An evening out

Last night we we're invited to a barbecue* at the house of one of Seb's colleagues, a super nice French couple we first met in January over an apéritif. I felt bad about not having called the wife back but it was one of those cases where I had meant to get together with her but for some reason didn't get around to it even though she lives in the same neighborhood. The evening was fun and about thirteen people showed up, many couples and all bi-cultural mixed couples with a French connection which was even more fun.

I finally got to meet the wife of Seb's best work buddy Emmanual who was also there and we really hit it off right away. We had a lot in common even though she's Mexican and I'm American, probably because we both have French husbands. Our boys are only a few weeks apart in age and she had tales of giving birth in France with him that paralleled my giving birth here in Mexico --being eight months pregnant and living in the hotel for three months and giving birth without speaking the language. We also shared some similar views on French culture and how hard it is to integrate in to it. In fact she was so disenchanted with small French village life that she convinced her husband to move back to Mexico. We talked for much of the evening and she was amused to hear that I had spent ten hours on a plane with her in-laws back at Christmas break. We had bumped into Emmanual who was depositing his parents at the airport and then we shared their flight from Mexico, their seats not too far from ours. Seb and I got on great with the parents and I thought how odd that I'd met her in-laws before meeting her, and then of course all of the mention of the in-laws brought up the elephant in the room. She'd given birth to a little boy two weeks after Charlotte and he'd only lived for three days because of a heart defect.

I was horrified by her story when I first heard it. Seb had been telling me about a French guy at his job whose wife was due soon too and I was interested because we'd be having our babies at nearly the same time. When he came home with the news that the baby had died I couldn't compute it. How does this happen? I had Charlotte in my arms when he told me and the tears started. I told him right away, "you have to take him aside for coffee and talk to him. " It seemed that no one at Seb's job wanted to talk to the poor guy. Seb felt slightly awkward too but he did finally pull Emmanual aside and chatted with him about it. Then a few weeks later we were headed back to France he was at the airport too dropping off his parents. They had come for the funeral. It was kind of uncomfortable standing there with the newborn Charlotte but we all started talking and the subject came up and we all breathed a little better that we could stop making small talk and discuss what was looming.

The babecue evening ended with Seb and me feeling sad that we were leaving, especially with all the group trading stories about living here and one newbie couple getting lots of advice from everyone else about where to shop and go out to eat. Everyone kept teasing us about rainy Paris and how they'd be sipping margaritas in our honor while we were trudging through another gray and balmy day. We laughed at the time, but walking home in the dark to our house afterwards in the cool, night Mexican breezes we both admitted that hopefully Paris is just a pit stop towards another destination. And of course there's always the hope that a job will appear out of nowhere and we can stay here for a few more years.

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* I was secretly dreading suffering through another French barbecue. Most of the time the French don't do much on the barbecue in the way of seasonings and marinades and it's often just a pile of burned up meat on the food tray because of the Frenchman's love of talking and debating. They just don't take the barbecue post seriously enough! This time it was actually pretty good.