welcome back.

I've been avoiding this first posting because I feel as though it has to be this sort of thrilling combination of situating everyone with where I am and impressing upon them in some way what it is that brought me back, how I saw that as the week unfolded, how I learned that I was meant to come back. All of this felt like an immense pressure (Kate? Putting pressure on herself? Mais, non!) but the pressure disappeared two days ago when I finally started to settle in.

The first few days were loaded with introductions, re-immersions into a language that had gotten rusty in my brain and so many new faces, a new area of the city, a new lifestyle, that I felt overwhelmed. I was suffering the worst case of jetlag that I have ever had, averaging about four-five hours of sleep a night, and struggling to make sentences in either French or English. The last time that I was lucky enough to live in Paris, I lived with a family that required me to only speak French (they signed a contract, in fact, stating that they would do so despite the mother's fluency in English). This time I am living a truly bilingual lifestyle. My host mother is American and my host father is French; their hope is that if I spend enough time babysitting their two sons (ages 8 and 12), both will gain more confidence and ease in English. My days have been a mixture of struggling to regain the French I lost back in the States in my daily interactions and then fetching the children from school, feeling astonished at my sudden inability to form sentences again in English after working so hard to speak proper French. The mother in this family does it flawlessly. She can string together sentences that are half in French, half in English, and it seems to me that she is unaware of the switching between languages. She has been so warm and welcoming to me (she herself was twice an au pair and knows what it can be like, for better and worse), and I am so grateful that I can say that I think once again I have hit the jackpot and been placed with with a safe, caring, accepting and entertaining family. (A precious discovery of the week for sure was the 8-year-old boy's lesson that girls too [see: me] can play video games or perhaps better yet the 12-year-old boy's question [on the first night] as to my religion and my host father's subsequent decision to hold up a flashlight to his mouth to show me his Inner Light). These are, I believe, good and genuine people.

None of this sounds bad when I write it out but when living on four hours of sleep a night with lingering sinus pressure from the flight and genuine language confusion, I felt lost. I felt that I could get through the individual moments, make every appearance to be comfortable and to be glad to back to Paris, but in reality I couldn't remember why I had decided to live in Paris again. I felt homesick more than I wanted to admit to anyone and worried that I had most likely romanticized my time abroad here. Maybe this city life that I had remembered was nothing more than memories made more lovely by the longing that distance creates.

Until I got on the Metro. It wasn't until my fourth day here that I finally left my new neighborhood (having felt like I knew enough about it to not get too lost in it) and got on the subway for the first time. I've never been a city girl (the New York Metro makes me nervous, always) but something about the Paris Metro took the pressure off at last. It was not just the music playing in the cars by the musicians begging for a coin or a chance, nor was it coming above ground on the line to see the Eiffel Tower and cross the Seine to visit some of my favorite neighborhoods. It was not only that I recognized the feeling of the train's bumpy tracks nor the sudden recollection that it is the riders who must press open the doors (which will not open automatically). It was that this was the first transportation system that I ever learned on my own and that by learning it, I had once made Paris my home. On Friday night, I went out with some other Teaching Assistants from England and Ireland, and as we navigated the Metro to our destination, one asked me how long I had been here. I replied, "Just since Monday" and she remarked that I was doing awfully well leading the group to the destination having only been here a few days. I responded, "Oh but this isn't the first time that I've lived here." This was me coming back. And this was Paris coming back to my life once again.