Let It Go

If you've been watching the news at all lately, no doubt you've noticed that the MH370 updates have been replaced by the horrific Korean ferry tragedy. And if you've been reading my blog for any amount of time, you probably noticed that I love Korea. I considered it a second home. It's why I felt so comfortable teaching at a Korean school here in China. I know the culture. The food. And I know a bit of the language too.

The disaster with the ferry made my heart ache because for one thing, I'm a mom. For another, I'm a teacher. I understand this pain that the families feel and I am so sorry for their loss.

Despite that everyone grieves in their own way, I was perplexed by the Education Ministry in Korea banning all school field trips until at least June. You can read about that here and find many more articles about it in a simple Google search. I know that many parents are concerned about big overnight trips right now, and perhaps now is not the best time for students to take them. But even day trips are being banned. That's right. No trips to the parks or the zoos or anything of the sort.

My school has decided to jump on this bandwagon as well and thus, our plans for Children's Day on May 5th have been changed. Instead of enjoying a gorgeous spring picnic at one of the nearby parks, we'll be doing something at school, most likely involving a few games, some crafts and face-painting. Last year, the principal cancelled our spring picnic because of the bird flu (even though she didn't care if they played outside on the soccer field or playground where birds can also get to). This year, it's because a ship of students sadly sunk into the sea.

I mean absolutely no disrespect regarding this incident. It is incredibly sad and if the captain hadn't been such a coward, coupled with how Korean culture forbids you from questioning authority, perhaps this would have been an entirely different turn of events. But as it stands now, 150 people have been confirmed dead and another 152 are still missing. In Korean culture, it is all about being a whole unified group. So even for people who didn't know any of those aboard this doomed ship, they are mourning as well. I get this about Korea and Koreans and I feel them, truly I do.

That being said, I find it a bit much to ban ALL trips. Even day trips? How do your kids get to and from school? What if the bus they take to and from school has an accident? If you drive them, what if YOU have an accident? Shouldn't you keep your children home if you're so worried that something horrible might happen to them out in the world? What if some idiot in your building leaves the gas on and blows it up?

Before you think I'm so harsh, I'll have you know that death terrifies me. It frightens me to my core and to even think of something happening to my daughter, my husband, my brother, my parents, or any of my relatives or friends, makes me ill. What if this? What if that? If you know me personally, you know that as excited as I am to have my second child, I am completely freaked out about having a second c-section. What if I die? What if something happens to Raelynn while I'm in the hospital recovering? What if? What if? WHAT IF????

We - and by we I mean all of us, especially myself - need to let go of that fear. Because fearing everything isn't living, is it? If I spend my days freaking out about the what ifs, then I miss the beautiful moments in between now and my time to go, which I hope and pray isn't until I'm old and senile and while I'm sleeping. And God forbid it isn't, then I've wasted precious time panicking about something I potentially can not control.

Every day when we leave for work, I hug and kiss my husband goodbye. And I hold my daughter tight. Because if something awful should happen to any of us that is beyond my control, I can at least make the moments I have with the people that make my world complete wonderful memories. And if all goes well, I store up a collection of beautiful moments that make me smile when I'm having a rough day at work. It's these sweet moments that make our lives worth living.

I've lost enough family and friends in my life to know the sting of death. It leaves a scar that never goes away. I can't live every moment afraid that people I love will suddenly cease to be. Or think that way about myself. Which I sometimes need to remind myself about. Bad things happen in this world and there are risks to be had in every single thing we do, from eating to swimming to driving to flying, and being so terrified of them that you don't live your life is no way to spend the time you've got. It's like a prison of your own making. I'm guilty for being my own warden at times in my life. But as I look at my daughter, so happy and full of life, so friendly and open each day, I know that for her sake, I must drop these heavy suitcases filled with my fears and just let it go. 

Off With Her Head!

This evening, we went out for dinner at one of the restaurants on our street. We also enjoyed a couple beers with it while Raelynn watched episodes of Dora the Explorer on our Chinese iPad. It was quite nice. Until we got home and I was getting Raelynn ready for bed. That's when Jeremy tells me he has some bad news.

"Your yak mug broke."
"MY YAK MUG?!?!?""

 I should clarify here. The mug I am talking about had a cartoon yak on it. It said "Y is for yak" on one side of it. It was so adorably weird that I just loved it.

My beloved yak mug is pictured here in this photo I used a while back to show how MIL puts that damn luo bo radish thing everyfuckingwhere. RIP, yak mug!

I bought it in Korea at some discount store. They also had an "M is for Moose" which I'd bought for my brother. I kept checking back in hopes that they would have other letters and animals but no such luck.

I loved this mug because it was so unique. And now, it's gone.
But that wasn't all, apparently.

"Um, your Starbucks mug broke too."
"WHAT THE FUCK?!? How did this happen?!?!"
The look on his face said it all. I gasp. "SHE broke it! Your mother! GOD! That clumsy fucking oaf!"

You know why these mugs broke, don't you? Because that old troll stacks the dishes on the drying rack like this:

I'm just as pissed about the Starbucks mug, incidentally. It was just a plain red mug with "Starbucks" on the side, but it had been given to me with some coffee (which I never did get to enjoy as it was before we had a coffee pot at home, so I'd brought it to work and that skank girl from France that they hired after Genesis moved away drank it all without my permission. Whore!) by one of my favorite students last year, Ella.

I know mugs are cheap and I can easily get more of them. I'm just pissed that out of the 20 mugs in our home, the only 2 with sentimental value were massacred by a total half-wit. Jeremy tried to change his story and tell me he was responsible for the slaying of my mugs, but it was too late. I knew he was trying to cover for the old goat.

Lately, MIL and I had been getting along so much better. But this week, it seemed like she really wanted to reclaim her #1 spot on my shit list. All week, she kept putting this flower-patterned zip-up hoodie on Raelynn when she took her out. I should tell you that the hoodie isn't entirely hideous. Not what I would pick but paired with the right things, it's cute. And we all know MIL cannot pair anything correctly, even if her life depended on it. I noticed she used it 2 days in a row. So the next day, I made sure to lay out a different jacket (Raelynn has quite a few) so MIL would dress her in that instead. But she insists upon dressing my kid like a migrant worker by putting her in the same thing every day! Gah! She totally outdid herself though when she apparently hand-washed this fucking thing and then put it back into Raelynn's closet while it was still noticeably wet. THERE ARE 5 OTHER JACKETS IN THERE! USE THEM!!!!!!!!

So yeah. She's back at the top of the list of people I want to throat chop. Like you even thought she would ever be off that list for good. As if!

Korean Drama

Photo of traditional Korean masks.

My husband and I love watching Korean dramas. It is something we did nightly while living in Seoul and now that we have access to Korean channels here, we proudly continue this tradition. Korean dramas are just so juicy and over the top. I couldn't help but get into them.

But there is one type of Korean drama I just can't get into. And that's the Korean drama at work. Since I started this job, there is always something they just have to muck up with their ideas about something. They want the school to truly be international but some of the things they're doing are just, well, dumb. It turns into a big dramatic showdown during our meetings where us foreign teachers are sticking together and trying to explain to them why their ideas are nice thoughts but are simply not going to work.

Like the most recent drama which was, ironically, about drama. If you've been reading my blog posts, you'll know I am teaching kindergarten for a Korean school in China. That means 1) my students are very young at 6 years old 2) they are Korean 3) they are learning English AND Chinese as well as how to speak Korean better. The director and principal had thought they'd try to be cool and update the curriculum. In it, they added drama. Because they'd made this change (or "changie" as they say it) long after I'd departed for the day, they took the liberty of adjusting my weekly schedule I'd already submitted to reflect this. On said schedule, they had put "Library Time & Writing" on Tuesday and "Library Time & Drama" on Thursday. I figured that on one day, they wanted me to read to the children and have them write something about the story we read and on the other day, we'd read a book and act it out after. That would have made the most sense so of course, that was wrong.

What DID they want? Oh, for me to teach them a play. Yes, teach children who are just learning English to ACT in a play to perform at the end of each month. We're talking a classroom full of 15 small children with only 3 who can really read very well in English. I actually had tried to do this thinking it would be fun. But it was what I imagine kindergarten in hell would be like. The children were restless and bored and who could blame them? Even with a short play that I'd edited to be even shorter and simpler was of no interest to them. ALL of them, even my best students, used the paper I printed it on to draw pictures while I was going around the room helping the children with their lines. It seemed to me cruel and unusual punishment for children that age.

I relayed this in our weekly meeting while my friend Genesis, the other Western teacher in kindergarten with me, stood her ground as well. Even Lane thought the idea of teaching children so young to act in a play in a language that isn't their first language is the stupidest idea he's ever heard of. Lord knows what will happen next. Hopefully, they will drop it faster than their other brainless scheme that never made it - to have Genesis and me catalog the kindergarten library in our "free" time. That was shot down faster than you can say "what the fuck!" It's only a matter of time before they come up with something else equally as annoying. Until then, I'll finish enjoying my drama-free three-day weekend thanks to the mid-fall harvest day, celebrated in both Korea and China.

When 2 Loves Collide

A spectacular view of Seoul from high up, featuring the iconic Namsan Tower in the background.



My love for Seoul knows no bounds. An incredible metropolis with a side of silly thrown in, I'd fallen hard for it in December of 2009. It's where I met my wonderful husband, Xiaolong. And it's where I up and moved to teach English in February of 2010. But when we got pregnant and then got married in September of 2011, we had to make plans to move due to my husband's visa complications. In November of 2011, we moved all our things over to Qingdao, China where we now reside.


Qingdao isn't a bad city. It's just that it takes a lot of getting used to. I had very little in the way of culture shock when I lived in Korea. But here, it's an entirely different story. Here, things can be frustrating by being difficult or just plain outdated. I have missed Seoul from the moment we boarded the plane here. I cried the entire flight. I have wanted to go back from the moment we got here. And I finally got my chance. But there was a catch. A huge catch.

The Chinese government won't consider Raelynn an official US citizen until she goes to a Chinese Embassy in America to get her visa. Don't you have enough citizens, China? Sheesh. This place is full of your citizens. Xiaolong and I had to take care of some important paperwork with our marriage certificate back in Seoul. The Chinese government again was making things difficult by telling us they wouldn't recognize us as a married couple until we went to the Chinese Embassy back in Seoul to get it validated. And so, because Raelynn doesn't have a Chinese visa from one of the Chinese Embassies in the states, we had to leave her here. With my dimwitted in-laws.

To their credit, Raelynn was alive and relatively unscathed when we came home. But of course, my in-laws didn't listen to us on some things. I'm not too angry though as it came back and bit them on the ass. Hard. See, the day before we left for Seoul, Xiaolong and I had lunch out at a nearby Chinese restaurant. It's hot out, but hey, why run the A/C, right? Cheapskates. It was very hot in the restaurant and Raelynn became instantly agitated. So much so that I could only get several bites of food in before we gave up and had it packaged as take out. Nosy people kept coming to stare and I yelled for them to go away. Normally, this would make my husband uncomfortable for me being a total bitch but he was totally behind me on this one. As soon as we got outside where, by comparison, it was largely cooler (and breezier), Raelynn stopped screaming immediately. We warned his parents to make sure that Raelynn is not at all hot. She'll whine a little if she's cold but if she's hot, she'll flip out. Apparently, my in-laws didn't sleep much during their 6-day stay with Raelynn. And I know just why.

But meanwhile, back in Seoul, we handled our paperwork with relative ease. And I turned 35. It doesn't feel too different from 34. I wish I were as skinny as I was last year before I got pregnant but Rome wasn't built in one day, now was it? More than being stick thin again, I wanted to be with my little baby but that wasn't going to happen. I was torn between two loves. My love for Seoul and my love for my daughter. Ultimately, the love for Raelynn trumps all. We decided to make the best of it and try to enjoy the city we both love so dearly. It was complicated due in large part to SK, the phone company I'd had my prepaid phone with before I left, which was handed down to me from my brother when he'd lived there. I never had trouble adding money to it before. But now, they made some upgrades and my phone was considered obsolete. Because they wouldn't add money to it at the SK location in the airport where you can actually rent phones, I had to go into the city to find this out. Now we were stuck without a working phone. My husband's cell from China would only accept calls but would not dial out. We had to make do with pay phones which were all very difficult to use due to being in crappy conditions. I get it...why replace those phones when everyone has a cell phone? Little things like this are what make foreigners feel unwelcome there. Still, we did the best we could with what we had.

For my birthday lunch, we enjoyed a traditional Korean meal. We so totally missed all the side dishes that come with the meals here. Yum!


We enjoyed the Korean dishes we'd missed all these months. We managed to get in touch with some of our friends and enjoy drinking in their company, though there were still many more we couldn't reach, much to our great dismay. We visited the site of where we got married. There was a lot of walking and shopping involved too. All in all, a lovely visit. But something indeed was missing. And that was our little Raelynn!

While we did our best to enjoy ourselves despite missing our little angel, my in-laws suffered the consequences of not heeding our advice. We had called via calling card each day while we were away and his mother mentioned they did not sleep more than 3 hours a night. When we came home though, I figured out WHY they didn't sleep. Sure, Raelynn missed us tons and was probably annoyed that she had to hang out with her grandparents for that long without seeing us. But that's not why she kept waking up. I discovered just why when we finally got home. It was very hot outside, about 80 degrees. And when we got upstairs with our luggage and entered our home...it too was 80 degrees! And muggy, just like outside. They had the windows open during a huge storm. It wasn't one of those storms where it cools everything off either. It was as bad as I remember how hot and wet the summers of Florida are. I also discovered one of Raelynn's long sleeve shirts on the couch, a sign they'd had her dressed in that. This particular shirt is made from terry cloth, not exactly summer material. I checked the baby's closet and all the short sleeve onesies were clean and folded, waiting to be worn. Raelynn herself was wearing a short sleeve onesie when we got in. The same one we left her in too. Nice. They must have yanked that long sleeve job off of her when we called from downstairs. I have no doubt that they overheated Raelynn each night trying to save on electric. Dude, it is HOT. Just use the air! It is only hot here from the end of June until early September which isn't as bad as most places. Friggin' morons could have slept a good solid 5 hours each night if they just listened to what we had told them. Joke's on them! Ha!

We hated to leave Seoul but we were so happy to get home to our daughter. And after the hellish day of travel we had in order to get home (coming soon in a future post), only one thing made it all better...Raelynn's smile.

I live for this face!

Bureaucratic Bullshit

After returning from Shanghai, my husband and I were overjoyed that our beautiful baby girl, Raelynn, was now an official US citizen. My husband quickly rushed off to the Entry/Exit Bureau to deal with her visa so we could take our trip to Korea. But he came back with some lousy news. It's absolute bullshit but I've come to expect this kind of crap from this country. They said they wouldn't acknowledge Raelynn as a US citizen (even with all her paperwork proving it) until she gets a Chinese visa from a Chinese Embassy in the United States. That means if we take her out of this country, she can't come back in without a Chinese visa that she obtained in the states. My husband and I must go to Korea to validate our marriage certificate because in the grand pain-in-the-ass tradition of all things China, they do not recognize us as a married couple. EVERY other country does, but China will not do so until we visit the Chinese Embassy in Seoul.

Why don't we just say 'fuck it' then? We can't. I have to renew my visa and I will keep having to renew it every few months which will certainly add up in costs as opposed to having a special visa that you can get when you are married to a Chinese national. So annoying as all this is, we must get it done so we can deal with the next issue...taking care of our daughter's visa. The good news there is that Raelynn can stay in China without a visa as long as she likes. And we have time to actually plan a trip to America. So we are looking into what it takes to get Xiaolong a visa to the United States for a visit. I can practically hear all my friends and family squeal with delight at this news but I can't tell you WHEN we'll be there so please, just hang in there and I will update you on that soon. There are more pressing issues at the moment.

Like what? Oh, like that, if you've been paying any attention as you've been reading this, we can't take Raelynn with us to Korea. Do you know what that means? My old bat MIL is going to get to watch her. I cried my eyes out.

This incompetent woman who is one step up from special ed will be in charge of my only baby. This woman who we have to remind to wash her hands is going to watch MY baby. She who wrecketh my house with her unsanitary ways and who cannot remember to put the vegetables in the refrigerator will be here to try not to kill my child with her negligence. The same woman who, last week, put Raelynn on the edge of the couch when she went to go to the bathroom, leaving her unattended and dangling over hard tile flooring when she COULD have put the baby on her foam floor play pads, into her crib, into the Baby Bjorn Babysitter Balance chair or, heaven forbid, given me MY baby back to hold. No. My stupid mistake for letting that cow hold her. I was only trying to do what would make my husband happy and look what happened.

My only slender ray of consolation is my husband. Xiaolong absolutely loves Raelynn as much as I do and would do anything to protect her. He promised me everything would be all right and he asked me to trust him. So trust him I must because this is the man who has given me everything I've wanted. He's never made a promise to me and broken it. But I can't help but wonder if he puts too much faith in his seemingly senile mother. I can also take comfort in that my FIL will be here too. Yes, I am allowing them into my home to wreak havoc on our clean and orderly abode. But I'd rather have a mess to clean up after we get back than for them to take Raelynn to their filthy home. I speculate on how filthy their home is since I have never been there myself, but if it is even a fraction of the way they kept this house we live in before we moved into it, then I know I'm doing the right thing.

Where MIL has no sense whatsoever, my FIL is the opposite. Instead of holding the baby and just staring at it like an idiot, he talks to Raelynn and sings her songs. He doesn't scare me so much. But MIL truly frightens the daylights out of me with how brainless she is. My husband allowed me to lay down all the rules for their stay and for taking care of Raelynn which I am hoping they follow. Some of them are:

1) Do not leave the house with Raelynn, even for a walk.
I can just see MIL bragging to everyone about her grandchild. That I don't mind but she's so clueless, she'll let filthy people come up and try to touch the baby. Oh and she'll use the stupid stroller she got us too so she can brag how much she spent on it. Yeah, great gift. No one can carry the damn thing up or down the stairs with a baby by themselves. She is SUCH an idiot.

2) Please do not attempt to give Raelynn a bath in the tub.
I'd rather the baby stink of old milk and farts than to worry that those 2 are drowning her in the tub. MIL would probably shoo her poor sweet husband away and do the bathing herself. But when the phone rings, her stupid ass would run off to answer it, leaving Raelynn alone in the tub. I do not want even the remotest possibility for drowning to occur so I have taken that one off the table. Would YOU let this woman bathe your kid unsupervised? Yeah, I didn't think so. She can use a wet cloth to sponge bathe her instead.

3) Please practice sanitary hygiene.
It is sad I actually have to include this on there. This listing includes but is not limited to washing hands especially after using the toilet and after handling dirty vegetables and raw meat. It also demands that soap be used. Yes, I had to tell them that it's not washing your hands if you don't use soap!

Among other things, I have asked them to pick up after themselves and leave our home in the same condition as the day we left, meaning CLEAN!!! I was not surprised today when MIL showed up to cook us lunch and totally demolished our spotless kitchen. Annoyed, but not surprised. As long as she stays far from the windows...my husband paid someone to come clean our windows and they look incredible. He also went through all the cabinets and weeded out useless stuff his mother had been keeping there for over a decade. Now the kitchen looks even more incredible than when I clean it. Well, at least it did before she showed up to make one of her craptastic lunches. Bleh.

I also gave them detailed instructions on sterilizing bottles, on thawing breast milk correctly and on Raelynn's routine because I can just see them fucking that up and my kid not going to sleep when I put her down for bed the first night I'm home. I can also see them using up all the breast milk I leave in an hour so I should get back to pumping now.

And as I pump, I try not to think about this milk-curdling issue. I swear my milk goes sour as soon as I hear her voice. Ugh. It should speak volumes to everyone that all I have wanted to do was go back to Korea and now that I have a chance to, I don't want to go. I don't want to leave my baby because I love her. Even if I had someone I deemed competent enough to handle this task, I hate that I have to be apart from my sweet little girl. But I don't have someone competent. I have an invalid and one semi-normal person to care for the most precious thing I have. I pray that our trip, which should last no longer than a week, goes smoothly and that upon our return, my little angel is alive and unscathed, all the while thinking that this is a ridiculous steaming pile of bureaucratic bullshit.

I Left My Heart In Seoul

When I first visited Seoul, I absolutely fell in love with it. Everything about it made me feel alive again. It was so big, yet so small. The culture was fascinating. And everything was so modern. During my first stay, we did typical tourist things, like tour the palaces and museums. We ate traditional Korean meals. And less traditional meals at the fanciest of restaurants. We went shopping. We drank A LOT. We had a wonderful time. 

To save our parents some money, my brother had me stay with him in his fantastic apartment on the 37^th floor of the Brownstone building.  It gave us siblings a chance to spend more time together plus, I got a chance to meet more of my brother’s friends, which further solidified my decision to move there permanently. 

It was during this trip I met my husband, though at the time I didn’t know it. When I met my husband, I had already made my decision to move to Seoul. On December 26, 2009, Phillip, Mom, Dad and I happily bounced along the snowy sidewalks near my brother’s apartment. We’d just seen the play Nanta which we’d all really enjoyed. Maybe I should thank Dad for wanting to walk to Phillip’s apartment rather than take a taxi. Because as we waited to cross the intersection, I looked over and saw an incredibly handsome Asian man waiting to cross the street with us. I smiled at him, and he smiled back at me. Boy was he cute! I looked away briefly but when I turned back, the handsome man was still smiling at me. My mom then teased, “Oooh, I think someone likes you!” And still, he smiled. The light changed and we were now able to cross. The handsome man began to speak to me.  And we walked across the street together while my family scrambled ahead to leave us be. 

Two things about him I noticed right away were what a great smile he had and how sweet his demeanor was. His English wasn’t the best but at least he spoke it enough and understood me when I spoke. But soon, my family got very far ahead and I had to catch up to them. Not before I’d told my new friend that I’d be moving to Seoul quite soon. He asked for my email address and I jotted it down with icy fingers. As I ran off to my family, I turned and blew him a kiss. 

My decision to move to Seoul had been final in my mind before this. Despite there was something about this handsome stranger, who I learned was a foreigner like me, having left his home of China behind to go to graduate school, I had no idea at the time I would marry him. For the moment, I was happy that I’d made a new friend.

Once back in America, after starting the process of cleaning up my mess in Miami and moving in with my parents a bit north in Stuart, I finally checked my email. And after hours of cleaning out hundreds of new messages, I found one from an address I didn’t know. It was the adorable Chinese man I’d met in Seoul. And thus, we began corresponding every single day. Toward the end of my time in Florida, our emails became a bit flirty. And when I saw him again, I knew that we were so much more than friends. And that I was so much more in love with just Seoul. I was in love with him.

Over the next few months, I busily applied for teaching positions. And Xiaolong and I moved in together. My brother had to change jobs and soon became even busier getting ready to move to Singapore with his wonderful girlfriend.  Soon, I was taking the subway like an old pro. I was learning the language. I was making more and more friends and I was loving my life. I discovered that I loved teaching English more than I’d ever loved doing anything work-wise. I was finally happy about my life again.

After nearly 6 months working at my job, my schedule changed with the new semester and I suddenly felt exhausted all the time despite I didn’t really teach many hours. Soon after, we discovered we were pregnant. And with that, waiting to marry seemed silly, and Xiaolong and I went to the US Embassy in Seoul just days later to get married. That was on September 8, 2010. We were so happy. We had it all. But something had to give. And it was our ability to keep living in Seoul. We had to leave the place we both loved most on this earth behind. 

In November 2010, Xiaolong and I moved to his hometown of Qingdao in China. We brought everything we could with us. Except a piece of our hearts, which will always be right there just across the Yellow Sea in Seoul.

How DID I wind up in Asia?

Unlike Bugs Bunny who took a wrong turn at Albuquerque, my move to Asia was planned. And I didn’t dig through the earth to get here. But I dug through my soul and found myself again when I first landed in Seoul in December of 2009. 

In 2008, I’d lost my advertising job that I’d steadily held for a decade, due to the recession. It was a blessing in disguise though finding new work would prove near impossible. The job had been killing my desire to live and there were now too many knife marks in my back to count from all the cuntery going on there. The loss of this job was indeed the catalyst that started my life in a downward tumble but eventually, led to how I changed my life for the better. Then I would have traded places with just about anybody. But now, I wouldn’t trade a single thing.

After some time, I did manage to find a fantastically fun and rewarding job writing for a dining magazine in Miami. And I loved it there! Getting paid to eat and write about it! Unfortunately, the job was not full time, nor did it pay very well. But it gave me something to do. I also walked a friend’s giant dog for some spare cash. But mostly, I had to rely on unemployment checks to see me through. Staying afloat was harder than I thought.

And then, all hell broke loose. My live-in boyfriend who had taken a job up north to supposedly support us broke it off with me after he finally came home from being away for months. I’d had a sneaking suspicion he’d been running around but no solid proof.  The only thing I had to look forward to anymore was my trip to visit my brother in Seoul with my parents. It was all that kept me going. 

Just days before my trip, intense rains ripped through South Florida. This is nothing new but they were so fierce and heavy, many areas began to flood rapidly. And as I left a friend’s house to head back to my condo of broken relationships, I plunged into a wall of standing water, hidden by shadowy trees and a large dip in the road.  At first, I was just annoyed. Now I needed to get a tow truck on a night when every single one of them was likely already deployed pulling other drivers out of flooded areas. But as I sat there on my cell, telling my friend I’d be coming back up to her home and to please call for a tow, my car began to move. And the water began to rise. And I realized I needed to go. Now. Or I might not live. 

It truly seemed like forever, but it all happened in just an instant. I grabbed my purse and keys and pushed out the driver’s side door. The current ripped one shoe completely off my foot. I made a grab for it but it was useless. It was gone and if I didn’t move it, I would be too. I swam hard and fast until I could feel pavement under my feet again. And then I ran. And I didn’t look back. Until I looked out the window of my friend’s condo and saw my poor G6’s emergency lights fading in and out with the current.

I was in awe. I survived. But why? I was given a second chance to live my life. A life that until that moment, I had somehow stopped really participating in. Bags packed and ready to go at Miami International, as I slid my passport across the desk to the ticket agent, I knew I’d have plenty of time to figure out why.  All I knew at that time was that this trip would change my life. But I never could have anticipated what came next.

My trip to Seoul was my first ever to Asia. And as I arrived, I couldn’t help but smile. I was thousands and thousands of miles away from my mess of a life. And for 2 weeks, I didn’t have to figure it out. I could just enjoy spending time with my family. During those 2 weeks, I fell head over heels in love with Seoul. For the first time in my whole life, I felt like I actually fit in somewhere. Somewhere that was as unusual and strange as I was. If we’d all decided to do separate activities and meet for dinner later, I would have felt completely comfortable navigating the city on my own. Within days of our stay, I knew how I would change my life. I would move to Seoul. And I would use my expertise of the English language to teach ESL, a lucrative career in these parts. 

In February of 2010, I moved to Seoul.  It wouldn’t have been possible without the help of some wonderful friends and my parents who moved me right out of the Miami condo I shared with a man who, upon my return, had revealed himself to be a cheater, one who donned wigs and wore my shoes and make-up when I apparently was not around, and right into my parents’ home. Though I am right where I need to be in my life now, I do miss how much fun my parents and I had before I moved away.  I hated to leave them and my friends behind but I had to move forward with my life. I had to start living again.