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.

The other night I went running.

I know that for some people, running is a regular task, not worthy of commentary. They just run and then do that whole bounding into brunch thing, all glowy and endorphin-y, and say “great run, dude, up at sunrise and just really cleared my head, hey, yeah, I’d love a wheatgrass juice, thanks.”

Blech.

Let’s be clear. My body ain’t exactly built for speed.

Of course, it’s not really built for endurance either. It’s built for…cheese, a little tapas, maybe a dry rosé.

But the other night, I was out at the soccer fields football pitch with the boys; it was a beautiful evening; I was wearing my sneakers. There were two empty pitches off where no one could see me as I trotted around and I figured that running on grass would perhaps cushion my increasingly rickety knees.

I stretched, I tied and re-tied my sneakers, I adjusted my walkman ipod to the music I like for exercise: loud.  Loud drowns out the slow thud of my feet and my equally thudding breath.

Off I went around the fields, The Black Keys filling in my ears, trying not to notice the slight floop floop of my tummy as I jogged along.

Okay, I think, I’m running.  My mind should be clearing, I should be feeling my creative juices bubbling up.That’s what’s supposed to happen when you run so any minute now I should be getting an idea – HEY! I could write about running. Yeah. That would be great -  maybe I should stop and write this idea down?

I do not stop. My inner gym teacher keeps yelling at me to move, dammit!  Inner gym teacher looks a bit like Sue Sylvester and a bit like Mrs. Friel, from 9th grade, who seemed to think it her mission on earth to make pre-adolescent girls cry.

I whine to myself in time with the music:  I’m huuunnnngggrrry….I’m thirrrrsssstttyyyy….I’m tirrreeed. I offer bribes to myself – ice cream, cookies, cheese – if I do just two more laps, which I figure would bring me to almost twenty minutes of non-stop running trotting jogging ambling quickly.  I do not believe my own bribes and call myself a liar.

The gym teacher screams at me again to move. I kick The Keys a little louder. Okay this running thing isn’t so bad. Let’s get a little more speed going here, yeah, that’s right, a little faster.

I am flying. I am Usain fucking Bolt here, I am burning up that field, it seems I am built for speed.

Whoosh. See that blur? Yeah. That was me.

In my mind, anyway.

Okay, maybe I was more Usain Bolt’s great-great grandmother than Usain himself, but still. I did it. Twenty minutes of non-stop “running.”

And you know what? I think I want to do it again.

**when I wasn’t pretending to be Usain Bolt (or his elderly relatives), I wrote about the expat workers in Abu Dhabi for the World Mom’s Blog, over here; and published a sort of op-ed about the relative failure of Abu Dhabi’s recycling program (as near as I can tell, the city/country doesn’t have one), over here.

Once again, Stasha’s Monday list is being made on Tuesday night, but that’s because I couldn’t figure out how to write this list until I read someone else’s post. And then I decided to plagiarize. Although, is it plagiarism if I tell you my source? I borrowed this idea whole cloth from the Sisterhood of Sensible Moms, which is a blog you really should put in regular rotation.  They asked their kids to make this list for them, and so I did the same thing – I even got one kid to make his list while we were driving, just like they did. Lest they be insulted, I will remind them that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

The original prompt for this list came from Mommy Padawan, with whom I feel a special affinity because Star Wars pretty much rules my entire household: her prompt was for us to list either 10 things we’re good at, or what we’d do for 48 hours with unlimited money and no responsibilities.  Well, writing that list would simply make me cry, having not enough of the former and WAY too much of the latter; so I went with “what I’m good at.” And then punted and asked my kids to make the list for me.

Caleb gave me his five items when I was driving him home from soccer the other night.  He was in the back seat trying to read Order of the Phoenix by the light of the streetlights; I told him not to try to read because he’d strain his eyes in the dark; he said YES I CAN TOO READ IT and held the book pretty much on the tip of his nose. And then, as if by HP magic, I was suddenly my mother, saying the exact same thing to me, when I was about the same age. As if on cue, Caleb said, look the light looks like water, mommy, and I knew exactly what he meant: speckled windows do cast a watery light.

I say, Caleb, I need a list of things I’m good at. I need five things.

You take care of us.

I wait, drive a little bit. Resounding silence from the back seat, pages rustling.

Um…Caleb? Five things?

Five?

Clearly five is a ridiculously exaggerated number. There is another pause.

Well. You’re a good cook. Of homemade stuff that you get from recipes on the internet.  And you’re good at driving in Abu Dhabi.

A signficant achievement my friends; that one is huge because driving in Abu Dhabi pretty much terrifies me.

More silence. I say “and…?”

Uh…homework. Helping with homework. And good at costumes. But not as good as daddy.

Clearly I should’ve stopped after “driving.”

So then, at home, I ask Liam, my child who has never met a test he doesn’t love; who wants to do everything perfectly, no matter what.

I say “Liam, I need a list of five things that I’m good at.

Liam panics, leaps off the couch: Why? What for? When do you need it?

It’s just a list, I say. Not a big deal.

He sits back down. Oh. Well. Pottery, you’re good at pottery. And that thing with the oar?

Paddleboarding?

Yeah. You’re good at that. And cooking.  Pottery, paddleboarding, cooking…And being a mum.

Did you say mom or mum?

Mum, he says, in flawless fauxbrit.

Anything else?

Oh. And you’re good at being on time.

Great. I’m punctual. I suppose that’s a skill. Not up there with, say, hang-gliding, playing Chopin, or knowing Mandarin, but hey. I’ll take my compliments where I can find them.

They’re beautiful, these boys, even the ones who aren’t particularly “cute.” Their skin stays close to their bones and gleams with health; when they walk they inhabit every inch of their bodies. They’re intent on their work; their arms wave with enthusiasm when they have something to say to the class and sometimes when they talk, their words come out so fast, they get tangled in their ideas and have to start again.

They’re no longer children – they’re at college in Abu Dhabi, which for all of them is a long, long way from home – but they’re not quite men, either, despite the fact that some of them have wispy little beards or long what-do-you-think-about-these sideburns.  I only went to Boston for college, from Illinois – and it felt like an epic distance, so how are these 18 year olds handling entire hemispheres of distance?

I remember the tearful phone calls I made to my mom during those years about how strange and weird it all was, that my sheets smelled funny, the food was weird, and my roommate was from some entirely alien planet called New Jersey.

These not-quite-men boys from all over the world – I have students from Hungary, Russia, California, Pakistan, Colombia, and yes, New Jersey – do they call their moms and sob? Did someone teach them, when they were young, that it’s okay for boys to cry and that frequently you feel a whole lot better after a good sob?

I think about their mothers, spread all over the world and wonder what they think about their distant children; do they imagine their boys huddled over their work, tongues gripped in the sides of their mouths as they write down their thoughts, many of them using a language that is not the language of “home?”  Curved as they are over their work, the napes of their necks are exposed; the tag of one boy’s shirt is sticking up and it’s all I can do not to walk over and tuck it down, as I imagine his mother would have done, were she in the room.

When my boys were babies, I would nestle my thumb in that little divot at their nape and feel their pulse inside – incredibly fragile and incredibly strong at the same time. I miss that neat match of thumb to neck; I miss that babyhead smell.

Mostly, though, when I look at the boys in my class, I wonder about touching. Not in the professor-is-a-cougar sort of way, but mother-child, all those things I do with my boys now. My boys still curl into my lap, sidle up to me and lean on my shoulders, clamber up my legs for a monkey hug. Sometimes, true, I want them to leave me alone, but then I remind myself that these days of easy intimacy are numbered. Girls, I think, get to stay in physical contact with their moms forever but somewhere, somehow, at least in the West, we’ve given our boys – and ourselves – the idea that too much touching is unmanly, inappropriate, wrong. I don’t want to give my sons the idea that “men don’t hug” – and then again, I don’t want them to be teased (or worse) for expressing affection.  Somewhere, I suppose, there’s a balance – but why do I have to teach my boys that hugging is only for “little kids?”

I wonder what will happen when these boys return home at the end of the term. Will their mothers hug them – but quickly, stepping away before they want to let go? Will a mom want to stroke her son’s curly hair at night as he falls asleep but content herself instead with a light kiss on his cheek?

I look at these boys in my class, intent on their work, so far away from home, and I wonder if their mothers were ready to let them go.