Babylune

The Pleasures of Jet Lag

by kate baggott on March 31st, 2006

Hi!

I hope you didn’t think I’d disappeared. I spent Tuesday travelling with the kids from Canada to Germany, most of Wednesday not knowing what day it was, Thursday in a pleasantly jet lagged state and today grappling with technical issues (our firewalls don’t want to let me post here).

Travelling with two kids is not a terrible ordeal. In fact, jet lag gives me a pleasant sense of well-being. It’s a bit like being mildly drunk without contaminating the breast milk. It numbs me from the full force of my mixed emotions. I hate leaving my friends and family behind. The nuclear family can be a lonely institution. The expat nuclear family is often completely isolating.

I know there is a full body of research on re-evaluating the expat experience, on re-forming extended family models, and the sheer necessity of having maternal relatives around  to help a woman recover from childbirth. Today, I can’t maintain enough critical objectivity to go into that research.

Today, I can recount the patches of rain and sunshine that made up our day in the Rhein-Main. I can remember the snatches of the robin’s courtship song in my mother’s garden on Tuesday morning…just a few days after my son woke on the first day of spring shouting, “It’s a bautiful day the flowers are coming and look at the snow!”

Today, it is just enough to know that everywhere seasons are changing, children are sleeping or waking and the pattern of life looks much the same for everyone.

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POSTED IN: Mental Health