Silk pashmina

Baby S and I had a wonderful time visiting my friend Bea and her boys but it's always a little sad when we're together. We're both terminally homesick and it seems like we spend all of our time lamenting about going home. We both seem to and crawl into a verbal cocoon, telling stories of adventures we've had the previous summers in the States and reliving all of the adventures we had before moving here. It seems almost like the memories we're creating here pale dimly in comparison to those created in the short visits where we see our family each year. I hate having these feelings because I want to enjoy the present, but they are so omnipresent that there's little I can do about them.

This homing instinct was never a part of my personality until I became pregnant. My friend Bea claims it was the same for her and true to this, she has always talked about "going home" since we first met, just after the birth of her oldest boy. I didn't have these feelings at all, and always told her that France suited me well for now and that I enjoyed living here. Maybe it was the beginning of the tugging that made me always say it suited me "for now" and not "forever."

As soon as I became pregnant I turned to the telephone and called my mother. I immediately discussed the purchase of plane tickets for a visit home before the end of the second trimester. And, when that month long visit to the States was finished I still hadn't had enough. For the first time in forever I didn't want to get on the airplane and go back to France. I wanted to stay where I was and have Seb come to me. It actually physically hurt every nerve in my being to get back on that airplane to come home to France. I cried a good part of the way to New York, blaming the abundance of hormones. After all I had cried just as hard a few weeks earlier over a story about terrier who found his owners after they'd moved across the country.

I still have these crying spells. I find myself drawn closer and closer to the nebulous of a world I'm more familiar with. This is the world I wanted to raise my children in, the children songs I know, the women I need, the vacations I loved as a kid. In short the nostalgia of my childhood. I'm not sure if the instinct is as strong for the male species, or maybe it has something to do with the French culture not being as buried in nostalgia as American culture. My husband doesn't seem to have this need to surround his children with the things of his own childhood. Instead I think he considered it banal and would much prefer to see his kids explore the world for themselves, and maybe even have more fun than he did doing it. Or maybe it really comes down to the fact that he's never been away from his culture enough to miss it.

We've discussed the inevitable move one day. My heart tells me loud and clear that I won't retire here in France, but that I will be painfully drawn to it from the other side of the Atlantic. Like a woman with two lovers, each with equally endearing qualities, away from one I'll continually long for the other. France is my antique, hand woven, silk pashima. I'll always wrap myself in it for it's ability to make me feel adventurous and elegant, impregnated with all of its memories of discovering another world. The States to me are like well-worn bedroom slippers, full of holes and dingy, but feeling to me like a comfortable, second skin. Right now the pashima feels a little chilly around my shoulders and the slippers seem delightfully inviting.
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