Photo by Christine Isakzhanova on Unsplash
[I used to be a prolific, almost obsessed blogger back in the day when the kids were small and I was at home full time but since I started working, since we moved to France and there’s stuff that take time to process in private and since the kids hit early adulthood and we became part time taxi drivers, not so much.
In a busy life though you learn to look for little blocks of time to do regular tasks and this week I realised that I have an untapped block of time in my week that I (hopefully, no promises) take up writing for fun again. My block of time is that early Saturday morning where I can’t sleep but when everyone else is their first sleep in of the week and the rule is DO NOT MAKE NOISE.
Perfect writing time.
So I am going to try. Try writing again. Try expressing my thoughts. Try being creative again. Trying getting into a healthy rhythm just for me.
Of course that being said, I have only been writing 5 minutes and one child has woken up and come down to join me. Murphy’s Law. Here it goes anyway…]
I have been thinking this last couple of months about our identity here in France. We’ve been living here for almost five years now and when we first came I thought to myself that we should do everything in French. I started facebooking in French, I tried speaking in French when we were out in public (too tiring for the girls to do it at home as they didn’t speak much at all), I tried to make only French friends and avoid English speakers and if we were around tourists I tried speaking in English in low voices. In short I felt like I should apologise for being who we are.
I still do to a certain extent. I don’t know if it is the region that we live in but when people hear us speaking in English, you can see the side glances coming at you. You know those looks, the out of the corner of your eye, looking the person up and down look. I do it myself, although I do try not to!!
In Pakistan when I was a kid there was no hiding it. We were the only white people in the town where we lived and, particularly out in the smaller villages, children would surround the car giggling and pointing or trying to touch you to see whether white skin felt different to brown.
In Europe, the same thing happens but subtly.
So on a street sound level, when we go out as a family and the girls are chatting and laughing like magpies amongst themselves, we become the family that gets the curious side looks.
I have tried to hide and blend in as much as I could but even when speaking in French the conversation inevitably turns to “Mais vous n’avez pas un petit accent?“
At some point along the way though I thought, “Stuff it! We are who we are, a French English family living in France with a background from Pakistan, NZ, Fiji, Australia and there’s no way we can change it. We are most definitely, as the Fijians say, Fruit Salad. Let’s embrace our fruit saladness. Let’s stop thinking about who we are and just be.”
So we are now the noisy annoying hybrids abroad who don’t really fit in but are cheerfully embracing our franglais-ness and our weird background, accepting the oddity of whoever happens to pop into our world.
As I embrace our mixed up nationalities and languages, I’m also embracing the things I like and don’t like. Perhaps its my age or perhaps its a side-benefit of covid throwing all normal things out the window but all of a sudden I am wondering why growing up in a Christian culture it was frowned on to have hobbies or passions.
Nobody really verbalised that restriction officially but somehow I grew up with the impression it was not really holy to be passionate about anything but God. I think this still exists in the church today. We tend to think that loving God means that we can’t love anything else, that everything else must shrink to non-existance in his presence.
This, I am coming to the conclusion, is incorrect.
Actually the opposite is true. We can love God fully passionately and enjoy the creativity and passions he has put in us because he gives them to us … sometimes for no particular reason except that he wants us to enjoy and appreciate his handiwork.
I’ll give you an example.
When I was a teenager, I never really got into fan-girling anything.
When I was a young mum, my South African uncle who I met for the first time at my brother’s wedding asked me what I did with my spare time and I was at a complete loss as to what to say. I could not think of a single hobby or passion that I had.
Since Uncle Ant asked me that question though I started thinking about what I liked doing and I realised that I had been enjoying writing, baking and crafting.
A friend got me hooked back on to crocheting and sewing. Later I found I relaxed a lot while doing mundane gardening tasks in my parent’s garden. Even though I am horrible at keeping plants alive or watering regularly in the hot weather, I love the tactile sensation of snipping branches and pulling up weeds or sorting out garden sheds.
And as our kids grew up they got into Japanese animé, kpop and then kdramas. At the point where they got into kdramas, I started watching too and one thing led to another. Now I’m learning Korean for fun on my bus journey home from work every week, I’m Ia huge kdrama fan, and I cook asian food several times a week.
Is any of this of any heavenly good ? Probably not. I may never use my Korean language skills in my life, there are probably only a tiny amount of Koreans in France but I am enjoying life while doing it. It’s tapping into my love of understanding different cultures, my love of languages and my love of cooking. All put in me by God who made me.
A friend of ours has taken up cheese-making in a big way. Is that of any heavenly good? Probably not, but I think God loves his creativity and he uses his cheeses to bless other people. This friend has a great hashtag sense of humour and tags his posts #blessedarethecheesemakers .
I love this. I think we need to stop being po-faced Christians and start realising that God has made us to be wonderful creative beings who are all mixed up like fruit salad, that we are fearfully and wonderfully made and made to enjoy this planet, this life he has given us. No guilt and condemnation for being who we are included.
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