Jeremy’s green card arrived today. A billion thanks to Kathy for FedExing it over, and to our awesome attorneys Minette and Sheryl for working on this for five-and-a-half years.

We had our first meeting with Minette when Claire was six weeks old and snoozing peaceably in her sling. Claire woke up about ten minutes in and gurgled graphically. We apologized, but Minette said not to worry:

“Those are perfectly legitimate noises.”

So! We have it under legal advice.

C: Where are we?

R: Stevenage. Jane Austen was born here.

C: Who is Jane Austen?

R (mimes being stabbed in the HEART): What a cruel thing to say to your mother! Jane Austen was the best writer ever. She wrote the best books. All six of them.

C: Did she write any kid books?

R: No, she didn’t really get time. She died when she was only 38. She did write a funny history of England, which you might like. I have it at home in California.

C: Why do people die?

R: Some people get sick. Some get old. Some die in accidents. Or do you mean why do we all die? Nothing lasts forever. Not even stars. They get old and die.

C (looks EMO)

R: It’s okay really. If you’re lucky you get to die when you’re really old, and those people sometimes say it’s like going to sleep when you’re tired.

C: I can tell you one thing that lasts forever.

R: What’s that?

C: …mud.

We went out onto Coe Fen, which is quite the loveliest part of Cambridge we’ve found so far, all birdsong and head-high wildflowers and fragrance. I ambled on as Claire and Julia, exploring in the verge, found a roly-poly, what I’d call a slater. Wikipedia calls it a woodlouse. Jeremy loaded it onto a piece of grass to bring it with us. The girls ran ahead, as its heralds.

When they caught up with me, the roly-poly was gone.

Claire collapsed with grief. She could not contain her sobbing. Julia stood stony-faced and sorrowful nearby; she could not be comforted. Jeremy was mostly amused but I remember what it was like to be that little and lose something you care about. I sat on the fen with Claire and told her about Sugar, my dog. I recited Sugar’s elegy and improvised one for the roly-poly:

We had a roly-poly,
he was on a piece of grass.
When we turned to look
he was gone, alas!
Roly-poly how we miss you.
When we see you next, we’ll kiss you.
Roly-poly we love you.
We would not make you into stew.

Claire’s weeping abated a little. I said: “There’s a cafe at the Fitzwilliam Museum. Shall we go and have hot chocolate? I think it’s what roly-poly would have wanted.” Jeremy snorted and I kicked him.

(Go give money to Burma and China. And then when you have compassion fatigue, come point and laugh at the non-disabled white girl who wants a pony.)

England confuses me. There are all these none-too-subtle reminders to Know Your Place, most recently when we went to Kings College Chapel for Evensong and a smiling Anglican person said “You are very welcome! Please sit in the antechapel in case the children need to leave in the middle of the service. I know it sounds horribly exclusionary but it’s not…” This after a fortnight of walking around the quite pretty public spaces in Cambridge looking through locked gates at the exquisite private spaces. It’s as if the class system here were set up intentionally to tweak my insecurities.

Oh.

And as it turned out the kids did need to leave early, Anglican liturgical music not being the overwhelming cultural touchstone for them that it is for me. Jeremy packed them off home and as I sat listening to the rest of the service I thought about the imaginary England of my childhood; the BBC and imported copies of Horse & Hound, Thelwell, Penguin Classics, Maree Suchting’s back copies of Punch and my grandmother’s Everyman Shakespeare and Kipling. Little wonder that everything in Australia seemed insubstantial and derivative. I was ignoring the dark sky and the thousand lost languages, and spending all my time in Edmund Blacket’s Main Quad and Christ Church St Laurence, explicitly modelled on the Perpendicular Gothic of Oxford and Cambridge.

Everything was a distant echo of the purported Real Thing, a black swan of trespass, &c. The unquestionably real and solid thing of my teens and twenties was my horse Alfie, the source of my obsession with Lady Anne and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and Crabbet Arabians generally. Some of the best memories of my adolescence are dawn rides through Kur-ring-gai National Park. At least I was paying attention. Being in the place I was in. And when I thought about this, in Kings, it occurred to me that my malaise of the last few weeks might be attributable to my not being in the place I am in, and instead being bugged by my 21-year-old self who would cheerfully have killed to be here, albeit as a student, not as a townie wife.

So (here is my California stint for you) I went to sit down in the Christ Church choir stalls sixteen years ago with sad baby Rach. I said, Chin up old girl. You won’t believe me if I tell you how it turns out. You’re married to this extraordinary man! And oh my god, the children, you cannot imagine it, the way you love them makes you a better person. The members of your little family are all brilliant and hilarious and they smell good. And the place you live in! And what you do for a living! And oh my god, your friends!

As I did this (California is really getting to me, you can tell) I vividly remembered a moment that bitter February when I turned 22, with no clue what I was going to do. I sat in the choir stalls beside Moira, crying silently through the readings. And then I felt the ache in my chest ease a little, for no reason, as if someone had kindly patted my hand.

Here’s the thing. I knew nothing, really, about Oxford or Cambridge. I’d never been here and I still haven’t been to Oxford. I knew no one at any of the colleges. I asked Professor Riemer, the Grim Riemer, to write my academic references, and I’m pretty sure those references were bad. (Did he do me a favour there or not? Discuss.)

What I thought about Oxford was that I would get sort of promoted out of a life where I would have to scrabble and compete and use my wits, into a world of tenure, a world full of books. I saw myself sitting by a diamond-paned window, looking out on a lawn, reading a dusty tome. Life would effectively stop. These daydreams did not involve marriage or children or grocery shopping or going to the toilet. I would hover, I suppose. I would transcend.

Sixteen years’ hindsight makes it clear to me that this was a virginal death wish. (Incidentally I think I understand Sylvia Plath a lot more than I did two weeks ago.) What I wanted was not to have to grow up. I felt I needed tenure because otherwise I would certainly be fired. I needed the ivory tower because I couldn’t possibly cope out in the big world. I needed the imprimatur of Oxbridge because there was no other way I could avoid being exposed as the idiot I am.

Now I am presented with the unexpected option of not minding about any of this. Of thinking of Cambridge as a funny, beautiful old town full of posh (and not-posh) people, with some good colleges and some bad ones. Of thinking of class as a social construct, not a measure of worth. Of thinking of myself as just this person, you know? Yes, England confuses me.

The flat we’re in is very nice, and one block from a gorgeous playground, and two blocks from the river and Jesus Green.

Inside the flat every room has a heavy fire door designed to close. The rental agency has provided little wedgy doorstops so you can prop them open.

So far these doorstops have been cellphones, templates for a family of paper people and, most recently, ice skates. We didn’t need to bring toys.

Even though the sun is shining, there’s a freezing cold wind blowing and rattling the house. YES, THANKS NATURE, I GET IT. Could you STOP NOW?

The girls are at their most splendid. In our wanderings around Baja Noe today I got stopped by three separate sets of strangers today to be told how completely lovely they are. Jules in a little pink dress with her shock of white candy-cotton hair, and those unsettling blue eyes. Claire in a hummingbird t-shirt and cords with a kicky new bob and indomitable scowl. They’re both being extra well behaved, and showering me with random affection. You’d think they were empathic.

Hard to read or write – can’t summon the attention span. Easier to attack long-procrastinated chores. The cat litter has never been cleaner, and the last hardy tomatoes on the terrace have been ruthlessly watered.

Ja: Mummy what’s that?

R: A big nasty pimple.

Ja: Mummy got owie?

R: Yes, it does hurt.

Ja: Owie?

R: Yup.

Ja: Julia kiss.

She takes my face in her hands and kisses my zit as if it were a dimple.

J: I read Overclocked.

R: Mmm?

J: Really liked it except for one story.

R: “When Sysadmins.”

J: Exactly.

R: I had to stop reading it after the baby died.

In unison: I wonder if he could write it now?

LATER. In a tacqueria. There are TACOS. R beats J for no apparent reason.

J: Ow.

R: My ovaries hurt.

J: And?

R: It’s your fault.

J: How?

R: You are the patriarchy. If it weren’t for you we’d all be living in the woods in a big happy lesbian commune, and my ovaries wouldn’t hurt. Isn’t that right, Jamey?

Jamey: Your ovaries would still hurt, but we’d have a drum circle about it.

WE ALL start to DRUM on the tacqueria table. JULIA stares for a moment, then DANCES.

Approved on April Fool’s Day. We started the process when Claire was six weeks old. She’s five and a half. For those of you keeping score, yes, this does mean I got European citizenship, US residency and a good public school for my daughter, all in the space of about six months. I know what you’re thinking: bitch. And fair enough.

(I’d been waiting till I got my green card to unleash hell’s fury on the DHS, but now it’s here I find myself thinking warmly of the hardworking individuals who approved it.)

In other news, Julia found my secret stash of Lindor truffles this morning. There were two. She gave me one.

“Yours.”

And held up the other, saying shyly:

“Mine?”

So we started the day with chocolate. Why not? It’s cold and Mr Jeremy is away; we need to indulge ourselves a little.

The children are being delightful, suggesting that Jeremy is in fact a bad influence. (Joke.) I read Horton Hears a Who to Julia, who heard me out and then asked politely to be put in bed, curled up and went to sleep. Claire carefully washed her toothbrush:

“If you don’t wash it properly the bristles get stiff. That’s what Ada told me.”

I dreamed last night that I got pregnant again, not that I really want to, I think, but that the bewildering vastness of my love for my daughters remains almost impossible to believe. Dreaming about pregnancy is like running my hands through heaps of gold. Mine!

A cosmology, in the car on the way home:

“In the first fifty years of life, robbers discovered a kind of dust, which was smoke dust. And they put it into playgrounds so it would get in childrens’ eyes and noses and mouths and penises and baginas. Robbers are not very nice! But they were sorry! Because the smoke dust got in THEIR eyes and noses and mouths and penises and baginas! That is what happened in the first fifty years. I know the story.”

Homeschooling Julia:

“What colour is this? No, this is green. What colour is this? No, this is blue. Now then, Julia, here is a toothbrush. Can you say semicircle? Good! Can you say diamond? Very good! All right. My Book of Easy Mazes. And this is where we’re up to today. Aww, your hands are so cute.”

In the worlds before Monkey, primal chaos reigned. Heaven sought order, but the phoenix can fly only when its feathers are grown.

Julia has been having very vivid and disturbing night terrors, usually only once a week or so but last night over and over again. She thrashes and kicks and cries “No no no no no,” and though her eyes are half-open she can’t really see and isn’t really awake and can’t be consoled. It’s horrible. And loud. And by the time she’d had her fifth night terror early this morning – and then gone on to do a huge poo and wake up quite happily and settle down on the sofa for a Dora marathon – her father and I were as ringwraiths, mere hollowed-out shadows of our former vibrant selves.

Which seems as good a time as any to mention how utterly I love her. She’s well into her two-year-old explosion in theory of mind, and has developed a massive crush on her Spanish teacher Susy. She is also greatly attached to her bear Bess and likes to gesture with her to make a point. She likes it when I get pedicures:

“Want see prilly toes!”

She calls Bebe “Killy” and showers her with affection. That vicious little cat’s eyes go wide:

“How DARE you…” And then she half-closes her eyes and starts to purr.

Jules gives the best hugs, solar plexus to solar plexus, her entire body glommed onto you like a starfish. If you won’t get down to her eye level to receive one of these in the approved fashion, she’ll improvise by glomming onto your legs.

She is a point source of happiness.

This morning I asked her: “Are you my Julia?”

“No,” she said. “I MY Julia.”

The nature of Monkey was irrepressible!

(What does it say about my misspent youth that I can accurately date that clip based on Pigsy’s prosthetics?)

We got Claire’s school assignment! We didn’t get our first two choices, the adorable schools that are within walking distance.

We got our third choice. It’s a short bus ride away. It has a great campus, with all the kinder and first grade classrooms opening off a library, and an organic garden out the back. The principal is a woman about our age, totally kickass (and parenthetically, hawt!) Claire got into Spanish immersion but there’s also a Chinese bilingual stream and English general education, so the school is a veritable crazy quilt of cultures. The kids all do Carnavale and Chinese New Year.

It’s so ridiculously charming and San Franciscan that I have taken to calling it Armistead Maupin Elementary.

Because this is me here, and I am incapable of doing anything in a gracious and straightforward manner, I have had moments of eating my heart out over my first choice school, especially as two of Claire’s close friends got into it. And yesterday, ambivalently, I dropped off an application to get on the waitlist for that school.

Ambivalently, because Armistead Maupin is actually a better school in several respects. There’s that library! And the test scores are higher, not that I care about test scores, which usually just measure white middle-classness, but Maupin is the very opposite of a white middle-class school so high test scores mean it is doing something surprisingly right. And as Jeremy points out, there are significant advantages to having school friends and then other friends who do not go to the same school as you. For example, you have more friends.

What’s more, we were lucky to get ANY of our choices: about a fifth of families went zero for seven in the first round. My first and second choice schools both saw triple-digit growth in demand this year, and demand for Maupin itself was up double digits. (I never think about my second choice school, oddly enough, which suggests that it should have been my third choice.) (In fact our little cohort was ridiculously lucky. All four families got fourth choice or better, and we all got Spanish immersion. Holidays in Sayulita, anyone?)

It’s not very likely that we’ll get into our first choice school off the waitlist. I’m actually pretty okay with this now, as I get more and more attached to the thought of Claire attending Maupin. The surprising thing about this is that a few years ago, my first choice school was underenrolled, meaning if you made it your first choice you were bound to get in.

In other words, demand is going up, and this is because more parents are applying to public schools, and this is because the schools themselves are getting better. Which means? That crazy terrifying Diversity Lottery, the one that makes it impossible for us Type A moms to control exactly where our precious darlings will go to kindergarten, is doing precisely what it was intended to do: mixing things up, challenging everyone to improve all the schools, and helping give all the kids in San Francisco a better education.

None of which is any comfort to the families who went zero for seven. My heart goes out to them, and I wish them every bit of luck in Round Two. And to the parents who have yet to go through the whole messy process, I say what wise parents from (the awesome, the essential) PPS kept saying to me: Yeah, it sucks and is labour-intensive and stressful and startlingly painful. But we ended up with a great school where our kids can thrive.

For an incredibly funny and reassuring perspective on the whole mess, go read Sandra Tsing Loh.

We’re off to spend Easter in a cabin in the Sierras. Thrift Town had two snow suits left: one a perfect fit for Claire, the other a perfect fit for Jules.

We went to the farm today. Bellboy, the world’s best pony, Claire’s pony, just turned 35. His mother made it to 37. Claire and Julia both got to ride him. He’s the pony I learned to ride on when I was 13; did I mention that?

As we were leaving I walked into the garden and found him in the sun, grazing on the green, green grass, looking exactly like a unicorn.

I want to burn that sight into my eyes so that I will never forget it.

ETA: Julia as she fell asleep said “I loff Bellboy. I loff horses.”

My heart went nova.

Then: “I loff toast.”

We’re on the patio outside our cabin, listening to the rain on the sailcloth above us, and the Pacific Ocean crashing onto the beach.

It’s possible to hear all of this, now that Julia is asleep and no longer screaming like a deranged banshee.

It took me a week to untangle from work, then I lost my glasses. It took me a few hours to figure out how to replace them in rural Queensland (a very fun road trip with my brother Alain, as it turned out) and then, because I was in rural Queensland trying to chillax, whatever the INS calls itself these days raised a question about my green card application.

Since there was exactly nothing I could do about it, I worked hard on being Zen; and the next time I checked my email my friends in the States had sorted everything, which makes me feel very loved.

Even with these transpacific stressors, the holiday is definitely working. I’m sleeping about ten hours a night and taking long naps in the afternoons, and behold, my cough has nearly cleared up. My sister was here for the weekend with her kids, making eleven of us altogether. Kelly and Ross were just delightful with my girls, very patient and playful and charming. It hurt to say goodbye.

Mum and Dad and Alain are still here, all camping on the same site. It’s beyond perfect. Our world is defined by the shops across the road – good cafes and restaurants, a butcher and a baker; the spectacular beach with its shipwreck; the creek that runs down to the beach; the playgrounds and the pool. The feel of everyday life is like Burning Man, oddly enough – walks and fun interspersed with socializing and tea.

I haven’t spent so much happy, unstructured time with my mum and dad and brother and sister since my wedding.

I would like to have an editor like Gordon Lish; only, instead of ruthlessly editing my stories, he would write them, then let me collect the accolades, royalties and hot poet wife. Takers?

Me to Julia, idly: Do you like cats?
Julia, intensely: I. Love. Cats.

What I hate most about running is that I end up warm and energized, able to breathe more easily and calmer about whatever is worrying me. It’s so unfair. The odds are totally stacked in its favour. Exercise cheats.

To celebrate the 75th anniversary of the San Francisco Ballet, storefronts around Union Square have the original, embroidered and jewelled tutus on display. The effect is to make the expensive clothes that are for sale seem drab and dowdy.

Claire: This is my unicorn. These are its legs. And this is its metal claw, for killing.