The Exchange, Day 17

One of the aspects of “modern” foreign exchange is all the technological trappings that come with it. Child is barely here before we are “orienting” him to American family ways, which I’m sure he’s already had, back in France, in preparation for an American homestay. This company dots its “i’s” and crosses its “t’s,” and then proceeds to hammer on every other letter of the alphabet, too. How do you say “overkill” en francais? So here we are, sitting down with the little travelling band, who are so jetlagged their heads sing, slogging through the forms and paperwork we’ve all been emailed for weeks now,  telling them to take short showers and say thank you, often. Americans like it when you say thank you.

Then a day later, Camille is required to text both the American coordinator and the French coordinator who flew over with them. Then I, the host mom, have to text the American coordinator. Then sometime during the week he has to call the French coordinator and she has to call me. “Check-in,” Oui? It’s a little like today’s insta-review with, say, Verizon or Amazon, where you’ve barely hung up the phone and some overeager survey wants to know “how’d we do, how’d we do, how’d we do?” Fine, but I’m going to ding you on self-confidence. Shut up, already! By the time we’re done making electronic niceties and the exchange is off and running, we have to do it all over again the second week, and then again on the third. People. Please! I want to live this exchange, not live evaluating it!

Meanwhile, travelling child has at his finger-tips WhatsApp, Facetime, Skype and I don’t know what else to stay in daily touch with his parents, which he is not supposed to do–but he might, if you are not vigilant. I was surprised to go upstairs to seek my new boy that first weekend and find him visiting with his mom and a darling half-naked brother named Jacques. Hmmm. French boys really do like to hang out in their underwear. Equally surprised to come through the garage door a week later loaded down with bags of groceries and holler for the boys in what I hope was a delightful, musically polite request of them, because Camille shows up at the doorway with his mom. When he flashes the phone screen in my face so I can talk to her, too, I remember that before grocery I was at yoga and before yoga I was not in the shower, so I decline and decide he does not have to help me this time. Somebody needs to think this through a little better, anyway. I found it hard to holler up the stairs, “Get off the phone with your mother and come be part of this family!” Actually, as a step-mom I forget I been there before…

He has a group chat going with the other kids he’s just met on the plane, which I fear will outlast any connection he’ll make with us, mainly because it is so easy. Doesn’t matter that in a sense those French kids are the “random strangers” and we are the chosen family, matched by a professional host/exchange organization since March. He’s been coming here, chez nous, four months before that plane even took off, and yet they have a leg-up. From the get-go they share more with Camille then he ever will with my boy–and they have the language to prove it. The kid is so “connected” he’s not even there! But he might, he might be, if we were to get him “only,” for that is a state of being that truly opens one to the world. I can show you a better time here, boy, if first you let me teach you orphan….

I spent a year in France. Week after week, month after month, until it came to a year. In that time I made one phone call, home, on Christmas day. It was among the most anticipated, joy-giving phone calls I have made in my life, but even it could not match our primary mode of connection: we wrote letters. We sent postcards and airmail letters and from time to time received little care packages from home. I read and re-read those letters, savoring them. I waited for letters with breath caught in my throat and butterflies everywhere when the mail came. I held them lightly, treasured the writing that seemed to carry a bit of the sender with it. Font has personality, we all know that. Or it did, before lol, idk, and nvmnd. And letters smell like the places whence they came. If I could ‘read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them’ I might have, so sacred were those pages when I was oh so far from home. This is to say nothing of the love letters written across an ocean. Ahhh, me, I will not go there. I will not go there.

I have felt homesick and lost in the world in ways no modern child ever will. Like a little nut rattling round in search of a pocket. A dull ache deep in the pit of you, a longing that both hollows you and warms you from deep within, because it almost always comes with a tinge of gratitude. It gives you a heightened sense of who you are in the world. And where you are. Makes you work a little harder on being here. Being present. It was practically part of my education and I know it shaped me. Homesickness teaches. It does. I knew then that the world is larger than I, so small inside it, and because of that I have stayed curious to know it. Today, because of the lie of “connectedness” we think the earth is small and we are large in it. Larger than it. But that old world “disconnect” has its vision all its own, a truer read on the sitch: In the words of the Breton fisherman, “Dear God, be good to me. The sea is so wide. And my boat is so small.”

Camille’s approach to the required check-ins is to give them the attention and thought any 13-year old boy would: which is to say, nothing, nada, rien. So for three weeks in a row, since his little crack-o-matic can’t text, he uses my phone (defeating even more of the purpose if there were one!!). Here is what he writes: “I’m fine and I like my family.” Okay good, we pass. They’re not going to take him back. Invariably, the check-in comes at the most inopportune times: late at night or mid-ride in the amusement park or when he’s in the shower. Here we are, screaming up 95. Here we are, trying to order sandwiches at the sub-shop and put up with his ridiculousness. No, here we are at the pool, or the lake, or at table.  So I have a little difficulty getting the job done, and I’m the mom here. Burden is on me. Couple times I think to myself, hmmmm. It’s my phone… I’m the native speaker… How’s about we cut out the middle man and get ‘er done…? Camille takes care of my stifled dishonesty by sending exactly what I would have: “I’m fine and I like my family.” Each time. For three weeks. Like pushing a button on the back of a talking doll: “I’m fine and I like my family.” Apparently this in-depth report on the situation satisfies, and we move on in the time of our lives.

After he goes, on that last day, understandably I’m a little on edge. I’ve just put a child on a plane for his very long and multi-faceted voyage home, a journey that will cover 4000 miles and take over 24 hours. It’s a little like putting my nine-year-old ALONE (alone!) on that class-5 Disney roller coaster ride “Expedition Everest,” which once he was on it looked to be thousands of feet from the ground, and then worrying a little path from the exit to the viewing point to the exit, behaving the whole time like the Himalayan yeti herself. I LOVE these people and I have hard time letting go!

I try to impress upon Camille how much I would love to hear that he is arrived, that he is safe. Same thing I did with our French girl the summer before. A “check in,” oui? They’ve lived in your home and your heart for a month, they are a few cells yours by now, and you want to know. I want to know. I detail the ways that he could do that. He could email me. He could. We did that with some photos he shared with me. We can’t text and we can’t use WhatsApp because of there being no sim card in his “phone,” which is why the American coordinator has had to go through me these past few weeks. I suppose he could message me on Instagram, which he helps set up on my phone, adding himself to my list of 16 followers, so I can stalk him the way I do my other keds. “You write to me Camille, eh? You write and tell me that you are home safe.”

And then he’s gone. The little group is ushered like ducklings to a waiting plane. The French coordinator is busy handing out boarding passes and checking passports to her  little flock. “CAM-ee!” I hear her call the littlest one. He takes the boarding pass but has nothing else in his hands when she asks. Now, I had carried that passport in my own hands from the car into the airport. I carried it myself, knowing from years of travel that this is the most precious piece in the last moments, and it is also the slipperiest. It’s like it has a mind of its own. So I had handed it directly to the French chaperone. She, unwisely, had handed it to boy at the ticket counter. Now he has stopped midstride, is looking around not finding it, mildly concerned, looks back at me, and then in the same motion puts down his suitcase and begins to run toward me. He is coming back! He’s coming back to me for one last hug that will outlast his childhood and my mortal life! It’s like a freaking movie. Somebody cue the music. Others are looking at us, trying to see what is the problem, so when he’s at me he speaks in hushed voice, looking flustered, sounding sheepish: “Eu, Jennie-fair, have you mon passport?” I don’t, I don’t! It’s in his pocket, he’s all set, okay, go–but then my arms are around him again. Ah, Camille, boy of my heart, I knew you forgot something. Here, have a bowling ball.

To say there’s something missing when Will and I return home is understatement. My heart hurts like that homesickness I told you about, desperately gasping for more time, more time, my family, but also slowly filling with gratitude from deep within. These are waters I know, and I swim lightly. Must not swamp the boat, there, lady. It’s a little like casting a line in seemingly  still water with the trust there is something there. So you wait. I wait. I still trust the old, time-tested ways of concourse. I know enough not to barrage his email. Blow up his phone, if even I could. (or if buddy on a blow torch hadn’t already!) I play it cool. That night before I go up, I send a little photo from the empty lake, trying so hard to be brief the way kids are brief, NEVER giving enough: “Camille, we miss you! The lake is calling your name.”

No answer.

A day later I open my email-box and there it is: “re: empty lake,” sent at (my eyes pop!) 3 a.m. his time. Ooooh la la! He was right about there being no restriction “een France.” Does your mamma know what you’re up to, French boy? It’s the only new email in my box, bolded for being new, and it jumps at me. Okay, I’ll admit it. My heart leaps, too. Pathetic, n’est ce pas? I open it, his first report from being home with his mama and his papa and his little brother, Jacques, and I have to chuckle. I hang on his every word, which is hard, as there are so few. All the way from Cogolin France, where my little bird has finally landed:

“Hello. I’m fine and I like my family.”

Well, that’s good, Camille! Glad to hear it. ‘Cause if you don’t you can certainly come back here!

The second thing he tells me makes me chuckle harder. Remember the beginning? Remember? You tell me life isn’t one wide, glorious circle spinning out what it comes round to catch. “I’m fine. I like my family. But my baggages is still in New York.”  (weeping smiley face emojis here). Way to go Delta, way to go. If all those stuffed plush pythons coiled inside the bag get hungry, they can eat the ketchup I stuffed in his shoes.

Photo by Edoardo Tommasini on Pexels.com