You Can’t Go Home Again.

I grew up spending my childhood summers on my great-grandparents’ farm in the mountains of western North Carolina. Just down the road from the farm is a cemetery with a statue of a beautiful angel. Throughout my entire childhood, whenever our blue, faux-wood-paneled station wagon would pass by the cemetery, my mother, like clockwork, would turn around and tell me and my older brother, “Look, there’s Thomas Wolfe’s Angel from Look Homeward, Angel. He also wrote You Can’t Go Home Again.” And then she’d turn back around in her passenger-side seat and we’d look up to see the angel pass by our window.

By the time my childhood was over, I had probably been told to look at this angel hundreds of times. And while it never occurred to me until now that I should go read those books, I always wondered how someone could write two books so apparently opposite—one seemed to be about going home and the other was about how you can never go home again. Was he not allowed to go home? I took the books’ titles very literally.

Look Homeward, Angel

Now that I’m a little older, don’t take things so literally and have lived abroad for six years, I find myself thinking back to that angel and Thomas Wolf. It turns out that Wolfe was himself an expat in Paris between the time that he wrote the first book and the second, living at 13 rue des Beaux Arts in the 6^th, having followed a similar path to my own—from the Carolinas to New York to Paris.

Now that I know more about not only Wolfe’s books, but about his own story, I understand that I have become that angel. I look homeward (the angel even faces the direction of my great-grandparents’ farmland), but I can never truly go home again. I’ve grown, I’ve changed. It’s no longer the fit that it was when I was in the back of the station wagon.

After we are introduced to another culture for an extended period of time, we change. We change slowly and imperceptibly. Sometimes we may only realize this when we go home again. At the same time, our home country and its citizens are changing and growing, continuing down the same road they were on when we left. Depending on how long you’ve been away, it may be profound and shocking change, so that many basic things are now unfamiliar to you. You’re out of the loop. Your family members know what’s going on, but you are now a foreigner in your own country. Yet at the same time, you are not a foreigner. You hold a passport and you were born there. Being repatriated can be as difficult as being expatriated, but perhaps more puzzling because you should belong. At the very least, you have a right to belong. Here in Paris, we can make social blunders and language errors, but back home we’re supposed to have all the keys and know what we’re doing.

So I’ll take you through some moments of returning home for Christmas that illustrate how you really can’t go home again. I’ll steer clear of politics to keep this on the light side, but let me just say that in the last five years, American politics has managed to get even more to the right than it was when I left. Ditto on other less frightening trends, like bad fashion and other things I’d rather not rant about right now.

I thought France was the culture of No and America the culture of Yes

Day 1: Not in my country!

When you’re in a foreign country, there’s a tendency to react to odd or unacceptable behavior by saying to yourself, “well, that would never happen in my country!” And we know darn well that that’s just not true, but it makes us feel better. A French person, as they so often do, will jump in front of you in line and you say, “that would never happen in America!” And chances are that it wouldn’t. But here’s what really happens: there is so much personal space required by Americans and so little here, that we adapt (especially my children, who go to French public school). We get close. Really close. To other people.

We get to Newark airport and need to find an ATM to get some greenbacks. There is a line of people. Only, it doesn’t look like a line. It looks like people just standing around doing nothing, all about 3 or 4 feet apart from each other. So we stand (after a red-eye flight with three toddlers) where it looks as though the end of the line is. And we were immediately called on our behavior by a huge guy wearing jeans, a Mets sweatshirt pulled over his beer gut, a blue Mets baseball cap and safety orange Crocs: Wach-ju guys think-jus a-doin’? And thought we might just get our asses kicked. This is where it’s helpful to start speaking French and smile and pretend we no know no engleesh. Or is it?

Day 2: Chocolate is ruined

I’m a self-confessed chocoholic. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I don’t cuss. Well, okay, I do cuss. But I eat lots and lots of chocolate. I’ve been this way my whole life. It’s my nice vice. It doesn’t really hurt me and it’s good, but it’s not really good for me. Anyway, I was so looking forward to eating a Hershey bar. Just a plain, good ole fashioned Hershey bar.

It tasted like crap. You call this chocolate? In 1999 I discovered the Milka milk chocolate bar from Switzerland. It has a little purple wrapper with a cute little white and purple cow on it. It has completely changed my taste buds with regards to chocolate. A Milka bar is real chocolate. Hershey—my heart was broken—this was not chocolate; this was wax with a lot of sugar and some cocoa powder. I had no idea how bad the chocolate situation was in the U.S. When you grow up with something, no matter how bad it is, it’s the only thing you have and you think it’s good, normal or even great. I’ve even been to the Hershey chocolate factory in Pennsylvania (twice, I hate to admit) and I used to love it . . . that chapter in my chocolate love affair has now been closed.

American optimism and capitalism merge in the pet store

Day 3: When the kissing had to stop

In a lot of other parts of the world, friends and acquaintances kiss. About ten years ago, when I traveled to Spain to meet Andy’s high school friends, I must have kissed about 20 people in a day. Two kisses hello. Two kisses goodbye. I remember saying to Andy, I’m not kissing these people again. Next day, more kisses. I remember how much it bothered me. This amuses me because now, every morning, for the past few years, I go through the motions of kissing the other mothers at school when we say hello. I kiss the principal. I even kiss my children’s friends. It’s normal. I’ve grown so accustomed to it that there’s nothing odd at all about this to me.

So on day three, we saw some more childhood friends. I immediately go in for the kiss. I hadn’t noticed the hand held out for a formal handshake. Formal? Hmm, I mean normal. I hugged and kissed and picked up pretty quickly on the fact that the people I was hugging were physically reeling and pulling their bodies back. I made the married men feel real uncomfortable. (I’m guessing I made their wives feel even worse.) I soon realized that I looked like a freak. Remember that eccentric French teacher you had in middle school? You wondered what she was smoking, right? She was smoking France.

Purell those hands, kids

Day 4: Purell

Americans have become either major hypochondriacs or simply major germaphobes. We take the kids to a “children’s museum” and are met by a very smiley, passive-aggressive, pearl-wearing Southern Belle who immediately hands us a contract to sign and points to the extra-extra-large bottle of Purell, the instant hand sanitizer that claims to kill 99.99% of common household germs and has now become omnipresent in American daily life. The contract goes through all these rules about what the kids can and cannot do and at the bottom promises that we will all Purell our hands before we enter the museum and, if we visit the bathroom, after we use the toilet.

I’m a born rebel. All of us hobos are. I wanted to tell the lady where she could shove the contract and her extra-extra-large bottle of Purell, but my kids could see really cool stuff inside the museum and wanted to go in. So we Purelled their hands—and mine, too—as per section 12, paragraph 3 of the contract.

So here’s what happened. Thanks to the size of the kiddie bladder, about 30 minutes later, my son had to pee. We found the sterile bathroom. He peed. I saw a sign in the bathroom that said, “After using facilities, please wash hands and then re-apply Purell.” I said, Rory, wash your hands. No! I don’t want to wash my hands! He was ready for the fight we always have. I said, okay. That’s fine with mama today, actually. You don’t need to today. He felt a victory. I felt a victory.

This sign has no influence over American kids!

Day 5: Yardapes

The Barnes & Noble reading hour for kids. Because our children go to French school, we have to go the extra mile to teach them English. It’s an uphill battle because they prefer to speak just French to everyone they encounter, including me and Andy. So I found out about the Barnes & Noble reading hour and we took the kids.

School starts in France at age two-and-a-half or three. School starts in the U.S. at age five or six, depending upon your birthday. If we were living in the U.S., none of our kids would have even started school. Here they’ve been in school going on four years and our eldest can read and write in French, even in cursive and with a fountain pen! There are a lot of advantages to this—I love the French school system—but most of all, for this age, it teaches discipline. French children are very well behaved. As are our children. They know what is expected of them and they know how to act.

So we show up to the Barnes & Noble reading hour and that poor woman reading the book may as well have been reading to monkeys at the zoo. American parents don’t yell at or spank their children like French parents and teachers do and it was quite eye-opening to see the behavior of the children. . .and watch their mothers trying to control them: "Madison, sweetheart, please sit down for mommy," says mommy through a fake, bright-white smile in a sweet, sing-songy, angelic voice. But you just know what mommy is thinking--wait until we get home and it's your naptime, sweet little Madison dear, I'm going to pop not one, but two, prozacs. Madison and the other local kids never did sit down, stay still or shut up, so anyone who wanted to hear the story couldn’t hear a thing. And so we (quietly) left before the woman finished reading her silly book about a pigeon driving a bus. (I’ll never know how it ended.)

This is a small drink

Day 6: A trip to McDonald’s

I finally realized that the kids weren’t eating American food. Someone bought pain au chocolate and baguettes in an effort to make my children feel at home and even though they’re very young, they are already food snobs. Back in France, they love pain au chocolate and baguette bread, but in the U.S., they wouldn’t touch the stuff. I realized they needed what all kids need—a trip to McDo. I suggested to everyone within earshot that we go to McDo. Blank stares. Uh, I mean, Mickey-Dees. Mother-in-law, sister-in-law and a countless number of kids in tow, we head off to McDonald’s.

It came time to order drinks. I asked for a medium Coca Light (a huh?) and three small orange juices. The cashier looked at my mother-in-law with a question mark on her face. My mother-in-law didn’t miss a beat and said, “seven small drinks, please.” I thought what? Seven small drinks? What the heck does that mean? The cashier didn’t miss a beat, either. She grabbed seven small (you call that a small? That’s larger than a large in France) empty cups and put them on the tray in a stack. No liquids. She looked at me and pointed behind me. I turned around. It was heavenly. There was an enormous bar with several soda machines, huge industrial-sized tea and coffee dispensers and ice chests, with a sign that said, “Help yourself.” Help yourself? Don’t mind if I do. While my kids played on the playground and ate chicken nuggets, I helped myself repeatedly to all sorts of drinks. Red drinks, orange drinks, dark brown drinks. Southern sweet tea. Some milk and coffee. All for the price of the 65-cent empty wax paper cup.

Day 7: The diner

We went to a diner to get pancakes in an effort to show our kids the real meaning of American culture. Try as we might, even something as simple as eating pancakes in a diner made us feel like foreigners. The portions were ridiculous. The word enormous doesn’t do it justice. It’s just downright stupid. No way could one person eat that much food in an entire day, let alone for just one meal. And what’s up with the constant refills of coffee?

Remember the part in Titanic when Rose goes down below to an Irish music session to dance with Jack? The Irish passengers are talking to her and she smiles and says, “I can’t understand you!” This was us. Same language, a world apart. We could not understand anything the waitress said to us. And we grew up here! We understand she was calling us “honey”—that’s fine, that’s obligatory, that’s all sweet and welcoming. But we could not understand anything else. Her trailer-trash, redneck, Southern accent (which I admit I sometimes slip into when I’m fussin’ at my children) may as well have been Latin.

And so where does this leave us when we come back after Christmas holidays? Not just me but all of us expats? I always feel relaxed when I step back onto an Air France flight and see that the flight attendants are wearing little neck scarves and look like models. Then they open their mouths and are as rude as can be. Ah, on my way home for sure.

But where is home? The cheesy phrase home is where the heart is almost does it for expats, but not quite. For us, my mind goes to one of my favorite musicals, Chess. In short, it’s about the Cold War and the East/West chess competitions. In the end, the Russian defects to the West. In response to questions by reporters about where his loyalties lie, he answers My land’s only borders lie around my heart.