1994: Like a Hurricane!
We moved in together in late August 1994, and all hell broke lose.
Or should
we say that all hell was breaking lose when we moved in together.
Marie-Hélène
was breaking up with her ex, and Ian and his ex too were still separating.
As you can imagine, neither ex was
entirely thrilled with the direction that we were taking. Neither hesitated to
make known their respective points of view.
The first day that they were together in their first joint home,
Le Tahu, Alban and Tom found some panes of glass leaning up against a stone wall in one
of the outbuildings, and promptly and gleefully picked up the rocks that just
happened to be lying around and smashed all the panes of glass to bits. We
only left them alone for ten minutes!
We're not sure what exactly is happening in the picture above, but you can
get an idea of the energy level. Tom's right leg is laying on
Alban's right arm,
Marie-Hélène is looking in a worried manner at Tom, as is
Daphné, Nick and Daphné have their thumbs up and Tom his finger up, and we can't remember what
Alban was doing. That was the way it was much of the time: too much going
on to keep track of. There's another photo from the same . . . dare we call it
sitting? . . . here.
It was a hurricane that lasted for the rest of the year.
Blending families is
a poorly understood art: no guidebooks, no do-it-yourself references. The
children effortlessly amplify whatever is going on around them, and divorces are
not very good things to amplify!
No annual update was sent to friends and family
at year end: in fact, no Christmas or New Year's cards from that year are to be
found. Some perhaps came and went, but no trace remains. It was that sort of
year. Needless to say, there were Christmas presents, even in 1994, and a few
can be seen here.
But warm moments do stand out. There were visits to Chartres and its heart-warming
Cathedral, not 45 minutes away from Le Tahu, home from
2004 until 2006. We have a
video of one of those visits, with the children taking turns to roll down the
grassy hill below the Cathedral and in its garden. Yes, children, that is
exactly what one of the most beautiful and unspoilt cathedrals in the world is
for!
Then there was the day of the photo to the right, the first day that Ian's mother met
Marie-Hélène, Daphné and
Alban, and a very successful
meeting it was. We had tea at the Randolph Hotel in Oxford,
Grandma could not
communicate properly with any of her visitors, they each had to struggle to
communicate with her, and yet everyone was as happy as a clam.
What made that success so surprising is that Grandma was a true English woman
(in her head, that is: she was Irish by descent!), and was thus out of principle
not particularly partial to the French. Here is an extract from a 1994 letter
that Ian sent to a friend, commenting on Anglo-French relations and other
aspects of life in that year:
How hard it is for a "bloke" to live in
France, with all those French people!
Of course, I am not personally responsible for this
senseless and unfair prejudice. My mother is. Her obsession about the Channel
Tunnel is that it will permit French rats to crawl through it into England's
green and pleasant fields, where they will promptly infect every mammal, and
probably a few trees, with rabies. The psychoanalytic underpinnings of this
kind of concern would appear obvious (rats penetrating tunnels - need I say
more?), except that the concern is sufficiently general that the Tunnel builders
have installed electric fencing to impede (get it?!) the rats' passage. No,
it's not psychology, rather a thousand years of similarity and mutual contempt.
So I can hold England and History responsible for my prejudice, absolve my
mother and sleep well tonight.
It was thanks to Grandma that we began our visits to
Disneyland in Paris. If
the traffic cooperated, it was only about an hour away from Le Tahu, and we
could fit in a visit on Wednesday afternoons, when there was no school, or on
weekends. Tom, Goofy (called "Dingo" in France) and
Nick celebrated Grandma's
birthday in January 1995 at the California Grill. She turned 68. Other pictures of that day can be
found here. Our Disney days were the highpoints of that
year.
The year ended, normally enough, with the Christmas holidays. Our first
Christmas together played out warmly and with
very happy children, but getting
there illustrates the complexities of blending families. It turned out that in
Marie-Hélène's French family, the presents were
traditionally opened late on Christmas Eve, culminating a family reunion and
dinner. In Ian's English family, the presents were traditionally opened early in
the morning on Christmas Day.
Not a big deal to figure out, you would say, and you'd be right, ultimately.
But getting there involved a lot of give and take. For example, Nick and Tom
were at their mom's apartment until Christmas Day, and Daphné
and Alban were staying with their father after Christmas. If we had opened the
presents late on Christmas Eve, Nick and Tom would have missed a piece of
Christmas if they opened theirs alone the next day. So we had the family reunion
and dinner on Christmas Eve, and very warm it was too, but put off opening the
presents until the next morning. It all worked out.
Grandpère
had a blast, as you can see in the photo, as did the children, as you can see
here.
Here is our carousel of time, and here are
annual updates summarizing the ensuing years of our lives together: 1995,
1996, 1997, 1998,
1999, 2000,
2001, 2002, 2003,
2004, 2005,
2006, 2007
