First "vacation" of 2024

Between all the excitement of Neuralink's big news, I nearly failed to mention I was up to some other things last weekend as well. In between doing my part to ensure Neuralink's first human surgery went off without a hitch, and while subsisting on far less than an appropriate amount of sleep, I was also traversing the state! Months prior, I'd thought it sounded like a great idea to rebook the LA trip we'd originally planned with our foster kid to a completely inoffensive time of the year, just long enough after the holidays to not get a side eye for taking a long weekend, but not soon enough into the new year for anything too important to be happening. Famous last words.

We had an interesting sort of remote work day.

I spent our train ride down to Los Angeles furiously tethering myself to my personal hotspot and hammering out down-to-the-wire code changes, all while frantically dreading the inevitable dead zones on the journey. I sent screenshots and software instructions well past midnight from our hotel room. I tracked the final day's countdown while creeping through the mazes in The Last Bookstore. We toasted to a Chi Connection while crossing my fingers there'd be no last minute software requests pinging me between sips of wine. And we both quietly celebrated while reflecting on art in The Broad, aching that we couldn't share our biggest news of the day while catching up with family. We breathed easier over Sunday night dinner in an English pub in Santa Monica (quite the destination) when I got a proper shout-out in Slack for my software's seamless operation.

A trip to LA isn't complete without a stop by The Last Bookstore.

We visited The Broad (free modern art museum) for the first time on this trip.

We couldn't call this a relaxing weekend, but it was an excellent way to spend those precious moments while holding onto such big news, waiting for the rest of the world to find out.

All too soon, we were back to the grindstone on a Monday morning train, still dizzy from the excitement and the sleep deprivation, with incoming software requests piling up as I fought with my hotspot en route back home.

We did it!

Neuralink - no longer just for monkeys (and other furry friends)

It's been seven years in the making for the company at large, and a week shy of six that I've been a part of it. The marathon of sleep-deprived nights, tears, frustration, and joyous breakthroughs all led to this Sunday morning. And now a new countdown begins: days since Neuralink has been a device used by humans. It's still surreal - I may be furiously crunching numbers streaming from our clinical trial participant's brain, but I don't even know his first name. Nicolas put it aptly as though we're Apollo 11 and we've just stuck the landing. We're on the precipice of that one small step, but the shuttle door hasn't opened just yet. I can't wait to help make this giant leap for mankind. But for now, I should probably sleep, if I can still remember how.

All the feels

The app that is my latest obsession

This little Spring Fertility app is my latest obsession. Any time my phone pings during business hours, I immediately wonder if I got some new message or test result, and I also panic about any coworkers seeing my phone's home screen notifications. 

I don't know if I want to cry or do breathing exercises or furiously Google my next concern. Stress is precisely the thing to avoid, but I can't seem to think about anything other than this stupid egg retrieval process and my eleven suppressed follicles. Eleven: "low end of normal." Suppressed because that's what happens when you spend thirteen and a half years on birth control. The suppressed thing isn't a deal breaker - a month or two off the pill should shape things up. The low number just means I've got to cross my fingers and toes that those little gals are healthy. "Quality over quantity."

It's all rather confusing to be freaking out about something I don't actually have my heart set on. But there are a lot of layers, so welcome to my therapy session. We've got a lot to unpack.

I am a nerd. I love the idea of combining my genes with Nicolas's. This is really weird and nerdy, but imagining totally new cells with my chromosomes all snugged up next up to his makes my heart happy. I don't love babies, but I love the abstract concept of a half-me-half-my-favorite-person human. It's someone I'd mourned and accepted I'd never meet well before fully embracing foster parent life, so to have this tossed back into the fray creates a frenetic excitement.

Finances scare me. The price tag of this whole endeavor isn't exactly a recipe for avoiding stress to make healthy eggs. Why am I about to dive into something that will wipe out most of my liquid savings to potentially be exactly where I am today, just poorer? There is of course an answer: to have the peace of knowing I tried, to have explored an alternative route to parenthood compared to last year's stab at it. Because eleven follicles isn't a low enough number that there's no hope in trying. But imagining me in a few months with no healthy embryos and a very low savings account balance makes me feel terrified.

Aging is coming on too fast. I'm not ready for my internal organs to keel over and call it quits on me. 36 feels way too young to start dying, but statistically pre-menopause isn't that far away. I'm afraid part of me sees a successful egg retrieval as some sort of get-out-of-jail-free card that allows me to escape the first milestone in my body's steady march towards the grave.

I never half-ass anything. Foster care? Let me read all the articles, search every state's fost-adopt rules, find us that "perfect match" and dive in 110%. We all saw how that went. Now it's egg retrieval and I'm frantically trying to figure out what sort of lifestyle and nutritional changes will give me the best possible outcomes. "Take it as it comes." Have you met me??

I don't deal well with uncertainty. The outcome of this egg retrieval could be profoundly life altering either way. There are so many things to consider. So many contingency plans! The wheels just don't stop spinning.

Is this even ethical? If this egg retrieval and fertilization works out, is it even fair to make another human to whom I risk passing on my various neuroses and anxiety? And who am I to decide that another person has to exist in this world of increasing inequalities, political tensions, and global warming?

The wounds of last year haven't fully healed. Embracing this possible path to parenthood is forcing me to face down the disappointments of the past year once more, which twists the knife.

I'm scared of getting my heart broken. I know how it feels to lose a kid who was never really yours. New year, new flavor of pain-of-losing-someone-who-was-almost-your-child isn't exactly my idea of a fresh start.

It's tough to have to hide this journey. While I can share with friends, this journey isn't kosher for either of our families. On my side, if we do manage to fertilize any embryos, the Catholics will believe those babies already have souls, and I don't want to be viewed as committing some sort of heinous crime. (Remember the whole aim of avoiding stress?) I also don't want to get up their hopes or break their hearts. On Nico's side, the judgments around why we won't just try for a normal pregnancy aren't something we're prepared for.

Maybe word-vomiting all these feelings into this blog will leave my brain a little more quiet for bed time tonight.

Courtesy of (aka used without permission from) the Word Vomit podcast

Hoping your new year has begun with less anxious questioning of your entire life journey.

New year, new bucket list

We survived the holidays (just barely counts) and have rolled into 2024 full steam ahead!

Survived Christmas 2023 - and yes, that matzah ball soup and the latkes were worthy of the highlight reel.

One week into the year, we've already knocked out a cat surgery, our first test run of an electric vehicle, a day trip to Santa Cruz, a preliminary fertility screening (complete with horrific bruising), a theater performance in SF, and a new non-alcoholic strawberry mojito recipe worthy of the cocktail book. (Some people spend decades amassing and perfecting their personal collection of recipes to pass on to future generations - my recipes just happen to be a bit more liquid.)

One week down, fifty-one to go. Bring it, 2024.

Though we've never been much for New Year's resolutions, we've made ourselves a 2024 "bucket list" which seems to mean we've resolved to properly embrace life here in the Bay Area. We've come up with restaurants, cafés, bars, parks, hikes, and events to hit up. I'm excited to see what we'll knock out and how the list may morph by year end. Lately, I've struggled a lot with finding a sense of purpose or motivation for existing. I'm not the sort to derive meaning primarily from work, which often makes me feel the odd one out in the trenches of Silicon Valley. This bucket list feels like a declaration that I still exist outside of my 9-to-much-later-than-5. 2024 may not be the year we pack up and move back to Europe (as far as we know), but I'm hoping it'll be the year I start feeling more like the sort of human that my European life allowed me to be, one who isn't primarily defined by the contents of their LinkedIn profile.

Life plans and whiplash

I'm having trouble sleeping. That in and of itself isn't so unusual - there's a reason I have two different kinds of sleep aids in the medicine cabinet under the bathroom sink. But there's a lot to unpack from tonight's insomnia.

The clock's past midnight so we've officially reached the winter solstice. We can count another year round the sun, and a full seven since our sole Burning The Clocks celebration to mark this day the way only Brightonians know how—with an all-out parade through town packed with handmade lanterns that all wind their way down to a fiery end at a beach-front bonfire.

Today was a good one - seven years since partying on the midnight beaches of Brighton, I officially ticked perform a solo aerial act off the bucket list. Was it perfect? Hardly. Was it fun? Very much so. Still a track athlete at heart, I'll never have the grace and fluidity of movement of some aerialists, but I'm amazed that I can challenge my body to reach new physical limits while simultaneously pushing myself to explore creative expression. And (some) people actually want to see me do it!

Knock "perform a solo aerial act" off the bucket list

But today was also a weird one. We'd hardly gotten home from my performance when one of our couple friends announced their pregnancy. We knew they were on that timeline, but learning the baby is officially in the oven still feels weird. Another one of our friends who'd attended tonight's performance has been trying. And yet another had her heart broken just last week when she learned her body won't be able to achieve pregnancy. Two other friends have told us they plan to start in the new year. It feels like the walls are closing in.

In the midst of all this, we have a deadline looming: January 3. It's our appointment at a fertility clinic. If that statement gives you whiplash, believe me, I'm right there with you. This is officially, 100%, in no way part of the life plan. But what is the plan? With dreams of fostering dashed and rolls of Christmas wrapping paper purchased at the tail end of last holiday season now collecting dust, where do we go next? The fertility clinic. Even though we've never even tried to conceive. Even though a pregnancy is the last thing I want. All in the hopes that some freezer will become home to a healthy-sized batch of frozen embryos that can buy us a few years to figure out the plan. But there are so many ifs.

Some ifs are easy: What if it turns out I'm sterile? Cool, proceed as planned. Regroup and dive back into foster care, or don't! It's our life, and the only thing that's certain is we won't come out alive. Between now and then, game on.

But then there are more tricky ifs: What if we can afford a surrogate? Can we justify spending six figures to avoid a whole lot of pain and to keep up with my favorite aerial hobby? Or worse, what if I undergo a fertility treatment cycle just to come out with only a couple of viable embryos? With numbers so small that a freeze/thaw cycle might leave me with nothing after two weeks of total medical hell, do I just implant? Do we literally throw every plan out the window and dive in? And then what?

And after all this, why? Why am I doing something I'd never dreamed of? For a sticky, screaming, highly expensive outcome that I honestly do not want? The best answer I've got is that the only thing worse to me than not exploring this option is the idea that I'll never have the chance to nurture a child with whom I can form a lifelong bond. I don't need to be there from the start, and I've never cared about the familial resemblance or even the inherited quirks - I've got a heart big enough to love someone different. But I'm not sure that children of trauma know how to love back, and I'm not sure I have the emotional wherewithal to teach them. Maybe this is just my PTSD response to this past summer, but then again everybody's choices are just half-chance.

And I wonder why I have trouble sleeping.

Seeking gratitude

2023's brought a lot to be grateful for. Thanksgiving weekend is about that (and endless food, and those deep discounts on things you were hopefully already going to buy). And looking back, we had some major wins this year:

• We both got our second nationalities!
  
  

  

  Je suis française ! 🇫🇷🍷🧀 And Nicolas is now a card-carrying American. 🇺🇸🦅🏈 

  
  
• Our Neuralink stock got its second comma!
  
  

  

  I guess this makes us millionaires?

  
  
• We got a very good puppy. I'm honestly not sure this last point is a total win as she's definitely reinforced our understanding that we are cat people, but she is so very cute.

Our stupidly cute puppy

And, from the perspective at the tail end of our Thanksgiving weekend, we had another solid holiday even though we didn't host this year. We made my favorite candied cranberries, threw together a nice arugula/apple/pear/pomegranate/walnut/goat cheese salad with a light ginger vinaigrette, rolled out a crowd-favorite apple-bourbon cocktail (pro-tip: probably shouldn't leave the cinnamon sticks in for more than a day), and we were gifted a large enough left-over turkey leg to whip together our classic Black Friday turkey soup without even first going through the hassle of cooking a whole turkey. [Recipes at the bottom of the post]

With all that out of the way, I can't wait to close the book on this year. It's been a tough one, and I've been struggling to be thankful for all we have through the heartache. If the gaping hole in this year's gratitude list hasn't made it exceedingly obvious, our foster kiddo decidedly did not work out. No need to hash out the details here - I kept a totally private blog to work through things as that placement imploded - but I am sincerely grateful that we had the ability to reclaim our home when it was clear he had zero interest in engaging positively or even neutrally in any form of family life. Healing the pupper (who we'd adopted for him) from the experience of that kid has been a journey - she still has some anxiety issues, but they're improving.

It was tough to hang the holiday decor this weekend and accept that there was no point waiting for our forever kid to help us pick out the tree topper - I ordered a nice geometric star on Black Friday sales. I found all the extra rolls of wrapping paper I'd bought on the post-Christmas sales in preparation for our first holiday as parents. I've struggled with wrapping my head around the anger and sheer hatred a child could carry, and I can't figure out how we try again without risking getting back on the same roller coaster - I'd love to help make a kid's life better and hopefully form a familial bond in the process, but Nicolas and I completely agree that nothing is worth a repeat of the child of the summer of 2023. Living with the uncertainty, with the reality of this year's broken dreams, and without any clarity of action to take to move forward toward the goal of successful fostering/adoption has left me in a bit of an existential crisis.

There's not much more to say on the matter, so without further ado (and let's be frank, to make next year's Thanksgiving that much easier for me to shop for), here are the latest additions to our Thanksgiving menu:

Arugula/pear/pomegranate+ salad
Serves 6

Salad ingredients

• 1/2 cup of raw pecans
  
• 5 oz. arugula
  
• 1/2 cup of crumbled goat cheese
• 1 Barlett pear, sliced or diced
• 1 Honeycrisp or Gala apple, sliced or diced
• 1 pomegranate's worth of arils
  

Dressing ingredients

• 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 1 tbsp apple cider vinegar
• 1 tbsp Dijon mustard
• 1 tbsp maple syrup
• 1 tsp of finely grated fresh ginger
• 1/4 tsp fine salt
• 10 twists of freshly grated pepper

Mix all the salad ingredients together. In a separate bowl, mix all the dressing ingredients together. Toss just before serving.

Black Friday leftover turkey soup

Ingredients

• 1 turkey carcass
• 4 quarts of water
• 1 (28 oz) can of whole peeled tomatoes, chopped
• 6 small potatoes, diced
• 4 large carrots, diced
• 1 large onion, diced
• 2 stalks of celery, diced
• 1 1/2 cups shredded cabbage
• 1/2 cup farro
• 1 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp savory spice mix
• 1 tsp dried parsley
• 1 tsp dried basil
• 1 large bay leaf
• 1/4 tsp ground pepper
• 1/4 teaspoon paprika
• 1 pinch dried thyme

Put the turkey in a pot with water. Bring the water to a boil, then reduce to a simmer for one hour. Remove the carcass. Strain the broth. Pull the meat off the carcass, chopping as needed, and return to the broth. Add in all other ingredients. Keep the soup at a simmer for at least one hour until the vegetables are tender.

Apple-bourbon cocktail

Serves 15

Ingredients

• 32 oz. fresh-squeezed apple juice/cider (non-alcoholic)
• 8 oz. cranberry-vanilla simple syrup
• 24 oz. bourbon (or less by taste)
• 5 cinnamon sticks
• 1 sliced green apple

Mix all ingredients. Allow the cinnamon sticks to sit for at least a few hours, but remove them after a day if storing the cocktail. Serve the cocktail over ice or cut with sparkling water (optionally ginger-flavored).

Compatriots twice over

Today marked my most anticlimactic major life milestone: just before breaking for lunch on the first day back from a 4-day weekend, I glanced at my phone to discover I'd been a dual national for the last twenty minutes. Just like that. In between writing code and dealing with the stress from a recalcitrant sickly teen, a dream first planted in 2009, that slipped through my fingers in 2015, came to fruition with an undetected ping of my smartphone.

Translation:
Hello,

We have the pleasure of letting you know that you are henceforth a French citizen.

We welcome you and are happy to count you among our compatriots.

This blog was all about how to come home from a decade of the expat lifestyle. Instead, it's followed me on the journey to becoming an expat at home: I might be an American born and raised, but I spent my twenties figuring out adulting in a very different world. Now my legal status finally reflects the duality of my expat/at-home experience.

Nicolas and I lived through the horrors of our contrasting nationalities preventing us from staying physically together despite our very valid marriage contract at the close of 2017. At last, we've completed the process of sharing our nationalities with each other. From today onward, neither of our countries of birth can ever deny us the right to be with our chosen family.

And you know what else? That Eiffel Tower, the baguette tradition,  the macarons of Pierre Hermé, the foie gras and vin chaud at the marchés de noël - all that cultural heritage is now as much mine as any other Frenchman's. And that makes my heart so full.