Jenyfer Matthews

A year ago today I was putting my children on the bus to school in Cairo. It was a national holiday, Police Day, so most other people had the day off. Even taking that into account, the streets were exceptionally quiet and the bus driver and monitor quite jumpy. They obviously knew more about the situation than I did.

A year ago today, my life began to change course tremendously. If anyone had told me that the scheduled protest that occurred that day and continued into the weekend would topple the president of Egypt and that a year later I’d be living in Michigan waging war on mice (rats!), I’d have thought they were nuts. And yet, here I am.

A friend asked me the other day if it felt like longer than a year, or shorter. It feels like both. It is all so vivid in my mind that it might have happened last week. Yet, this last year was so filled with anxiety and stress and genuine grief over what was happening and how things were changing that how could it not feel longer? It was exhausting and sad. I never dreamed that when we left on that evacuation flight, the children and I wouldn’t be going back – that the walk I took on my last morning in our neighborhood would be the last time I’d see it.

The last views of my street:

Barricades still up so the self-appointed checkpoint groups could see who wanted access to the street.

The intersection I crossed nearly every day with the children on our way to tennis lessons, as quiet as I’ve ever seen it.

An Army commando on guard, a half barrel across the street for a fire at night.

Knowing what we know now about how the army has behaved in Egypt, his presence on the street conveys a different feeling.

A different friend of mine, this one half Egyptian, recently told me that though I’d lived in Egypt, I didn’t really know it because I didn’t get out much. She said it in passing, in a casual way not meant to offend, but I have to say the comment stung. I never claimed to be an expert on the place and no, I didn’t leave our immediate neighborhood much on a day to day basis. I’ll bet I could say the same to her about where she now lives in Maryland. However, when I was working my way through the archives of this blog to back up my more interesting posts, there are many, many posts about the various places I visited. When I read through them now, I see someone who was interested in the country and curious about the culture (though I might not have always interpreted things correctly). I think that should count for something.

When my husband was offered his job in Egypt, I wasn’t pleased to go. In the end, I didn’t want to leave. Egypt is the kind of place that gets under your skin.

So, though I am now busy making a life for our family in Michigan, I’m still watching the events in Egypt with interest – and missing the life we had there and the people to whom I never had the opportunity to say a proper goodbye.

My husband and I have moved eight times in our married life – some of those moves longer distances than others – and this last move from Egypt to Michigan was the first time he had to do all the coordinating himself.

It was extremely difficult for me to not be in control. I gave some thought to going back to Egypt to handle it myself but it didn’t make sense logistically or financially. Would I bring the children back with me? If so, then we would have to pay 3x international airfare (ouch!) and they would miss the start of the school year. Did I go alone? Though I had a very kind offer from a friend in Ohio, I wasn’t totally comfortable leaving the children for as long as it would take me to do the packing, mostly because of the distance we’d be separated. There was no way around it: I had to leave it to my husband and the movers to do the job.

It was a trickier job than you might think.

When we initially moved to Egypt from the United Arab Emirates, we had to create an inventory list of our belongings in order to get duty-free status on our shipment. Doesn’t sound like such a big deal until you read the fine print: it was recommended we list things like rare books, CDs, and DVDs by title and all electronics by serial number. Not only that, but we had to promise to take anything listed on our inventory list back out of Egypt when we left – even broken appliances, old computers, and VHS tapes of The Wiggles, which my children have long outgrown.

That’s not to say that we couldn’t have purged a decent amount – anything that was purchased in Egypt could be left there. I used my toaster oven quite frequently, but given the fact that toaster ovens are pretty easy to come by and the one I had in Cairo was 220v, there was certainly no reason to pack it up and ship it to the US. Same goes for the vacuum cleaner that they did ship. The children have grown quite a bit in a year and most of the shoes and clothes we left behind don’t fit anymore so all of that stuff could have gone.

My husband sold our TV and a few other things, but if I had been there on the spot, I could have had a sale and purged or donated so much more. I could have cleaned things before they were packed so I didn’t have to unroll a large carpet and find it filled with crumbs! Or a water bottle at the bottom of a tennis bag that actually still had some water in it and was leaking. I could have packed things more sensibly. But I wasn’t there and anything that we saved on airfare by my not going, we probably spent on shipping stuff that could have been ditched.

For instance, it was difficult for my husband to get parts for his mountain bike in Cairo so he would bring things like tires and gears back in the summertime. He replaced his tires and tubes one year, but kept the old tires just in case. My husband didn’t purge them in time so the movers packed them up and shipped them. They also shipped half a dozen punctured soccer balls and a step-ladder that belonged to the furnished apartment we lived in. Oops! And that’s only what I’ve found so far.

Those things I can kind of understand – I mean, they don’t want to judge what is and isn’t important to someone – but they also shipped an empty shoebox. Really???

Had I been there, I could also have supervised the packing and made sure it was done efficiently. I found a framed piece of papyrus which wasn’t wrapped at all – sandwiched between two lovely hand-embroidered pictures. Amazingly the glass did not break, but if it had, it would have shredded the papyrus and the embroidery.

The shipment is charged by weight but also by volume. There was no reason for dresser drawers, though heavy, to travel empty. Surely they could have bagged up some stuffed animals or pillows to fill them with and saved us a couple of boxes and that much space. Sigh.

Over the years, people kept telling us it was the items we put storage before we went abroad in 1999 that we would end up throwing away. Ironically, I think there is much more trash in this shipment. After all, I purged and packed all the stuff that ended up in storage!

Oh well, I suppose in the long run it is better that the movers erred on the side of shipping too much rather than making decisions to get rid of things that we might have really missed. It is going to take a long time to sort through all this stuff and find the things I really want among all the junk, however. I’ve already put a bag of outgrown, worn out childrens tennis shoes to the curb along with the bike tires. I can only imagine how much more garbage / donations will be generated. Not sure the Egyptian light bulbs that came over will work here and I know the night lights won’t!

I also see a garage sale and some more furniture projects in my future…

Here it is, already November and nearly the end of the first marking period for the children’s schools.

My little man seems to be settled in nicely. He’s been happy and comfortable pretty much since day one actually. In the past he’s always given me a hard time about going to school and has had frequent, vague “stomach aches” in the mornings. Those are a thing of the past. He still enjoys the weekends more, mostly because he has a couple of school buddies who live in our neighborhood and a patch of woods off the back of the house to explore. What more could a nine-year-old boy ask for?

My daughter has had a rougher transition. For one thing, she started sixth grade: the dreaded middle school. Not only did she have to learn to use a combination locker (I still have nightmares about forgetting my combination!) but she had to figure out her schedule and switching classrooms / teachers. That made her nervous but at least that change in system was new to every sixth grader. The transition has actually been much harder socially.

Sixth grade is a rough year and can be a nasty age. Whether they acknowledge it or not, everyone is so insecure about themselves and their position in the social pecking order that they will do just about anything to anyone to make themselves feel more powerful and “seem cool”. Not a fun age at all. You couldn’t pay me to go back to sixth grade.

My daughter is new to public schools and is a real marshmallow inside. She’s also used to being fairly popular and is having a tough time figuring out how to fit into this new, much larger school with its unfamiliar social currents. She’s a girl who is a superb athlete and has a tom-boy’s fashion sense which sets her way apart from the majority of the girls in her school (according to her anyway). She’s starting to grow her hair out and is demanding braces.

But more pressing, she’s not fluent in US-speak.

She came home very down one afternoon this week, feeling stupid because there are so many things she doesn’t know. Like what a 7-11 is – or a “slushie.” Someone offered her a “pixie stick” and they were astonished when she asked what it was. It is all so minor that I find it kind of amusing, but she. does. not.

I tried to comfort her by pointing out that none of her classmates knew how to call someone a donkey in Arabic, had taken a school field trip that required a flight and a passport, had gone snorkeling in the Red Sea, or had been inside a pyramid. She smiled when I reminded her of all the things that she had already experienced in her short life and also pointed out that all of this is relative – none of this will matter in a few years.

But it’s tough when all you want is to blend into the crowd and you stand out so much.

Also funny for me to think that she did pretty much blend into the crowd in Cairo because her school required uniforms and her friends were doing all the things she was doing and more… and on that thought I guess it isn’t surprising that the girls on her soccer team who she liked best are the ones whose parents are immigrants…

It’s been a busy week, what with upacking and sorting the bits and pieces of my life.

I started by looking through the many boxes labeled “Memorabilia” from our time capsule so I could get them out of the way before our air shipment from Cairo arrived. That was amusing.

Yes, I used to care enough about wearing makeup that I had a mirror which I could set to “daytime” and “evening” lighting. I also found a cordless curling iron and two unopened BUTANE canisters for it! 1) I don’t remember owning or using such an item (though I did have a corded curling iron I used every day); 2) storing the butane canisters was a very bad idea and I’m lucky that they didn’t combust at some point; 3) a butane curling iron seems like a very bad idea – just add hair spray and POOF!

I also found this. What is it though??

I took pottery lessons way back when and according to the stamp on the bottom, I made it. I was looking at it, wondering if I had planned to display a marble at some point, and in the process of writing this post I remembered: I made it to replace the base of a glass salt shaker that had been knocked over and broken by a cat. Since it is loose and I ran across the loose shaker top, I suppose it didn’t fit!

Our air shipment arrived this week, bright and early Tuesday morning. Fourteen boxes in all, most of which looked as if they’d been run over by a truck before being delivered. It’s amazing that none of our glassware broke, but I am still glad that the box mislabeled “sewing machine” wasn’t actually my Bernina. It was my jewelry box!

Since I was not in Cairo to (micro)manage what got packed and shipped, there were some things that showed up by air that could have come a slower method – or not at all!

Hmmm… I am guessing that I was planning to make A LOT of Christmas cookies at some point. I usually bought the sugar and brought it back because you could not find it in Cairo – unless you had a friend that worked at the Embassy. I guess I better get busy this year. I am now in possession of TWO cookie guns too so no more excuses!

Apparently I also planned to make a lot of muffins! Actually, I used to stockpile these – you couldn’t always find decent muffin papers in Cairo so when I did, I snapped them up. With what I’ve bought since I’ve been in our new house I could probably make muffins and cupcakes for a couple of years and not run out!

(Note to self: make cupcakes for soccer game tomorrow!)

What surprised me most about seeing all these things is how sad it all made me. I’m glad to have my things in one place, but my – how time marches on. One group of items is from a life I put on “hold” while I went abroad. In the time we were away my husband’s mother, uncle, and grandmother died, as did my own mother and grandmother. So many memories of them surfaced as I found old letters, photos, and objects that reminded me of them. The arrival of our air shipment contains the items of a life cut-short. We never planned to stay in Egypt forever, but we never had a chance to say a proper goodbye to Egypt and all of the people who we saw on a day to day basis either.

The only thing I can try to do now is weave the strands of my lives together and hope that the new pattern is pleasing and strong…

If you thought that I must have too much to occupy me here in Michigan to fret about what is going on with my stuff in Cairo, you’d be wrong.

Normally when we move, I sort things in to keep, sell, and purge. I have a house sale and lighten our load as much as possible before starting to pack. I know what things are easy to replace and what things are sentimental and precious. I know what clothes the kids will get more wear out of and which can be donated.

My husband is a very capable guy, but he has never been left in charge of one of our moves before. He’s never gone through the process of purging and sorting for packing and doesn’t know off the top of his head what things stay and what things go. I created a pretty exhaustive list from my memory of what items are stowed in which cupboards, nooks, and crannies but we’ve still been exchanging frequent one line emails with admonitions to “don’t forget!” and questions about this or that. He’s sold a few of our bigger items, but hasn’t had the time for a proper sale.

There is however another complication.

When we were preparing to move to Egypt, we were told that we needed to create an inventory of all of our things for customs purposes. Basically, the university supplies a letter of guarantee to the government that all of our possessions are personal and therefore tax exempt. The catch? We are supposed to take everything we arrived with back out again.

That doesn’t sound so very bad until you get into the nitty gritty of it. We were told for instance that with things like DVDs, CDs, and expensive or “special” books we needed to list them by title – this was also to protect us from sticky fingered inspectors. Have you got any idea how many books two avid readers and writers can collect?? Because of this stupid rule, we are going to be exporting a set of Wiggles VHS tapes that my children outgrew almost immediately after our arrival in Cairo five years ago!

The books and DVDs I can live with, but how this rule applies to electronics bugs me. Before Egypt we’d lived in the United Arab Emirates for six years. Both countries use 220v electricity and electronics are way cheaper in the UAE than in Egypt so we brought many items we already had along with us when we moved. However, since these items appear on our inventory, now we also have to take them out again – whether they work or not. Even if they do still work, they won’t be much good to me here in the US where the current is 110v. Using them with a converter is an option I suppose but I suspect they will end up being donated to someplace like this for children to tinker with.

Whatever – not much I can do about it now.

In short, I told my husband when in doubt, pack it. I’ll sort it out when it gets here…

For anyone who cares, this is the first summer that I haven’t gained five pounds immediately upon walking through the door at my father and step-mother’s house. I guess I teased my step-mother publicly on my blog enough – she’s had the usual ice cream bars and cookies around but hasn’t made any special desserts to tempt us all. The baggy jeans I left here last summer are a bit too bit. She did tell me to remind her to make a blueberry pie this weekend however so there’s always time to fall off the wagon I guess.

I’ve had lots of people asking me what we will be doing next, after our summer vacation is done. Short answer: I don’t know. My husband is still working on finding a new job in America and what I do will depend on how that works out. If he gets one, we’ll all stay; if he doesn’t then we’ll have to quickly regroup and decide out next move. I’d like to know more for the sake of the children than myself, but right now I’m doing my best not to think about it too much – I’ve had more than enough stress in my life in the last few months without stewing about situations I have no control over.

In the meantime, we’ve all just been hanging out and doing the things you do in the summer in the north woods: skipping stones on the lake, hiking, and berry picking. Not a bad way to pass the time actually…

It seems impossible to think that I left Egypt five months ago. I had no idea of what to expect when we left – of how long we’d be gone or if we’d even be able to go back but what I wasn’t expected was five months of wait-and-see.

Our decision for me to stay in the US with the children wasn’t an easy one, but I’d like to think it was the most sensible thing we could do under the circumstances. I am more willing to take chances with my own safety (which I proved when I had my picture taken with a tank (what was I thinking??)) but we weren’t willing to do the same with our children.

There really are no words to describe how utterly fantastic the children have been through this whole period. They left Egypt with us believing us when we told them it was going to be a short trip, an unscheduled vacation of sorts. We struggled through homeschooling for a month before we came to Ohio to stay with my high school friend, then they had to settle in to a new school here.

Adapt to a new school might be a better description because it was not simply a matter of not knowing their way around the building and having to make new friends. They went to a British curriculum school in Egypt. Here in Ohio they not only had to learn a new American curriculum but a whole new set of teacher expectations.

I wouldn’t say it was an easy process for them to find their way, but they certainly made it look easy. After initially struggling a bit, particularly in math, my daughter brought home an honor roll certificate on her last day of school. I am particularly proud of the “B” she earned in math. It was hard won, and if she’d have had another couple of weeks of school it might have even been the “A” she was striving for.

Both children were teary when I picked them up in the afternoon – simultaneously wishing to return to Egypt to see the friends they left behind and also wishing they could turn back the clock here so they could have a bit more time with their new friends. My own heart ached for them both from a mother’s perspective and from my own – I know all to well that feeling of being torn between places and friends and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

With our summer vacation, life just may begin to feel a bit more normal. We’ll spend the next few months doing our usual Minnesota north-woods summer thing. After that? Things are still a bit up in the air, but if nothing else I am confident that my children will land on their feet.

They are even more agile than I am

I’ve been doing my best to settle in to my temporary home in Ohio and I think I’ve been doing okay lately in terms of not flipping out (too much) about what comes next. Distracting myself with the treasures to be found in the many thrift stores in the area helps (though I am glad my friend has a big house because I might need to store some things with her for a while!)

Considering what they went through with the upheaval and stress of the evacuation and then having a month gap before starting a new school in a new state with a new and unfamiliar curriculum, the children have been doing amazingly well. I couldn’t be prouder of how they have have settled in and how well they have adapted. My daughter wants to have straight As on her last report card of the year and I think she might just pull it off.

Overall, I have been feeling pretty good about how things have been going and about what might come next. It’s been a challenging year so far! Then I started to read back over my status updates on Facebook for the past year – of all the little day to day things that I was doing in Cairo and the friends that I saw and interacted with – and I started to feel a little homesick.

I even started to second guess everything I’ve done since February.

I still believe that we made the only decision that we could have made at the time by leaving Egypt when we did. The situation was simply too uncertain to risk staying to see how things played out, especially with the children to think of. In hindsight however, I kind of wish the children and I had gone back when my husband did at the end of February. It would make things so much less complicated in so many ways.

One of the biggest complications is that the children’s school in Cairo is pushing us to commit to whether we will be back in the fall term. I know that they need to plan for class sizes and staff, but how am I supposed to know what will happen in three months? It isn’t as if all the news from Egypt these days is good. And it is more than just saying “yes” or “no” – if we say “yes” we have to pay a hefty deposit per child to secure their places. The fee is an every year thing, but the difference this year is that my husband is looking for a job in the US. If we are lucky he’ll find something before next fall – which would be great only we’d lose the deposit with the school (which is more than I paid for my car – ouch!). If we say “no” and just take our chances, there is a possibility that he wouldn’t get a job and we would also lose their places at the school.

If I stay in the US, our family remains in limbo. If I go back to Egypt, we have to hope things remain safe enough until we can make a permanent move elsewhere. There are many other minor complications like what to do with my car – if I go back to Cairo in September, I’ll have to sell it. I feel lucky to have found it so I’d rather keep it. What can you do?

I never expected or planned to make my life in Egypt for the long term so in many ways I am ready to move on, however I don’t think I’m quite done with the place yet either. I never got to say goodbye after all.

Looking at the world news headlines this morning, maybe my decision about whether or not to go back to Egypt in the fall isn’t as difficult as I thought. Protests were planned again in Egypt today against the military regime for “not being more transparent in their decision making processes” and because they had not prosecuted Mubarak for all of his various transgressions. I’m surprised it took this long frankly – the military regime is the same old beast with a different face (or no face depending on how you look at it). Between Egypt, Syria, Libya, Bahrain, and Yemen it may be better to just give up any thoughts of going back to that region, even for a short time.

Thinking about all of that was fairly depressing so after I dropped my kids at school, my friend and I went to a local diner for a greasy breakfast and then on to an antique mall. I love going to both thrift stores and antique malls – you just never know what you are going to find.

Earlier in the week I found a soft-as-butter black leather jacket with enough metal zipper details to make my inner biker chick very happy. Best part? It was only $5.99 and it fits me perfectly.

Today I was all about kitchenware – particularly mixing bowls and utensils. Since I don’t currently have a kitchen to furnish I resisted all the beautiful retro mixing bowls I saw. I did however find one treasure.

My mother had one of these measuring cups when I was a child. It’s great – filled to the top it is one cup, and the lid has a one tablespoon measure.

I can quite clearly remember my mother using it when she made gravy. She’d put flour and water in it and shake it up before pouring it into the meat drippings. I don’t tend to make gravy myself, but it cost little enough that I couldn’t resist buying it.

After we left the antique mall, we stopped by Jungle Jim’s. How can I describe it? It’s like Trader Joe’s but much, much, much bigger. It’s a spectacular place to just wander. We wandered through the liquor section, looking for sales. I couldn’t resist getting this bottle of wine, based purely on the label alone.

There would definitely be upsides to staying in the US…

I never dreamed I’d be gone from Egypt so long when we left on February 1st. I wasn’t really thinking much at all beyond get me out of here, but somehow I thought that we’d have a clearer answer on how things were going / how to proceed one way or another by the end of February.

Here it is already April and I am still not sure what to think.

In order not to drive myself insane with the what-ifs, I’ve been trying hard to be a bit more Zen, to take things one day at a time, not to get too far ahead of myself. If I can only get through this week… if I can only get through this month… if I can only get through the school year… maybe then I’ll know more about what happens next regarding whether I stay in the US with the children after the summer or whether we go back to Egypt so we can be together as a family while my husband looks for another job.

I had finally gotten to the point where I was resigned to drifting along for a while, trying to enjoy what Ohio has to offer in terms of entertainment and activities for the children, when reality butted in again: the school in Egypt wants to know whether or not we’ll be returning in the autumn so that they know whether or not to hold places for the children.

I understand why they need to know, but I’m not sure that my answer of how am I supposed to know will satisfy them. There are several variables that influence that decision and they themselves are subject to change at any time. Is it any wonder my shoulders are tense and I’ve got a sore tongue from industriously grinding my teeth at night?

There are many things to recommend staying in Ohio… but there are also reasons to go back to Egypt, at least for the short term. I’ll feel better once I make a decision – but then I’ll likely torture myself wondering whether or not it’s the right one…