Oh go ahead, say what you really think...

The mother of the family with which I live (a doozy of an English sentence....should it be "with whom?") ..has just come home.

She has been living with their eldest daughter for 2.5 months in order to take care of her granddaughter. Why? A terrible accident? A desperate job situation? No attachments back here in Valpo? No. It was winter. Therefore, the baby would die if taken from home to day care. You see this every day here. When babies are taken outside in the winter months, they are wrapped in fleece blankets so that not even one baby finger is sticking out. When my mother saw this for the first time last Saturday, she was quite concerned because she thought the bundled-baby-shape must have been on its way to the hospital. A few days later, we passed another fully wrapped baby...while both of us were wearing tank tops and sweating.

My German grandmother apparently had similar concerns when I was born. My birthday is in the beginning of August, and I was born in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. So the temperature on an average day in my first month of life was about 90 farenheit (high 30s celsius, I think, but anything with numbers loses me). However, my grandmother was extremely concerned about what was known as The Draft. My parents would find her lowering all the windows to a crack, because the dreadful draft was sure to suck away my life energy if I wasn't protected by being sealed in an airless room.

Anyhow. So Host Mom went to save the baby, in a manner after my maternal grandmother's own heart. I saw her today for the first time after her return a day ago. After berating me for my frequent absence from the house, she asked me: "How did you parents find you?"

That is a completely direct translation. You know what she means. However, think about it. We have no comparable question in English. I was rather confused when trying to respond in the immediate pace of a conversation. Did she mean, "were they happy to see you?" or "was it easy to meet them?" etc. Of course she wanted to know what they thought of me after 6 months (an obscene amount of time in this half of the Southern Cone). But really, what does one say? "They don't love me anymore"?

So I went with my steadfast, "Fine!" (en espanol...forgive my tilde-less keyboard)

And she responded, "Gordita?" ("a little fat?")

As a statement to my acclimatization, I was not entirely thrown off by this. When picturing seeing this woman again, I had thought perhaps she would comment on my Spanish (which gets better every month). "You speak so much better than when I left!" was a possible comment in my imagined world. I had not even really delved into the past tense when she left. I had a vague notion that she might get onto less positive subjects, given the cultural tendency towards the utterly blunt, but I was still rather put off (despite understanding its normalcy) by the weight comment.

This is impossible for a gringa to talk about without falling into either exxageration or dimunition, but to try to be fair, I would say I've gained about 10 pounds in Chile (due mostly to the incredibly unbalanced diet, which will be featured in another post). However, due to the fact that I'm constantly exercising by walking up and down hils, my body in general form hasn't changed too drastically. It's me, plus a widening here or there. I'm not all that interested in any of it, given its small proportions, but at the same time it's not exactly something I'm thrilled about. Being a Northamerican woman, I am pretty well conditioned to think that any change in my body is something to worry over. I don't endorse it, but there it is.

However, I went with the flow. "Yes, a little, I guess," I said.

"Yeah," she said, nodding, "You're definitely fatter than when I left."

Thanks!

From there we moved on to my parents being tired from so much walking, which was attributed to them probably being lazy and used to driving everywhere. Finally we rounded off the reunion with yet another chat about whether or not my volunteer program was going to pay them more rent.

It was truly heartwarming. Honesty is certainly not lacking in our relationship, I can say that.

On a totally and completely unrelated note, I am apartment hunting at the moment...

Yes. It's time to be an isolated, antisocial gringa adult once more.