Week One. Done.

Week one down, and the transition abroad has been surprisingly smooth. I keep waiting for the bottom to fall out of whatever giant ass block of chevre I find myself atop of every evening after dinner, but instead, life is simply leaving me on the shallow end of a pool of toddler pee to clean up here and there, wine glass in hand. My favorite are those pee pee puddles that seem to manifest themselves three feet from the toilet. Is this an unappreciated gift – or is she punishing me for too much transition during the most trying of times: the terrible twos? In any case, we have arrived. After six months of soul stretching, alligators and other reptiles of the mighty Brazos Bend, a full season of crawfish boils, a stint of potty training (which has regressed), and a few tattoos in Montreal, we have made it to the French countryside. And I’m drinking every apéro I can get my hands on because, dear world, I deserve it. It’s hard to think about what goes on behind the scenes when one decides to be brave because everything that leads up to it spans all sides of the emotional spectrum: I ran, I hid, I threw myself out there and streaked down the I WILL DO THIS interstate, I sank, I clawed, I tossed everything out the window in a silent rage of slow tears, I chatted with mama, I screamed for mama, I turned to Nature, I buried it, I tore the ground up with my hands and pulled it all back out again and stuffed it into my pockets for safe keeping. But then I forced myself to sit with it in a very raw form and asked some honest questions: what matters now, what will matter then, what makes me as an individual human being feel good, what do I have the potential to be if I choose the positive – and what does my family have the potential to become if that’s the version of myself they move forward with in life? In the end, I chose what made me feel good. I admired the woman I’ve been and all the lives she’s led up to now. I honored the woman I’ve become and what she values, especially when family is involved. I stopped being scared of making the wrong choice and directed, instead, my fear towards what might happen if I made no choice at all. Fear went from being debilitating to helping me defy the obstacles that I used to have lined up around orange cones before me, waiting for someone with a clipboard to say go.

Week one. Done. And I’ve never been more proud.