France’s cultural hallmark
Patience. Flexibility. Understanding. Melatonin. This is what I have discovered will get me through a time of compounded uncertainty circled in quiet anxiety. Our current instability means no car, no home, no school and no schedule of any sort. Add France’s famed bureaucratic process of getting a bank account, permanent residence status, and other necessities to build our new lives, our family is caught in a holding pen of waiting. This is where patience is needed to go along with the rhythm of accomplishing the very things your family needs to get on with it, in France.
Now add Covid in the mix and a national semi-lockdown, checking things off your to-do list gets even more interesting. Want to buy a car? Sure, it can still happen but don’t expect a test drive and getting the full treatment from the salesperson. Buy your car by email and phone. Yeah, right. So we wait.
As recent arrivals to a foreign land, we decided to rent first. We now have begun the search for an abode to start our new lives as expats. Between the advice of the few local folks we know, the fact that we prefer a village outside the metropolitan area of Montpellier and informed with the knowledge of the limitations of square footage, actually square meters all over Europe, we started the search to settle in by internet.
With the aid of our local relocation specialist hired by my husband’s employer, Randy and I are hunting for our “perfect” French home. There is limited inventory and our quest is proving to be quite more challenging than originally thought. This where the virtue of flexibility kicks in. So much for our idea of a small French cottage, we are now looking for anything with walls, doors and some decent footage in the right quartier. I will have to learn to deal with only having one bathroom for four people. Adapt to 100 sq meters (roughly 1000 sq. ft) of living area. Learn how to park our future car in the most compact of spaces without incident. And my personal tribulation, go without the fluffy warmness, fresh from a heated vented dryer moment I loved from my American appliance.
This search for a habitat will also need to follow France’s guideline for Covid during lockdown. Basically meaning that we will be unable to personally visit potential homes. Viewing a rental would only come in the form of a video tour and possibly, the allowed site visit from Andy, our relocation contact to give us feedback. With time on our hands, Randy and I have tracked down the homes we are interested in through clues provided by photos on the site. We pin down the general area from the map, study the pictures for identifiable traits and go on a mission to scout the place for its exact location. So far, the results have been more disappointing than not, but I am learning that flexibility is key. Just got to go with an open mind. Au revoir colorful French cottage.
So for now, we wait in our 450 sq. ft. AirBnB. Wait for our goods to arrive from the container ship. Wait to find a place to live and to send our possessions to. Wait to enroll our children in school.
This is where understanding comes in. Children everywhere are experiencing an odd time in their lives all over the world. The pandemic has brought upon a hurdle of circumstances that are delicate, worrisome and exhausting. Our sons have been transplanted across the Atlantic to a foreign country with a foreign language with no place for them to land. Their social connections are now at a greater distance and daily schedules are at a standstill.
As we have no choice to casually stand by to get our lives in order in France, our sons are alongside with us doing things that they find awfully uneventful. Despite the numerous sessions of DuoLingo they are doing to help them prepare them for assimilation into a French school, hopefully before the Christmas holidays, they too are going through their own emotions about this whole experience. It is only the four of us, all the time.
It is difficult for me to say if relocating to France with Covid while the country is in lockdown is going to make us closer as a family. I will say that we are physically close all the time. Plus we are the only ones that can speak to one another in elongated sentences. So we are a tight knit family right now, doing our best to be kind to one another.
And the melatonin? Sleep is necessary if I am starting from scratch, de zéro to be the patient, flexible and understanding wife, mother and global citizen while building a new life in La France. I am only human.
wonderlifeofmom 