The heavy scrape of bins being wheeled from the courtyard six floors below wakens me to good news and bad. Good news is the garbos of Paris are no longer on strike. Dreams of Paris’ romantic cobblestoned streets don’t usually include bright green plastic bins overflowing with last week’s rubbish.
Bad news is I still have a migraine and there’s no-one else to get the kids ready for school, so I struggle into their room and croak at them to get up.
Almost everyone I know in this world is 17,000 kilometres away in Sydney. I’ve left my husband at home and dragged our three children ages 11, 9 and 7 to France for three months…. crazy, much?
Emily talks to Holly and Andrew about her decision on the latest episode of This Glorious Mess. (Post continues.)
Yes, I’m crazy France-obsessed, the I-only-let-my-kids-watch-TV-in-French kind of obsessed. We had lived in Paris as a family for six months four years earlier and I’d been desperate to get back ever since. So when my husband was offered a great job in Paris and TURNED IT DOWN, choosing another job in Sydney instead, that husband needed to be prepared for some seriously negative feedback.
I didn’t leave my bed for days. That was my feedback to him. I felt… heartbroken. As if my heart’s deepest desire had emerged into shallows and light, only to be stomped all over.
Not everyone saw it that way. People told me to pull myself together. One kind friend suggested I get help, but when I talked to my doctor she dared to tell me I was sulking. Well, so what if I was?