Yes, there have been things that have slipped through the cracks. Like toasters, and microwave popcorn. It’s impossible in any world to expect your children to know everything you did. At a basic level this isn’t a third culture kid problem; this is parenthood. It’s evidenced by the number of memes with cassette tapes and ballpoint pens in them, the number of jokes with rotary phones, and the amount of sentences that start with, “Well when I was a kid….”
But the gap is bigger when your kids are raised in a different culture than you were, and this was showed more than usual on our trip to Lisbon last week. We stayed at an Airbnb where the owner was an American expat, and the apartment had some things that we aren’t used to anymore. Things like, a real genuine toaster which provided at least an hour of entertainment.
Lincoln was the first to spot it on the counter and ask about it. “It’s a toaster,” I said. “For bread.” “Oh!” he said, excitedly. “And does it sling the bread up to the ceiling and scare people like in Rutabega?” (His cooking comic books.) Truly, I think in the six days we were there, he and Eliot together ate about three loaves of bread as buttered toast, and they would have done more had I finally not been worried about nutritional value.
And microwave popcorn. For the eight years of Lincoln’s life, we’ve had a microwave for about half of them, and we don’t have one now. (And here’s a secret, I don’t miss it at all.) But we’re a big popcorn family and they had microwave popcorn already there so we went through the whole thing; unwrap the plastic, put it the right way up, listen for the popping, stop it on time. It was not as big of a hit as the toast. They didn’t really like the feel of it and the taste. (I understand, but I’ll eat popcorn in any fashion any day of the week.)
But there are things that they are used to that I would have never been able to navigate as a child. Lincoln can understand a metro map about as well as I can, Eliot is never as happy as he is on an airplane (see top picture), and they both can be stuck on a Alfama side street at midnight with their suitcases and wait patiently while Joe and I figure out where in the world we are supposed to be going.
They both sat absolutely stock still through a ninety minute Lisbon trolley tour with the headphones in so they could hear the history of the city, and last month in an art museum in Lyon last month, after a long few days of walking, Eliot sat down and started crying. “I don’t want to miss anything, Mom, but I’m so tired.”
(And don’t worry, I don’t have perfect children. On the same Lisbon trip a tired Lincoln hit a rock with his foot at the beach and absolutely screamed ballistic for a solid five minutes while people inched away from us slowly, and then quickly; and on the same museum trip in Lyon we were speed walking through the top floors past a Degas and a Picasso while they both loudly proclaimed it was BORING.)
Living abroad has meant that smaller spaces are their norm now. Whenever they see a house that looks like a normal house, Eliot squints at it, considering, and then turns to me to ask, “Mom, is this a ONE PERSON house?” And is always followed by, “Can’t WE have one of those?” (Not in Luxembourg we can’t, where 1 in 15 people is a millionaire and that’s reflected in the real estate prices, buddy.)
It means that when they see Fords on the streets they think it’s a high end, impossible-to-get car. “Maybe someday WE could have a FORD Mom!!!? It’s my favorite kind of car.”
It means that they are fluidly using metric and imperial systems, and by fluidly, I mean, fluidly confusing them. “Is Dad 6 meters tall or 6 feet?” And, “Is the 5.4 for this hike miles or kilometers?” And, “But what IS an OUNCE??” And I don’t have any concept at all about what temperatures look like in their minds, because Joe still uses Fahrenheit and I’ve committed to using Celsius to learn it, so they hear both regularly and are probably wildly confused.
But they can jump in the freezing cold Atlantic on the other side, they know how to function in a space as small as a shoebox, and to calmly stare down the woman at the beach who seemed like she was yelling at them in Portugese. (Turns out she wasn’t, it was a good learning experience to figure out that Portugese is just a very expressive, loud language.)
They know where the memorial to Vasco de Gama stands in the national mausoleum and what it looks like from above.
They know to look for the statues of national heroes, the way the houses are built, and they kept their eyes open for the Portuguese tiles on every street.
They know how a pastel de nata tastes from the kind restauranteur around the block who has a soft spot for little boys because he has one himself and is about to start trying for another.
They may not know microwave popcorn, but I think they’ll be ok.
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