mex Emirati learn to cook Mexican food?  She reads cookbooks, talks long-distance with her mother, and good-old-fashioned trial and error. Over the years, Maria has developed an entire repertoire of Mexican recipes, so everything on her menu is made by hand in her kitchen—just Maria and her Indonesian maid, Itoh.  They’ve been cooking to order for about nine years and have inspired a devoted following—so much so that when Mari tried to retire last year, due to health reasons, her clientele was willing to drive out to her house, pick up the food, deliver it themselves, and even serve as sous chefs, if she needed.

Thinking about my own futile attempts to find Mexican ingredients in local Abu Dhabi grocery stores, I asked Mari where she got her raw materials.  She smiled and said that sometimes, on her rare trips home, she will bring back chipotles and other spices; but the tortilla chips and a few other things are made by two companies in Sharjah, of all places (Sharjah is a much smaller, less Westernized Emirate).  With the help of Itoh, all the sauces, fillings, salsas, and guacamole are made right in Mari’s own kitchen and stored in one of three refrigerators she’s accumulated over the years.

On Thursday and Friday, Mari processes the orders that have come in through the week, while Itoh does prep work. On Saturday, they do the shopping and more prep work; Sunday they make sauces and tortillas; Monday morning they put together the enchiladas, salsas, guacamoles; pack up all the orders, drive into Abu Dhabi (Mari lives about ½ hour outside the city), and deliver their Mexican deliciousness to their hungry clientele.

In addition to her deliveries to people in the Khalidiya area, Mari delivers to the Emirates College of Applied Education, and—as if that’s not enough—she’s now at the Ripe Food Market every Friday.

Now that I’ve met Mari, I can see why the expats who live here are so protective of her culinary expertise—if she tried to retire again, I’d be one of those people lining up to help her in the kitchen.

if you’re interested ordering from Maria’s Kitchen, please email me or leave a note in comments, and I will get you the ordering information.  Maria is at the Ripe Farmers’ Market in Khalifa Park on Fridays.