My route to 66...

Much like Joaquin Phoenix I've had a strange and surreal 12 months.

It's exactly a year since I packed up my life in Cardiff and arrived at JFK with a sobbing Teenager. She shedding tears for the boyfriend she left in Wales, me still in shock at my Dad's death a month previously. At my feet some seriously bulging excess baggage.

The American picked us up in a rented SUV and we drove into Manhattan. I was all broad smiles and endless chat, but with a belly groaning with nerves. This is home now. Excited and scared for what lay ahead. Bye bye Cardiff. A fresh start packed to the brim with hope and blindness to any troubles that may lay ahead.

There was no time to ponder on my grief. No pontificating on the enormity of what I had done-giving up a great job at the BBC, renting out my beloved house to strangers, leaving my recently widowed Mum. I was the project manager of this whole new family life and there was a lot of gluing to do, or things would fall apart.

The work started pretty quickly with enrolling The Teenager in school, which was swiftly followed by finding another school, as she hated the first one. Next, the blistering footwork to find an apartment, followed by ploughing all our savings into securing the right one-which then had to be decorated and furnished. We moved from our temporary digs in Queens to our permanent bijoux box in the West Village and wondered how we were all going to live in harmony in such a tiny space.

There was then the small matter of getting married in Central Park by a naval captain in the freakish hot Autumn sunshine and then a rodent infestation in our perfect apartment in place of a honeymoon. Then began immigration and all the ridiculous, comedy bureaucracy that accompanies it. Have you ever been engaged in vice? Are you planning a coup against the U.S. government? Were you a member of the Nazi party between 1939-1945?

When the excitement wore off and it no longer felt like we were here on a long holiday- the missing came. Missing my Mum, missing my friends, really missing my Dad, missing working, missing Corrie and Cadburys, missing the NHS and missing someone knowing what a wanker is.

I had to find my way around New York and my new family life and there was maps for the first but not for the second, but in both I got lost frequently. Some real personal stuff happened, that even I as a chronic oversharer didn't want to blog about. Winter days got shorter and darker and colder and then snowy. Then there came some even bigger problems which I  couldn't blog about and then there was some money problems due to the stuff I couldn't blog about.

Throughout it all I missed not having girl mates to talk the extra 15 thousand words a day that women need to say. Finding them became my mission and I was horribly desperate at first, a girl's girl starved of female company. But by the time there was spring blossom outside our window the friends came. Then the friendships had to be fostered through NY girl activities like toxic cocktail drinking and $20 manicures from women who bitch about you in Korean. But mostly it was about the drinking. There is little that cannot be forged over a Manhattan mixed Martini.

Summer, the last season in the cycle. (More) Tears (than usual) for my Dad on the anniversary of his death, temperatures of 100 degrees giving birth to an obsession with air cons. Our green cards arriving in the mailbox and the U.S. immigration service using the worse photos I have ever seen of The Teenager and I. A deliberate ploy I believe, so immigrants will not commit crime and end up with an unflattering picture of them on the news. 

I blogged about most of what happened over the year here on Welsh Alien. In fact, I wrote so much I didn't actually write my book, but then I have not been writing my book for at least a decade, so at least that's one comfortable consistency to keep me warm at night. I can safely say I penned at least a book's worth of blogs, except none of you paid 12.99 for my hard work on Amazon. Although I'd like to think you would, given the chance.

I have written 66 blogs so far. This one makes 67.

66 would have been nice. An even, rounded number that evokes World Cup wins and famous American roads. But then that's not my number.

My life here is far more of a 67. A lovely, odd imperfection.

Happy Birthday (not so sweet) Sixteen

On April 2nd 1994 I was 19 years old, holding a brand new baby aloft in my arms. She smelled like Johnsons talc and had caramel coloured skin with a soft, dark, downy covering. She didn't cry, she just cooed. Like a little pidgeon. "Coo Coo".

The early hours of April 2nd 2010- I am at a downtown New York club in a pit of sweat, fist pumping 2 feet away from Calvin Harris. And I have lost my baby.

Panic begins to rise from my stomach but then she reappears in the crowd, smiling, beautiful, clad in tight black lycra dress, skin glistening from sweat and holding a $15 vodka tonic in the air. She mouths something to me. I don't understand. She waves her hand and shakes her head and smiles-our universal language for "...it doesn't matter." She closes her eyes, stretches her arms into the air and says ''Woo Woo."

Thank god. She is safe. And I am too old to be in a sweat pit, but more importantly I am too old to be in a sweat pit alone. She dances up to me, pushing her way through the crowd, eyes alive, sparkling, wide with wonderment at Calvin.

"I can't receive it's a ghost!" she bellows in my ear
"WHAT?"
"I CAN'T BELIEVE HE'S SO CLOSE."
"OH RIGHT! YEAH. I KNOW!"
"THANK YOU! THIS IS AMAZING!"
"THAT'S OK HONEY!

The next morning I wake up at 7a.m. with my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth and my bladder fit to burst. No false dawn today, the hangover just kicks straight in. I wait a few hours and then Mum and I burst into The Teenager's room playing Neil Sedaka's 'Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen' on the stereo. We sing loudly and Mum does this crazy kooky dance. The Teen pulls the duvet back, opens one eye and grimaces:

"What the fuck?"

The next few days whizz by like a fast forwarded film... We have the customary Smith birthday family argument which kicks in before midday. Then I am on 7th Avenue with a giant sweet sixteen balloon and a bag filled with garish pink banners and balloons. Next, I send The American off in seach of ready to roll icing, which you can't buy anywhere. I make 16 pink roses to put on top of the Victoria Sponge I baked.

That night we go to Employees Only in the Village and drink cocktails and have Oysters. The American puts away a few double Jacks, which somehow make him funnier than me.  J.D. becomes known as 'Thunder Stealing Elixir'.

When we leave I suggest The Teenager gets her fortune told by the woman that sits in the window of the restaurant. We give her 20 bucks and she gives the birthday girl some food for thought; be patient, don't be so hard on yourself, breathe, embrace womanhood.

We spill out onto the street and the American has found an abandoned locked vintage chest which he brings home in the cab and insists on powerdrilling open. At 1 a.m. Our neighbours probably hate us, but in New York no one complains about noise. I go to bed and leave Mum and The Teenager laughing at him climbing in and attempting to shut it, like some Whiskey sodden Houdini.

Just a few hours later and my alarm clock jerks me awake like a lumphammer on my sore brain. It's 5.30 a.m and time to put my Mother in a car to Newark Airport.  She seems fine despite the wine she put away and she's still sanctimoniously claiming she ''doesn't do hangovers'. Neither does The Teenager and I wonder if she and a pensioner are fine-how many decades I am going to suffer the black dog after a drinking session?

That night I am half dead and nigh on suicidal thorough lack of sleep and booze consumption, but I have to make it out to the Easter burlesque show we have tickets for. 'The Burning Bush versus The Second Coming' gives us five pairs of tits, two willies and several hours of open mouthed astonishment and horror from The Teenager.

I want to warn her not to leave her mouth open for too long in a place like this.

On the cab home I ask if if her if she enjoyed the last few days. She pauses, wrinkles her lips a little.

''Yeah...but..."
"I know..."
"I just... miss my Boy. And my mates you know?"
"I know honey. I know. Hanging out with your Mum isn't the way you would have chosen to spend your sixteenth birthday."
"I had a great time though. Thank you."
"You're welcome sweetheart."

Is it my imagination or is she that much older now? I look at her and it seems that way. A lamb, unsteady on her feet, finding her legs but getting ready to run. Time to let go of my baby and get to know her all over again as an adult.

I look out of the cab window as we whizz down 6th Avenue. We stop in traffic outside St Joseph's church. The white romanesque pillars are lit up and people gather on the steps for the start of midnight mass. I can see inside, candlelight beats invitingly. I want to go in, not for God, but for something.

Easter tomorrow. Spring.

New beginnings and rebirth.
 

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