One year later: the view from abroad
Waiting patiently
Interlude 7: One year later
13 February 2023: our darling little girl’s 5th birthday.
13 February 2022: our little girl’s 4th birthday party, a surreal experience overshadowed by the decision we – I? – had just made the day before to leave the next day, my daughter and I. (note to students: this is not a terribly good sentence; please don’t write like this)
If you’re a parent, you’ll know the cliché very well: Where has the time gone? They grow up so fast.
We left Kyiv on Valentine’s Day, with a return ticket for mid-March. We were leaving as a precaution, though precaution hardly captures how agonising a decision it was.
An accidental career
Late March 2022, Vienna: I sit here on a glorious sunshiny spring morning in Stadtpark, one of Central Europe’s most picturesque parks, with birds chirping, fountains in full flow, couples promenading hand-in-hand, the distant strains of a busker adding a jazz soundtrack to the setting. Ah, the life of an English teacher abroad! This is what it all leads up to: a comfortable, laid-back life in one of the world’s greatest cities, a city that regularly tops various Quality of Life indexes or makes it to the top three of any ‘Best Cities in the World to Live In’ rankings. This, then, is the luxuriant life of the English teacher.
Well, not quite. This is not my home. My home is…was (?) Kyiv, Ukraine, where I have (had?) lived since September 2010. But now I’m a refugee, I guess. I’m not sure I have a home there anymore, but maybe I do.
This is definitely not the life of the ‘typical’ English teacher, but what is typical, what is normal anymore? When people set out to teach English as a foreign language, cities like Vienna, Paris, Berlin and Amsterdam aren’t typically places teachers end up. Madrid, Barcelona, Roma – for sure. Across the Danube into Central and Eastern Europe – Bratislava, Prague, Budapest, Krakow, Bucharest, Kyiv – absolutely. And of course, many places much further afield: the Middle East, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, South America.
Vienna – a place I thought I might end up, possibly, if I had chosen a different career path, a career path I thought possible for a while: diplomacy, international development, the NGO world.
Here we are, one year later and we’re no closer to any certainty over anything.
‘The need for certainty is the greatest disease the mind faces.’
(Robert Greene)
My daughter was so excited in the run-up to her birthday – aren’t all kids? She couldn’t stop talking about her Peppa Pig cake, the presents, the food, the sweets, the family get-togethers…but over the past few weeks, she has been just as – if not more – excited talking about Ukraine’s eventual victory party.
‘Daddy, when Ukraine wins, can we have a victory party? And I can drink lots of cola and eat lots of ice cream and you can drinks lots of beer.’
‘Of course my darling. You can have as much cola and ice cream as you want, and you can even have beer if you want.’
‘No, daddy, I don’t want beer, but you can have cola and ice cream too!’
She’s very sweet.
But she’s also impatient. She keeps asking me ‘when will the war be over?’ and I don’t have any answers for her.
A year ago I wrote about how hard it is to explain war to a four-year old. I’m not sure it’s any easier with a five-year old, but she is certainly eagerly anticipating victory. And she is a lot more perceptive these days.
English teachers and grammar
Philosophically speaking, regrets, what-ifs, hypotheticals and woulda/coulda/shouldas aren’t so healthy. Just live in the present, don’t dwell on the past. Don’t fear the future, embrace the uncertainty, all that stuff. That’s what they say, anyway, right?
Grammatically speaking: you can’t avoid these things. There is so much grammar we teach that fits these context so perfectly:
If only I hadn’t become an English teacher!
If I had chosen a different career field, then I could be working as a diplomat in Ouagadougou right now.
I shouldn’t have gone back to work in Ukraine in 2010.
None of the above situations can be changed: it’s all in the past. What’s done is done.
Every English teacher who has taught the second conditional – the tense we use for these hypotheticals – will no doubt recognise the typically banal, clichéd examples from textbooks:
If I won the lottery, I’d quit my job and travel around the world.
If I were an animal, I’d be a bird.
If I could have any magic power, I would be invisible so I could go to…and… [insert your own finish here, but see if you can guess what 95% of teenage boys come up with]
These are hypotheticals about now and can, in theory, be changed: it’s all in the present.
And now these:
I wish we could go back to Kyiv.
If we didn’t have a daughter, we’d definitely return to Kyiv right now.
It’s so easy, in a way, to talk in hypotheticals. Well, we do have a daughter and that makes it all the more difficult to decide. But if we didn’t…And sure, there’s nothing, technically, stopping from us from returning to Kyiv right now, but…
I’m indecisive at the best of times.
Conditionals in the classroom: it’s one giant hypothetical exercise, and then in real life it’s not so hypothetical, even though it is, technically.
We could return to Kyiv, but…
I have friends who are abroad. I have friends who went abroad and returned to Ukraine. I have friends who went abroad, returned to Ukraine, and then went back abroad. I have friends who never left Ukraine.
Some have kids, some don’t. Some with kids have stayed abroad. Some have returned. Some never left.
I’m not complaining: we’re safe in Vienna. It’s such a lovely city. Our daughter is thriving, she loves her kindergarten, she seems to be speaking decent German, and she’s already met the love of her life who she says she wants to marry, a fellow five-year old named Ophir. She has even picked out her wedding dress, one she saw in a shop window, and she talks about how they kiss and she tried to show me the other day, on the metro platform on the way to kindergarten, how her first wedding dance with Ophir is going to go. (She’s also developed a talent for creative lying and storytelling too, so…)
With various commuters looking on and giggling, my daughter seemed to have her first dance routine down very well. And where did she learn this? From carefully watching my sister dance with her old man for the father-daughter dance at their wedding last summer.
Again, I’m not complaining here, and I want to be careful. People have lost everything. We are so fortunate.
But we’re also impatient and want real life to continue, and we want to get back to some kind of ‘normal’, whatever that is, if that is even possible. Our barely-lived-in new apartment is waiting for us. We’re in a tiny cramped apartment in Vienna. We can’t figure out the damn health-care system here and other sorts of bureaucracy and all of us seem to be ill all the time. It really sounds like I’m complaining. Maybe it’s an attempt to get back to some kind of normality, pretend that real life just goes on like it does before with the usual ennui, the aches and pains of everyday life, the usual stuff people whinge about when life is ‘normal’ and there is some routine to everything.
Then you have to stop yourself and say: stop it. Get on with it. It’s not normal, it’s far from normal.
‘Don't be overheard complaining...even to yourself.’
(Marcus Aurelius)
This was my first post of 2022, some 13 months ago:
And in it I said this:
[Here’s] a story that illustrates ‘don’t pickle anything’, my favourite advice from the past couple of years, from a New York Times column that I’ve long lost.
From August 2015 to September 2021, my mother-in-law lived in Vienna and we visited her multiple times over the years. Vienna, and those who have been there will know, is full of cultural delights, including some of the world’s greatest museums and galleries, most of which I had planned on visiting at some point. There were also plenty of daytrips, including supposedly one of Europe’s most beautiful train journeys, that I wanted to undertake.
A friend once told me about his philosophy of travelling, and it’s one I really appreciated and incorporated. Although he’d been to San Francisco many times, he’d never taken the famous cable cars, because he always wanted a good reason to go back – not everyone has the luxury of re-visiting places, but considering that Vienna was so close, and that we had a reason to visit once or twice a year, I always figured I was safe in saving some of the trips and museums for future visits.
And then Covid hit in March 2020. And we never made it to all those galleries, and we never took that epic train journey, all because I was saving it for future trips.
(at this point, I would forgive you, dear reader, for interjecting here and saying ‘right, so in other words, don’t procrastinate?’ yeah, sure, but ‘don’t pickle anything’ sounds better.)
‘Don’t pickle anything’ is a fun piece of advice, but also conflicting. I love pickles/gherkins, and I love the pickled vegetables so common in Ukraine every winter.
But ‘pickling’ too many other things means missing out on some great opportunities, or saving things until it’s too late. I have unworn shirts I bought two or three years ago that I have yet to wear, and by now, my belly might be too big for me to fit into them. As a teacher, I have my treasure chest of favourite activities which I like to put off for as long as I can, and then suddenly it gets near the end of the school year and I’m scrambling to squeeze them all in, berating myself for not having done them sooner. Imagine you’re an aspiring musician or writer – the dilemma might be whether to use all your best material for that first book or album, gaining a huge following and meeting with immediate success, or saving some of the good stuff for later, only for your first piece of work to be met with ‘eh, this could’ve been so much better…’
Wear that outfit right away. Eat that extra mature cheddar cheese before it goes off. Tell your best jokes first thing. Have that difficult conversation now, not before it’s too late.
Maybe pickle a few things, but be careful what you pickle. (and let that be a euphemism, if it makes you feel better).
Missing out on…great opportunities…it just feels so wrong to call all of this a ‘great opportunity’. I didn’t actually want to return to Vienna, I was more just lamenting the missed opportunities from before.
Dear readers, thank you – as always – for reading and putting up with my self-indulgent thoughts and reflections. It’s my way of catharsis. I’m probably repeating thoughts from the past year or so, and I might have stated them better and more clearly then. You’ll have to forgive me: my mind is pretty jumbled up these days. If you’ve been a loyal reader from the get-go, I very much appreciate it.
For anyone who might have missed some of the drivel I wrote over the past year, feel free to go back and [re]visit my posts:
Comments
Post a Comment