Dear Diary: A Year in the Pyrénées-Orientales
Moving to the Pyrénées-Orientales: 2 weeks left!
What do you do when you are having a midlife crisis and your first son reaches 18? Have a party of course, whilst retreating to the wardrobe (some of my best thinking time has been in there) wondering where on earth has all that time gone?
He was born in Albi when the hospital was still rather draconian in its methods and it was “feet in stirrups” birthing methods and none of those fairy lights, whale music or water shit. A bit of a shock to the system, however I have to say when you are presented with a squirming baby and a completely new life ahead of you, you forget the hour’s drive in labour pains to the hospital, the near-death experience and the broken coccyx.
Once again, it has been a couple of weeks of action-packed adventures, namely about the children. Our son, as you may have seen on previous posts, has been attempting the fabled Concours for Medicine where you effectively try your luck at winning the national competition for places into medicine, dentistry, pharmacy and midwifery. It is an incredibly academic test which I can only liken it to “The Knowledge” for those of you from the UK, but dragged over 9 months and so there is masses more information. He succeeded, but then came the wait as to which profession he would be allowed to pursue.
Yes, education in France is fantastic and for the most part free, but there are a few idiosyncrasies and this is one of them. Unless you are in the top 20% of the places, you don’t really get a choice as to which profession you would like to go into, unless you repeat it all the following year and try harder. The system is based on a first-come first-served basis, and so if your dream course is full, you have to choose another one of the four. It can be disheartening for a lot of these young adults, who have sacrificed a year of their lives only to discover they will be studying for the next 4 to 8 years something they weren’t really into. The other options are to quit and try again or to quit permanently. Luckily my son was able to have the choice of all four and has gone with his first option, dentistry.
Dentistry, lets talk about that shall we? Why on earth would people want to do that job, let alone even think about teeth all the time? I know it is a wonderful job, but part of a midlife crisis is about realising and accepting your body is not like it used to be as a young twenty-something in the full flush of youth. Suddenly at around fifty, one of the things that starts to just give up on you are your teeth. I mean, god. Why? Why didn’t anyone tell me?
“Don’t put that chocolate bar in your mouth, or in thirty years you will regret it as your teeth one by one roll over and disintegrate.”
Grr. Oh, and midlife does make me so angry. Sometimes I am not sure if hubbie is settled on his side of the bed because he’s comfortable there or if he is hoping I won’t suddenly attack him in the night due to the milk being left out or the toilet seat left up.
It probably doesn’t help that we are moving.
Luckily for my own sanity, I have had no mad incidents this week apart from sitting in a huge puddle of water in a local hospital whilst waiting for my son at a hospital appointment. Yes, I did check and smell to see if it was wee, but luckily (and I am sticking with this) it was only water that some lovely child decided to tip over into the chair in an idle moment. I have to ask where was the mother, but then how did that help me walking out with a bum wet enough for all to see in a health care setting. Couldn’t get more embarrassing you would think? Actually I have done so much worse! So this was a “thumbs up” embarrassing moment for me.
Exam season is still happening and as I write, my middle child is taking his oral exam in the local town. “Le Grand Oral”, the last test that secondary children do before they go off to universities, higher education or a job. It is the final test that puts a line under all their hard work after all those years in formal education. They have to do a 10-minute presentation on part of a subject they are studying from a choice of two, and they are then asked questions about it afterwards. The topics for today were
“1. En quoi le condensateur est une solution adaptée au bon fonctionnement de notre voiture solaire, l’Hyperion?
2. Quelle est l’utilité des équations différentielles dans la physique?”
I have to say that I have no idea what they are theoretically about, let alone be able to explain to you. Let us just say it was a success! He has now been let loose with his friends in the town to party until tomorrow morning. I am not sure which is the most scary, the exam or the partying. You start to feel empty-nest syndrome when your child makes an appointment with a different hairdresser to the family hairdresser, and refuses to tell you where or what style of haircut. Surely I am not the only one who would start to imagine all sorts of perhaps stupid things. Shaved? Dyed? Mohican? I know part of life is to let go, and I do that very graciously, all of the time. However, who is to know about the explosion of panic attacks and mini-meltdowns when I smile and say very sweetly, “Of course you can, poppet.”
Letting go as a parent is probably the hardest thing I have to do, and this move to another part of the country has made me realise that I not only need to let go, but also I don’t have any other options. I would love to rent out a flat near my children’s university and meet them for lunch every day, but I think I might be murdered in the first week, or even the first few days.
With 17 days left to go, the race is on to get rid of the furniture in the house without leaving us high and dry. Questions. Do we get rid of the food storage units or the chairs? Should we sell the washing machine yet? Considering my husband and I have already taken most of our clothes to the new house, that would leave us hoping that our love for each other conquers the horrific smells we will produce in this tiny modern house with no real insulation, at the start of summer, in the south of France. We might leave the washing machine to the last minute, as I think even the mozzies might get frightened off.
Final good-byes are always hard. All three teens have their last parties or balls planned. We have started to wish people goodbye but I suppose the move won’t feel real until we are in that car and driving out of the area for that last time. Perhaps the problem (or not) is that we have so many links to this special place that we will be coming back to see friends often. The two older teens meet up with most of their friends when uni goes back in September so perhaps this is not a final goodbye, but more of a gradual drift into the unknown.
As the mania settles in here in the house, I cross my fingers that our banger will survive the trip in a couple of weeks with luggage, children and an excitable dog. I am reduced to the mundane questions of the hour such as why are camping chairs so much lower than normal dining room chairs. I suppose that’ll mean I’ll be able to examine my lunch-time salad in much finer detail. Great.
MidLife Crisis In France
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