Culture Shock

The countdown to Spring Break has begun. It starts this coming Friday. The other grandparents are scheduled to pick up the GKs on Saturday. Scheduled. We are bearing in mind that the other grandparents are infamous for their fractured schedules and broken promises, but for now we are assuming the visitation will commence as planned. We are clueless whether they are still lawered up and still playing lawsuit lotto. Housing project lawyers are far more reliable when they are engaged in a rousing round of lawsuit lotto. Degrading intel must be collected while polishing halo.

Big Bro and Big Sis have regressed considerable with the approaching prospect of returning to the inner city barrio where they have lived most of those lives. Big Bro is having more anger flashes. Big Sis is whining harshly como una dama que no se conducen. At 15 months, Baby Sis is still pretty clueless. Despite being within the same State, the differences between an inner city barrio and a rural county farm are quite substantial, even in Spanish. Near as I can tell, the diffs between country and city folks are pretty global.

My flashbacks of the week are to my ESL students and the changes which transpired in them when they returned to their home countries for a visit and/or had people from their home countries move in with them, as well as my own experiences living in foreign countries. Good luck convincing an ESL teacher or globe trotter that culture shock isnae a real and present phenom. Culture shock isnae a judgement on either culture in the particular case. It is an accumulation of more differences than a system can assimilate at once. Do I say, "Howdy" or "Hola?" Is that person just surprised by my foreign dialect or judging me harshly?

The crew leader of the cleaning crew who did such a marvelous job on the house Friday is one of those rare and precious immigrants who feels morally obligated to give back to the communities she is taking from. Encouraging wrong color people to learn and/or maintain proficiency in Spanish is her favorite way of giving back. She teaches emergency and law enforcement professionals SSL. "Spanish as a Second Language." Her adult children wouldn't dream of playing the language games so prevalant in barrio communities. She jumped on my languishing Spanish skills like a spider on a fly. "Hablamos!" It felt good to speak of my woes in Spanish again. I miss my Ecuadorian Alanon network mightily. I feel closer to them every time I am allowed to speak Spanish freely. 100% of the dialog with my Ecuadorian network was in Spanish. The crew leader is also a grieving mother. Her son was killed five years ago in a similar car wreck on the same road my son and his wife died on this past September. Her fatherless grandson, the same age as Big Bro, still has his blonde-haired, blue-eyed mother but the grief and worry remain. We held each other while we cried. Is there a human trait more universal than a mother's grief?

Dunno what I am reaching for here. Just sorting. . . The rapid cycling seems to be letting up. I believe "okay" is the accurate mood indicator this morning. The healing mysteries are at work. I am plying therapy tools to the F-Word (Faith) to trust that ^it^ really is so.