Clueless

“Every day you speak Finnish better and better!”

Yesterday, after listening to my laborious efforts to talk to his 4 year old in Finnish, my neighbour offered this kind comment. He knows that I started an intensive language course earlier this month, and (like all my Finnish friends) he has been hugely supportive of my efforts to learn his language.

If it’s true, though, that my Finnish is improving, I wish I’d start feeling it myself.

The other morning I got a phone call from an unknown number. The woman’s first sentence was completely incomprehensible to me. She was unable or unwilling to speak in English. She powered on in Finnish, her tone firm and insistent – urgent, even. I strained to pick up some clue – anything – that might enlighten me as to who she was or why she was calling me. Was someone trying to deliver a package to our apartment? Had my younger daughter (at Finnish daycare) had some kind of dreadful accident? Was I in trouble with the police? Had I forgotten to return my library books? The possibilities were endless, and anxiety froze my brain and blocked all comprehension. I was spooked, too, because this woman knew my surname and had my phone number, and at some point she revealed that she knew my husband’s name, too.

Finally, she asked me a question that I understood: “How often do you recharge the credit on your [prepaid] cell phone?” And then it dawned on me, with angry relief – this was a bloody sales call.

It is times like this that I’m furious with myself – furious that I haven’t managed to learn better Finnish in the two years we have lived here; furious because whether or not I learn Finnish is completely up to me, and I wouldn’t still be in this state of frustration had I tried harder to study and learn; furious because I’ve been LAZY and have caused myself stress as a result. For years (even before we moved here) I have wanted to speak and understand Finnish, and yet for years I’ve managed to find other ways to occupy my time.

I do have moments that give me hope. Last weekend, I took my daughter to see a movie that was dubbed in Finnish. I fully expected to be lost within the first 5 minutes, but was happily surprised when I managed (more or less) to follow the story of Alvin and his chipmunk friends. Yes, I was able to get the basic gist of a movie intended for 7 year olds. 

Positive feelings were heavily overlaid with the realisation of just how far I still have to go.

I really should take a leaf out of my daughter’s book. Talking to her after the movie (hoping to get her to explain some bits of dialogue I hadn’t grasped) I realised, with interest, that she hadn’t caught everything either. In fact, in some ways she had missed more than I had, because not only was she unclear on the language in places, she didn’t have the life experience to give her extra clues. When I pointed out that perhaps she, too, was not quite sure what happened in places, she shrugged and said, completely unconcerned and unapologetic, “I don’t know ALL the Finnish words yet, Mummy.”

Her calm words spoke volumes, implying complete confidence that one day she would, in fact, know “all the Finnish words”, proclaiming that in the meantime she could manage perfectly well, and gently chastising me for being unnecessarily impatient about the organic process of language-learning.

The trouble is, though, that it’s harder for adults, because it’s assumed that we are not clueless; it’s assumed that grown human beings can handle a given range of tasks and situations without assistance. Yet, when not just the language but the whole way of life of a country and its people are new to you, there is going to be a lot that you don’t know and have to learn. You are in the weird situation of trying to act like a knowledgeable, responsible, socially-adept adult, even though in many situations you know less than a 7 year old. For instance:

* In Helsinki, if you are traveling on a bus with a baby in a stroller, you are permitted to enter via the back door, without paying. However (as I now know) this is not so if you’re traveling with a baby who is not in a stroller, or if it’s winter and the baby is in a sled. In my experience, if you try to enter via the back door in one of the latter situations, the bus driver comes and yells at you in front of your children, or simply drives off and leaves you standing in the snow.

* Some swimming pools have specific days on which bathing suits are not obligatory. If you use the pool at such times, you will find yourself doing 50m laps alongside (or worse - behind) people who are completely in the buff. You have been warned.

* When my daughter started Finnish daycare, in accordance with their guidelines I stayed there with her for several days. My daughter couldn’t speak Finnish, and the teachers expected me to guide her through the various routines. Talk about the blind leading the blind. At the time, I barely understood words like “eat” or “nap”. I half-guessed at what the teachers were saying. I couldn’t communicate with the other children. My kid cried a lot, confused and overwhelmed. I felt like doing the same.

* I come from a city where (to my knowledge) it has never snowed, and where we drive on the left-hand side of the road. When we left our Helsinki home this morning, it was 15 below zero with snow everywhere. Imagine you are me, and then try to (a) liberate your car from a cocoon of snow and ice with sufficient competence to enable you to drive the damn thing out of its parking spot; (b) on your return home, do a reverse (parallel) park on the “wrong” side of the road into a space bearing a car-shaped imprint bordered all around with half a metre of banked-up snow. With your two children whining in the back seat and your neighbour laughing at you from the side of the road.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m up for this, really. I want to make this Helsinki adventure work. Most days I see my cluelessness as a challenge – my chance to extend myself. Most days I can even laugh at myself if these things – which, in the end, are just minutiae after all - don’t work out perfectly.

On days of lower optimism, though, I just feel humiliated in my cluelessness. I wonder if this steep learning curve will ever taper off. Some days I long to feel capable; confident I can tackle daily life with some degree of basic competence.

I have spent 36 years learning to be an adult, only to find myself, constantly, in situations which make me feel like a child. Some days I just want to be a grown up again.

One year ago - a crossroads

For several years I worked as a lawyer, and had two little girls along the way. Each time, I took several months' maternity leave, but felt compelled to throw myself back into the fray sooner rather than later. The story I told my older child (once she was old enough to start asking, regularly and in plaintive tones, why Mommy had to go to work) was that Mommy and Daddy had to work to earn money to buy all the things we needed to live our life -- food, clothes, her toys...  This, of course, was only part of the story. The truth was that I was ambitious, and competitive, and hungry for challenge, and I wanted to stay in an environment that fulfilled all these needs in me.


After having my second child, somehow it got harder to muster up the same level of ambition and drive that had come so easily to me before. I felt more guilty and sad than before about leaving my kids with a nanny. I felt more irritated than before at various tough and frustrating aspects of my job. I started to realize that a second income was probably no longer essential to our family's short-term financial security.


It was at this point, a bit over a year ago, that our family relocated overseas for my husband's work. I found myself unemployed, and at a crossroads. I realized, with sudden clarity, that I was completely free to choose whether or not to find another job outside the home, or whether to stay at home full time.


You’d think that any mother, feeling dispirited about paid work and suddenly given the choice to look after her two small children herself,would jump at the chance. No more reliance on daycare or nannies. Endless quality time with her babies, where previously that time had been scarce and longed-for.


To be honest, though, I found myself torn, and unable to decide what to do.


By this time, I had invested so much time and energy into my career — I had studied for years and worked my ass off as a junior associate; I had given up countless evenings and nights and weekends and holidays to my job. It was as though all these years I had been diligently putting pennies into a big piggy bank, and now, just as the piggy was starting to get satisfyingly heavy and full, I was contemplating heaving it into a deep gorge, never to be retrieved.


There were times that my work had, admittedly, been just plain hard and frustrating, and times when the work-life balance issues had seemed insurmountable. However, at other times the work had been challenging and intellectually stimulating, and moments of success had been exhilarating. Fundamentally, I had loved being an attorney. I had even become reasonably proficient at it over the years, and had regularly received confidence-building positive reinforcement from my colleagues and clients.


The thought of taking myself out of the game at this point was hard to swallow, to say the least.
For the first few months after our relocation, by default I was the one at home with the kids. We went to the park together every day, and played and played and played. I prepared all their meals myself. I washed and ironed all their clothes. I bathed them and got to put them to bed myself every night.


It wasn't very long before I found myself thinking wistfully of my office at work - of sitting in complete silence, alone with my thoughts. Without my children.


My office had hardly been a haven of peace and harmony - in fact, almost every day had brought multiple high-stress situations to be dealt with - but it had nevertheless been completely free of situations like: preparing dinner with one hand and holding/trying to calm a screaming infant with the other hand, while being shadowed around the kitchen by a preschooler with a runny nose asking an endless, whining stream of questions and pushing story books under my nose. I discovered that, for stay-at-home moms with small children, each day is full of moments like these, which stretch your multi-tasking skills to their limits, and try your patience to its very ends. I soon learned why so many stay-at-home-moms confessed to drinking quite a lot of wine after their kids were in bed.


And another thing - I’d never before felt so inadequate and incompetent at anything as I felt at being a full-time parent. I rarely felt that I’d managed to do something perfectly; I judged myself constantly and felt that I should be able to do better. Small children have a way of moving the goalposts just as you’re kicking the ball, but I felt as though I was the parent and therefore should still be able to predict which way the ball should be aimed. And every time I shouted at my kids for bad behavior, I felt so low -- because I was unable to control my temper, but also because I felt that their bad behavior was surely a direct reflection of sub-par parenting skills -- mine. I wondered if my children would be better off being cared for by someone else -- someone with more skill, more patience, and, quite simply, with more of all those admirable qualities that would help to turn my children into happy, grounded, well-behaved, balanced individuals. I started to think - am I selfish and deluded to think that having Mommy around is the be-all and end-all? Is Mommy-Trying-Her-Best in fact not even close to what they need?


However, spending time with my girls did also bring amazing, priceless moments (on a good day, multiple times), and each time I experienced one of those moments I would think, how on earth could I possible give this up? How could I go back to a life where for most of every day someone else gets to live these moments, not me? Those moments when my toddler climbs into my lap and kisses me fervently, and snuggles up for a long hug. Those times when I'm reading a story with my 4-year-old nestled beside me, and out of the blue she makes an innocent, highly incisive observation that startles me and fills me with loving pride and admiration. Those afternoons when I'm baking cookies with my kids, and their faces are lit up with happiness and total absorption in the task. Those moments when my older child whisks the younger one off to their shared bedroom and dresses them both up in unintendedly hilarious outfits, and they joyfully run out and start dancing around the living room, the 4-year-old confident in her skill as a prima ballerina, the toddler with all the grace of a hip-hopping baby elephant, both of them eagerly demanding applause and praise.


In small, perfect moments like those, I frequently felt their need for their mommy. I never failed to feel my own need for them.


Attorney vs Mother. At this crossroads in my life, I felt as though in choosing one life, I would have to give up the other, and I didn't want to give up either. Making myself available to my kids would make me unavailable to my clients and unavailable to satisfy any burning ambition inside of me, but making myself unavailable to my kids for large parts of the day would surely break my heart.


Put that way, the choice seemed like a total no-brainer. And yet, the decision still felt fraught, anything but easy. I sensed, perhaps accurately, that in choosing the door that in my heart of hearts I felt compelled to choose, I would be allowing the other one to slam shut, perhaps forever.