Every once in a while I like to do a day-in-the-life post to give you all an idea of what it really means to live in a squatted, intentional Wagen community, to try to get past any romanticization and directly to the nitty gritty details.  You can read some others here and here.  I just re-read them both, and I was totally awed to revisit the way my life was pre-baby.  And now here I am, typing next to a sleeping three-month-old Pickles.  Wow and wow.  This is loosely based on last Thursday, though this is more of an average day portrait then the tale of one single day.  Though mind you, this is a portrait of a day without the Beard.  When he’s around there’s a lot more time for two-handed activities.  So, ready then?  Here we go.

life with baby pickles, volume three (months)

Days start so much earlier now, earlier than they have since I was in college and made the mistake of signing up for a 7 am ballet class.  Not only was that class not fun at all, I ended up getting a B in it, one of the few of my academic career.  Because seriously, who gets a B in ballet?  A B in Comparative Literature I could understand.  But Easy-Ass Ballet For People Looking For a Funny Easy Extra Credit and Good Grade?  Sheesh.  But I digress.  These days mornings start somewhere between 6:30 and 9:30.  This morning Baby Pickles twitched me awake around 8.  I moved a few feet away so as to avoid getting kicked in the scar or scratched in the face and attempted to will myself into consciousness.  Some mornings it’s easy, and I spring up singing and tickling smiles out of my tiny companion.  This morning it wasn’t, and I managed to get another half hour of sleep before Pickles got bored with staring at the ceiling and started getting loud.

Once I moved Pickles to the fold-down changing table she was content again, so after changing her diaper I rushed myself into clothes.  Every morning it’s a race against the seconds during which she is willing to quietly lay around, entertaining herself.  Will it be enough time to get dressed, brush my teeth, brush my hair (sigh, it’s now too long not to), sterilize the supplementary feeder bottle, pee, and eat?  Usually it isn’t, and my teeth and hair are the first to fall to the wayside.

If her quiet gurgling time hasn’t gotten me to food, I put a (possibly screaming) Pickles into the Boba wrap or sling her over my shoulder and head outside and over to the kitchen Wagen where I either fry up some eggs and bacon or mix up a bowl of yogurt, quark, and fruit.  On the good mood days, I lay Pickles on a blanket on a bench or on the table while I cook (or she sleeps, content in the carrier on my chest).  On the bad mood days I juggle the baby and my cooking hand and think longingly of the days when breakfast was a relaxing, enjoyable event.  We eat back in the Wagen, her laying on the bed or against my shoulder, me at our little table.

The days when I have a lot to do outside of the house—fleamarkets and vegetable markets to visit, errands to run, and so on—are the easiest.  I put Pickles in the Boba and off we go.  She naps, stares, breastfeeds, and repeats.  Sometimes she gets pissed on the bus (if, for example, I deign to actually sit down or the bus stops rolling), but otherwise she’s content, and I’m content.  If only I had the stamina to walk around during my waking hours all day, every day.

The days when I’d just like to stay home and relax and maybe get something done on the computer are the worst.  She doesn’t want to lay in the same damn place all day, and I don’t blame her.  Watching someone type on the computer isn’t as interesting as watching the town go by from the safety of your mama’s pouch.  On those days I take a minute here and a minute there, answering single emails over the span of days or taking three hours to do some piddly paperwork.  There are diaper changes, there are breastfeedings, and if luck is on my side, there is a nap or three.  Often, there is a lot of whining followed by walking around outside—one of her favorite activities and an (almost) guaranteed cry-stopper.  More often, there are long breastfeeding sessions in bed, during which I read blogs and news articles and, if the position allows it, books.

Evenings tend to be more relaxed.  By then someone else is guaranteed to be awake and or home from work, and Frau Doktor, Clementine, Pickles, and I spend a lot of time together chatting, eating, sitting, dreaming, complaining, planning.  If it weren’t for Frau Doktor and Clementine, I would not have survived the Beard’s eight-day absence.  They are always ready to take Pickles while I go shower or cook or hang up laundry or just because she’s so damn cute.  In the Church of Pickles, they’re Saints.  I am going to weep when they both head off to Switzerland for the summer, as is their habit, to get up at four am to milk and herd cows.

Pickles goes to sleep somewhere between 7 and 10 pm.  We lay in bed stomach to stomach, and I nurse her until her eyes close.  Theoretically, this is when I would scoot off to get some writing done.  But more often, I end up asleep myself.  Despite the low-brain capacity of the hour, it’s one of my favorite times of the day.  Teeny tiny baby cuddles are a great drug.  Not enough to make you completely forget the day’s obstacles, but sometimes enough to make you stop caring.

Those of you who have been reading for a while will remember the au pair chronicles—a serial about how it is that I ended up in Germany and what it was like spending 10 months au pairing for a insanely rich family in Frankfurt am Main. Well, I’ve been busy writing new installments to share with you during operation whirlwind baby. But since a hell of a lot of new readers have become regulars since I first began the series a year ago, I thought I would start by re-publishing the series thus far—both to buy me baby time and to get everyone caught up before continuing the saga. You can find an index of the entire series here. This segment was originally published on February 10, 2010.

My journal entries from that lonesome week in Cyprus are full of embarrassingly adolescent ramblings about a boy I had a crush on at the time. (Embarrassing because he turned out to have the intellectual capacity of a cave troll, while I assumed, for entire days at a time, that we didn’t talk about anything interesting because my German was still too elementary.)

For those around us Cyprus was the escape, the fantasy. I fled the beach for the page, dreaming up dates, jobs I would be hired for, books I would write, countries I would live in, languages I would learn—anything that would transport me for even a few minutes from my daemonic charges. The resort walls were not there to keep others out, no!, they were there to keep me in, and I was trapped there until an angelic voice would speak to me mercifully from above: “Now boarding flight 386 to Frankfurt International.” Oh hark how the herald angels sing!

While Franci became more and more aloof, Joseph became more and more doting. “Somebody has a cru-ush,” Janet sang at me across the dinner table, nodding toward Jo with her head. He looked up from the plastic car he’d been racing down the white table cloth and up at me. “Nikki, I have to poop.” I contemplated strangling her, smashing my wine glass on the table and leaping across the table, but the alcohol had already stunned me into placidity, an escape just as effective as my journaled daydreams. Instead I stood up and led Jo off to the bathroom.

My other escape was the small fitness studio where I ran on my plastic hamster wheel until blood had pounded every last thought out of my head. It was the one and, I am certain, only time in my life in which I will ever have washboard abs. So this is why people in prison end up with enormous muscles, I thought.

In two hastily taken pictures—”I guess I just want some sort of proof that I was really here,” I shrugged as I forced the camera into Janet’s hand—and the only two pictures of me from those ten days, my smile is a grimace.

The three of us slept in the same room, in the same bed; they were both afraid to take a turn on the small cot symbolically placed there upon our arrival and I refused to accept discomfort during sleep on top of the insults and the spit. They spread out, snored, kicked—there was no physical escape. Sleep, my most holy of rituals, was disturbed and cut off each morning too short. All that was missing was the yellow wallpaper, and I would have been ripe for a straight jacket and pills served regularly in little paper cups.

Halfway through the trip and with the theatrical grace that was quickly becoming her trademark, Janet told me to take a day off and go on one of the day trips the resort organized for the guests. As if giving me one day off in ten was a special gift she didn’t have to give me, but would, because she was just that nice. Technically it was illegal for me to work for eight days straight without a day or night off.

Technically. Some of my au pair friends were required to work hours like this all the time, and I was only being asked to do so because we were on a Greek Island. Maybe I never would have seen Cyprus otherwise, maybe I was the ungrateful little snot in this equation. Drink yourself numb! Cry yourself to sleep! Aldiana Cyrpus is perfect for everyone! The words took on a gruesome, futuristic tone, the way the would sound if I’d read them in Brave New World or 1984. And we would be leaving in two days. It was a tome I chanted until it became a prayer. “Two more days, two more days, two more days.”

Nicosia

My mother had wired me some money so that I could take a few interesting trips, and I signed up for Nicosia. Nicosia, I read, was the capital of Cyprus and a violent, tumultuous city since the 60s when it was first divided into Turkish and Greek sections. I could, an Aldiana barbie told me, pay someone to let me climb a ladder and peer over the wall at the Turkish side. (In 2008 a dividing wall was torn down in an attempt to symbolically create unity. Of course symbol and reality don’t tend to drink at the same bars, and the city remains “the world’s last divided capital.”)

But none of the other resort guests wanted to deal with tumult on their vacation, the trip was canceled, and I ended up on a bus to Larnaka instead.

Larnaka

How refreshing it was, to be out of the resort and away from my keepers! How refreshing to see a city whose architecture was influenced by eastern winds. My escape from Aldiana lent an exotic air to everything I saw. The man with skin like bark hunched over and between mountains of fabric in a tiny stone garage, the sandstone church and fort, the ragged tops of buildings that stretched out beneath the fort terrace and away from the graying sea, the Greek-lettered signs.

I wandered aimlessly through town, snapping pictures, inhaling my temporary independence like a fix-starved junkie. Little junk stores seemed as if brimming with treasure, alleys careened with sensual vines, and the old man sitting on the corner was most certainly a seer.

The town was everything that Aldiana was not: crumbling in places, pulsing, a little chaotic, alive. There was dirt and there was magic, there were real people filled with joy and sorrow and ambition. There were no hoses snaking the streets, and so there was little to green the landscape. There were most certainly poisonous spiders lurking in the cracks, and no one said hello to me pleasantly as I wandered down narrow streets.

Eight days.  It doesn’t sound like a long time, and it didn’t sound like a long time when, while still pregnant, the Beard asked me how I felt about him going on tour with one of his bands for eight days when Pickles was about three months old.  “Fine!” I said.  “Shouldn’t be a problem.  I mean, who knows, but why not?” Ha!  Hahahahahahahaha!  Yeah right.

Now I know that five days is my approximate limit for single parentdom of a three-month-old baby.  On day five I have nothing left, so when Pickles chooses day five for an hour-long screaming marathon, I am this close to completely losing my shit.  But it is a perfect example of the “it takes a villiage” principle.  Instead of starting to scream at the top of my lungs and flail around on the bed myself, I took Pickles over to my neighbor’s Wagen where two of my friends were relaxing.  They hadn’t been with a baby non-stop for the past five days or just spent an entire day counting the minutes until Saturday.  They had patience for some screaming.  They were well-rested and had done many things involving two hands throughout the day.  I passed off Pickles and went back to my Wagen, where I finally did throw myself on the bed to squeeze out a few tears and talk to the Beard on the telephone.

It only strengthened my resolve to give all single parents total ultimate hero status.  Seriously, how do you people do it??!?!  You are amazing, and I bow down in humble awe of your abilities.  Where do you find the patience?  How do you deal with the fact that after an impossible day, you still don’t get a break and have to get up again the next day and keep going?  Have you even brushed your teeth in, like, years?  May the universe shower you with wealth and attrative, loving partners, and rainbows and kittens and eternal happiness.

This is part two in a series.  You can read part one here.

I had always wanted to spend time outside of the United States, but I hadn’t wanted to do it by spending a college semester abroad.  I loved my school, and I felt like spending a semester somewhere else would be a waste of a chunk of the only time that I would ever spend there.  I would go abroad later, I said, once I’m finished studying and on my own terms.  From the sounds of it semesters abroad were a lot more about drinking, avoiding classwork but getting credit for it anyway, and completely failing at mixing with any locals, and those weren’t my terms at all.

After a year of proofreading, I also knew that 9-5 corporate work wasn’t for me.  Everything I read, everything I thought—it was all pointing to one inevitability.  I had to quit, and I had to go do something that would give credit to the short years of my life.  Back then I had detailed plans about spending a year in France (where I would learn French so that I could take the UN translator’s exam and get a job that probably sounded a lot more interesting than it actually was), but I didn’t really have any savings to speak of—all of my extra cash had gone into paying off my loans.  So instead of planning a care-free, job-free year abroad, I started looking for jobs in Europe.  I threw resumes at everything that moved, and when the government didn’t take me (thank cod), an au pair agency did.

The decision to move to Germany to spend a year au pairing for some rich family’s brats (you can read all about them here, by the way) may be the only decision I’ve ever made that inspired vocal doubt in my mother.  But after she briefly stated her concerns (that au pairing was “below” me, by which I assume she meant “a really stupid career choice for someone who just spent over $100,000 for a college education”), she never mentioned it again.  And look at me now, ma.  Still in Germany seven years later, a kid, a husband, and a job doing something I love, something that is even related to what I studied.  It’s not what you expect from the front-end of an au pairing job.  I didn’t know it then, but it was the first baby step in the direction of what Shannon Hayes refers to as “reclaiming” in her book Radical Homemakers.  In case you missed the quote the first time I posted it:

RECLAIMING: In the second stage, the “reclaiming” period, Radical Homemakers were recovering the many skills that enabled them to build a life without a conventional income.  This “phase” can take a few years or a lifetime, and homemakers will perpetually return to it as they build even more skills.  Initially, this is an exciting and tremendously fulfilling period, as people regain their self-reliance.  Interestingly, if the homemakers dwelled only in this realm for too long, they began to manifest some symptoms of Friedan’s housewife’s syndrome—maliase, feeling lost, aimless, or occasionally depressed, or wondering “what’s this all for?”

Though my year au pairing didn’t leave me with any skills that would enable me to live without money, it was a year of exploration.  I oscillated between the doldrums (an unavoidable part of the start of expatdom) and inspiration born of more reading.  I put together a zine called These are our weapons, which I never got around to photocopying and distributing (you can read some of the words meant for those pages in the zine graveyard), but which centered around the idea that our weapons in this fight against everything that felt wrong could be spoons and pens, paint brushes and sewing needles.  Radical Homemakers would have blown me into next week if I had read it back then; it was exactly the wavelength I was just starting to find my footing on.  I became interested in the little messages spread across the walls of the city through graffiti and rain-wrinkled flyers.

When I decided to stay in Germany, I got a job (teaching English) that would allow me to pay my bills with only about 20 hours of work a week.  I dumpster dived constantly, and I continued to suck in inspiration by way of the printed page.  Living My Life by Emma Goldman.  Days of War Nights of Love by CrimethInc.  Rules for Radicals by Saul D. Alinsky.  And so many more.  I prefered drinking a 30 cent beer in the park to going to a bar, though I did plenty of both.  I rode my bike everywhere.  I learned how to build a tall bike.  I was in love with life and enjoying every single second of it.  No corporate job was going to steal another minute of my all-too-short time to enjoy life as Nicolette Stewart.  It was another small step.

In April my cousin aka heart sister aka Fish in the Water came by to visit and meet Baby Pickles.  While she was here she stayed in my Wagen aka Trash House aka my kitchen and workspace.  Back home again, I asked her if she would write something about what it was like for her to stay in a Bauwagen for a week.  Turned out she already had.  So without further ado, her thoughts on Bauwagen life.

the real thing

There are some moments you are simply happy to be alive. I find these occur more frequently when you’re living your life outside. My sister lives in a wagenplatz. I won’t go into detail because she explains it herself here. But picture the Boxcar Children and you’re well on your way. When you’re living in a wagen the weather becomes of utmost importance. It was rather cold when I was there, and that mostly means heating with a wood stove. While I did finally learn the secret of lighting the woodstove (thank god for matches, because I’m horrible with lighters), you don’t always feel like lighting it, or you won’t be there for very long, and this leads to heating with candles. It had never really occurred to me that you could heat with candles, but duh, fire.

The first night the wood stove was lit, and I snuggled into bed with a comforter and read by candlelight. It’s actually about the same level of light as a bedside lamp, if you do it proper. And it feels infinitely more cozy. More real, somehow, more true. You have to watch that they don’t burn all the way down, and somehow, that increased level of attentiveness makes you feel all the more alive—that, and the occasional pops from the woodstove, and the rain beating against the roof.

Because of the small space, many things are done outside, or at least in another wagen. It’s a walk to the bathroom, which is the only thing that can sometimes be a pain in the ass when it’s warm inside from the woodstove and you just don’t feel like putting clothes on…

Otherwise you just wait for the weather. For the sun to dry your clothes, a clear day for chopping wood, a warm one for washing dishes. I can’t use my phone here and there’s no clock so I never have any idea what time it is, which can be a blessing and a curse. When time is irrelevant, all you have to go by is the weather. And when it’s raining, you wake when the rain starts making enough noise, and schedule your day around when you can manage to get outside without getting wet.

To go about dishwashing, you start by hauling a tub full of water from the tap. If you’re me you attempt to do this all in one go and get fairly wet. You set the washtub on the porch or somewhere similarly elevated (because wagens have wheels, doors, and thus porches, are 2-3’ off the ground) And then you go about it all in the usual way—wash, rinse, set out to dry. We handwash all our dishes at home, so it’s not a big chore, but it’s different outside, wagen door open, Florence and the Machine blaring. You notice things. Birds watch you work, and there’s a snail in the ivy under the tree. A leaf falls in the washtub. Like reading by candlelight, it somehow feels right, and more real than being indoors with a faucet. You use biodegradable soap, and when you’re done you dump it in the weeds, which are actually nettles and henbit and ivy and other useful plants.

A perfect moment, an immense feeling of satisfaction, having done a job well while standing in the sun. More alive than I’ve felt in ages, I can finally hear my thoughts again, and they are full of quiet and the snail and the song of the kohlmeise who has been watching me all along.

There are going to be some changes when I get home.

This post was originally published here.

Those of you who have been reading for a while will remember the au pair chronicles—a serial about how it is that I ended up in Germany and what it was like spending 10 months au pairing for a insanely rich family in Frankfurt am Main. Well, I’ve been busy writing new installments to share with you during operation whirlwind baby. But since a hell of a lot of new readers have become regulars since I first began the series a year ago, I thought I would start by re-publishing the series thus far—both to buy me baby time and to get everyone caught up before continuing the saga. You can find an index of the entire series here. This segment was originally published on February 9, 2010.

The war started with a bruise. Franci became a bitchy little snot in a matter of hours, twisted my skin until it turned black when I told her it was bedtime, and ran screaming into the “kids’ disco” across from the clubhouse

The disco was set up like a regular disco, but with lower tables and non-alcoholic drinks. I walked slowly in after her, counting, breathing deeply, doing anything I could to keep the rage in my head and out of my hands.

“Franci, what you just did really hurt my feelings. We’re going to go back to the room now, come on.” That’s what I had planned on saying. But when she saw me across the room she screamed, “Asshole, stupid asshole, I hate you!”

I turned around and left without a word. The situation was beyond my control; I needed to get mom and dad involved or I was going to break into a thousand little pieces that no one would ever be able to put back together.

Jens and Janet were sitting at a round table in the dining room with Franci’s new friend’s parents, eating fresh dates and drinking wine. My voice was shaking as I held out my arm and explained what had just happened. “Do you see that? Your daughter just did that to me. Then she ran into the disco, and as soon as I walked in the door she screamed and called me a stupid asshole. She won’t listen to me. I need one of you to step in.” Jens threw down his napkin, disgusted.

“I’ll take care of it,” he assured me, “Meet me back at the room.”

I could hear Franci’s howls from across the resort. Jens had her by the ear and was dragging her down the path. “You acted despicably tonight. If you don’t cut it out I’m sending you home on the next plane all by yourself.” She screamed louder. “Do you want to go home by yourself?” She screamed louder still. I stood waiting at the door, and he dragged her in past me and ordered her into pajamas and bed.

When Franci refused to talk to me the next morning, Janet suggested I ignore her. I was glad for the break, but ignoring someone who doesn’t want to have anything to do with you in the first place seemed like an ineffectual strategy. Fuck it. And then there was one.

With Franci out of the way—she now spent her time with her new friend James, and since James went to the Dolphin Club, so did she—Franz Joseph was easier to handle. With two there was always one who didn’t want to do whatever I suggested which meant that in the end we did nothing but sit in the hotel room: them hypnotized by Greek television, me staring longingly at the beach out of the terrace window.

Joseph preferred the heated pool to the beach, so one afternoon we joined the older Cole children there for a swim. In the deep pool I insisted that he put on his swimmies. He screamed. I insisted again. So he hocked a big lugey and spit in my face. I picked him up like a surf-board, slung the beach bag over my shoulder and carried him kicking and crying back to the hotel room. Fuck the Mediterranean, fuck Cyprus, fuck all-expenses paid. Now I understood Aldiana’s other motto, the one that was constantly being sung on the television commercials, “Back to the place you’re longing for.” I couldn’t wait to go home.

It had been brewing for a long time, maybe even years.  Though it may seem like it happened overnight, like it—it being your life and how you live it—must have just always been this way, particularly to people who’ve met you after The Change.  But it wasn’t.  Not a bit.

I’ve talked a little, here and there, about how my life used to be pre-Wagenplatz and post 9-5 job.  I’ve talked about how I used to wear make-up and shower obsessively.  Hell, there was a time in my life when I loved air conditioning and concrete and considered shopping a pasttime.  Though I barely recognize that person in myself anymore, being that person was an important part of getting to the person I am today.  Some people talk like change is negative.  “You’ve changed,” they’ll say.  And their tone will imply that you’ve become something much worse.  But more often than not, changes are good for the people involved.  Even if they aren’t always good for other members of those past lives.

I have wanted to share more of how that transition happened for a while now.  But yesterday’s quote from Shannon Hayes’ book Radical Homemakers inspired me to tell the story now, in context of the stages she identifies as leading people into radical homemaking.  Let me repeat the part of the quote that I will talk about today, the first step in her three-step ladder, here for you now:

RENOUNCING: In this first stage, the Radical Homemaker is increasingly aware of the illusory happiness of a consumer society.  They recognize and question the pressures and compulsion to purchase goods and services that they begin to feel they could provide for themselves “if only…”  This stage is marked by growing introspection, doubting the ultimate worth of their careers, identifying their true sources of contentment, and seeking better alignment of their pesonal values with their life’s trajectory.

For this Gorilla, it started with books.  Most things do with me.  These books were about anarchism.  During my senior year of college, a year that left me feeling utterly broken and in need of a long break from all things academic, I read The Disposessed by Ursula Le Guin, as well as The Alexander Berkman Reader.  Though I can’t remember if that was the year that I read the anonymously authored CrimethInc book Eviction, I do remember it being the year when I dumpster-dived food for the first time.  We were so up to our ears in Panera bread that year that we used to have baguette swordfights in the kitchen.  Too bad I hadn’t seen this back then, though (for the non-German speakers, it’s a list of 130 recipes for turning old bread into something tasty).  It felt like the beginning of my own personal revolution, though I’m sure it had begun long ago in little personality traits and whispers and preferences.  Who I have become today has always felt like an arrival at a long-expected point, like it was the trajectory everything was always leading up to.  These days, when someone accuses me of having changed, I smile and say “Thank cod.”

Despite my budding interest in the radical, I plunged into a 9-5 desk job proofreading two weeks after graduation.  I had college loans to pay off, and, well, getting a job after college was just was you did, wasn’t it?  Though I had spent hours looking into various programs teaching English abroad, it was the debt that convinced me to take the job.  I can’t remember the feeling, but I must have felt lucky to have actually found something in my field immediately.  And I suppose the experience was interesting in its way.

But it was also stressful, and it made me unhappy.  I spent evenings running off my aggression at the gym, and while I was in the best shape of my life physically because of it, emotionally I was teetering.  Teetering but disciplined.  I had a tight budget (I don’t even remember this, but dear Jill reminded me of it recently), I only let myself drink on weekends (I’m glad I now live in a country where beer isn’t one of the easiest things to cut out of your life if you want to save a lot of money in a hurry), and I made double and triple payments on my loans whenever I could.  The extreme thrift added to my misery from time to time, but in the end it opened the door.  I paid off my debt ($10,000) in one year and decided to take a job au pairing in Germany.  Take that corporate life, take that.

In order to save, I’d had to practice my thrift, something I’d already learned a lot about from my mother (who had fostered in me a love of yard and rummage sales at an early age).  This collided with my emerging political sense.  I bet that movie Fight Club even had its part to play.  Point was, I was noticing that I had too much stuff, bought too much stuff, and that I was the none the happier for any of it.  My path to simplicity started small.  “I will never buy another pair of pajamas or purse again.”  It was the beginning of a long journey to make my life about something other than moving objects from one place to another.  Slowly I identified things I was spending money on that I didn’t really need, and I stopped buying them.  And I still haven’t bought a purse or pair of pajamas.

Books, purses, and pajamas.  Where did it start for you?  Are any of you going through this right now?

“RENOUNCING: In this first stage, the Radical Homemaker is increasingly aware of the illusory happiness of a consumer society.  They recognize and question the pressures and compulsion to purchase goods and services that they begin to feel they could provide for themselves “if only…”  This stage is marked by growing introspection, doubting the ultimate worth of their careers, identifying their true sources of contentment, and seeking better alignment of their pesonal values with their life’s trajectory.

RECLAIMING: In the second stage, the “reclaiming” period, Radical Homemakers were recovering the many skills that enabled them to build a life without a conventional income.  This “phase” can take a few years or a lifetime, and homemakers will perpetually return to it as they build even more skills.  Initially, this is an exciting and tremendously fulfilling period, as people regain their self-reliance.  Interestingly, if the homemakers dwelled only in this realm for too long, they began to manifest some symptoms of Friedan’s housewife’s syndrome—maliase, feeling lost, aimless, or occasionally depressed, or wondering “what’s this all for?”

REBUILDING: Those homemakers who seemed most satisfied and committed to their life choices over the long haul had entered a “rebuilding phase.”  In this period, they took on genuine creative challenges, tended toward engagement with their communities, and made significant contributions toward rebuilding a new society that reflected their vision of a better world either through artwork, writing, farming, fine craftwork, social reform, activism, teaching, or a small business.”

-Radical Homemakers by Shannon Hayes

Even though I don’t can, don’t farm, barely even grow a few herbs (it’s looking like I won’t be doing a garden this year, although all of the garlic I planted last year and mourned came back in triplicate this year), hell, I’m not even the cook in the family, but the more of Radical Homemakers I read, the more I realize it could be a good description of my life.  Maybe there’s a little Radical Homemaker in all of us.  Where are you on her trajectory?

(If Pickles gives me enough typing time tonight maybe I’ll even get around to writing some things about what each of these stages have been like for me.  This quote provides a neat framework within which I could examine bits of the journey of my last seven years.)

With the possibility of a move, not just for the Beard and I, but for our entire community (if you missed my post on the subject last week, you can read it here), I’ve been taking more pictures than usual.  Even if the university may be bulldozing the magic of this place in the next couple of years, it will be remembered in snapshots at the very least. This is the first of a number of Mainusch Wagenplatz sets I’ll be posting during the next months.

Those of you who have been reading for a while will remember the au pair chronicles—a serial about how it is that I ended up in Germany and what it was like spending 10 months au pairing for a insanely rich family in Frankfurt am Main. Well, I’ve been busy writing new installments to share with you during operation whirlwind baby. But since a hell of a lot of new readers have become regulars since I first began the series a year ago, I thought I would start by re-publishing the series thus far—both to buy me baby time and to get everyone caught up before continuing the saga. You can find an index of the entire series here. This segment was originally published on February 8, 2010.

Au pairing isn’t a highly paid job, and The German Man dictates earnings: a 285 euro monthly stipend and at least one day off each week. The benefits are nestled between the lines—in the room, board, and health insurance the family is required to provide—and between work days, when the rich German matriarch announces one morning that you will be accompanying the family on their vacation to Cyprus.

A four-hour flight brought us from Frankfurt International to Larnaka International, and taxis brought us to the Aldiana resort where we’d be staying. The family, Janet informed me, would be staying in a suite located on the edge of the resort. The twins and I would be sharing a room just between the main clubhouse and the beach. I was not keen on completely dissolving the work/play boundary I meticulously maintained at home, but was willing to ignore the contractual breech in exchange for an all-expense-paid island getaway.

Aldiana is the German answer to Club Med. Book a vacation at an Aldiana resort and you can relax in a walled complex far from the messy cultural details of whatever country you are visiting (an irrelevant detail!) and socialize with your compatriots in your native tongue. I suppose this is the reason that the club motto is “a vacation with friends.” (Translation: “a vacation with other rich white people.”)

The Aldiana pamphlet says: “ALDIANA Zypern is perfect for everyone—singles, young couples, young children, and teens. The resort comprises a wide variety of sports, relaxation, and entertainment, all set amidst the beautiful coastal flora and fauna of Cyprus.”

Here another translation is needed: Aldiana Cyprus is perfect for everyone with money and for everyone too worried about security and/or xenophobic to bother with the actual country and people of Cyprus. Aldiana Cyprus is also perfect for people who think they would enjoy the “beautiful coastal flora and fauna of Cyprus” but aren’t actually prepared to deal with a desert climate.

But there is little that nature can do that Aldiana (cough, civilization) can’t take care of. And so dozens of hoses snaked the resort lawn, irrigating the Aldiana palms and the sparse Aldiana grass. As for the fauna, the poisonous spiders that would otherwise be inhabiting the landscape, an employee told us, are kept at bay with regular doses of insecticide sprayed across the entire property. Coastal flora and fauna indeed.

Greek travel propaganda had led me to believe that we’d be laying on white- sand beaches, but the beaches of Cyprus are gray, unspectacular in compar- ison perhaps, but beautiful and exotic to eyes accu- stomed to Jersey shore. That first day the twins put on their swimmies, I waded into the Mediterranean for the first time, and it was as glorious as it probably sounds.

In my former life I had been vaguely aware that resorts like Aldiana existed, but I don’t think I really believed in them. Like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny they were just pleasant little myths that worked well on television. Real people wouldn’t actually visit them. Why would they want to? You could save yourself time and money and travel to the German coast to the same effect.

The employees—sailing and diving instructors, bartenders and babysitters—were all generically good looking and insistently pleasant. If you passed an employee on the way to the beach he or she would smile and say hello. Always friendly, always polite. Failure to do so, I imagined, earned you a flogging from the boss. And that might ruin your tan. I imagined that nights they let out steam in the employee lounge, out of sight of paying guests, Dirty Dancing style. Welcome to the Aldiana bubble: polite, friendly, safe, pleasant, plastic.

If you were tired of tanning, you could take diving and sailing lessons, if you were tired of the Mediterranean you could take a dip in the heated indoor pool, and if you got tired of taking care of your children, you could send them to the Dolphin Clubhouse—the resort’s day care service. Jens, always wanting to play good cop, had promised me that the twins would spend the entire day there, leaving me free to do what I pleased. The reality was that the twins didn’t want to go to the Dolphin Club. They wanted to spend time with their siblings and their parents, and instead they were stuck with me.