In Limbo, and hating it
Posted by mofembot Wed, 06 Feb 2008 09:51:00 GMT
Yesterday my husband and I trotted down to our tiny town hall to pick up our respective “récépissés” – the official document that acknowledges having received our applications for 10-year resident cards. We had both been without valid one-year cards for a while: mine expired on December 16th, and Brent’s on January 1st. (This would have possibly posed problems had we needed to return to the States: we might have been obliged to buy a ticket taking us out of France after 90 days.)
So having a récépissé is a good thing, but it tells us nothing: we don’t know if the Préfecture will grant us the 10-year cards we would so dearly love to have, or if we will simply have our one-year temporary cards renewed. (It’s highly unlikely that they’d kick us out.) We will theoretically receive one or the other sometime before the end of April, when the récépissé expires.
I am inhabiting not just the “10-year v. one-year limbo,” but also the What Do I Do About Work limbo. I am going back to Germany for several days next week to try to figure out if continuing to work as a contractor makes sense. For the moment, all contractors for this German firm are in limbo: the 2008 budget has yet to be approved – a fact that completely astonishes me, given the size and general success of the company and all – so some contractors, including me, are not working this first quarter because it’s possible that we won’t get paid for any work we do. Meanwhile, I am still paying for my currently-uninhabited room in Heidelberg. I am reluctant to give it up because (a) the thought of finding something else is daunting; (b) it’s in a great location – a 7-minute walk to the train station, close to tram lines and grocery stores; (c) a month’s rent is equal to or cheaper than a week’s stay at a hotel; and (d) the landlady/lord are nice.
But larger questions are still totally unresolved: will it be possible to work more from France? In principle, it should be. When will I know? Who knows. My current project manager is on vacation until mid-week next week – which is why I “ate” the return ticket I had for this past Sunday: no point in showing up when questions of working and being paid cannot be resolved. Another issue is that the work in Germany is overall pretty boring. But the pay is pretty good. How much of my life do I have to trade? How much time must I spend grubbing after euros – time that could be spent working on my book (the one that is supposed to make me Rich and Famous)?
And there’s the even larger question of how my working long-distance works/does not work with our family situation. Now that Brent will be in France two weeks out of three (granting that at least one of those weeks is complicated and will for the moment require a 45-minute commute each way), will we be present enough to effectively deal with our youngest daughter? (Let’s not get into whether we “effectively deal with her” when we’re here. That question, unfortunately, seems wide open for the moment.)
Given how much I loathe uncertainty, I can’t say that I see much difference between Limbo and Purgatory… okay, well, fine. My understanding (boosted in some measure by the ever-handy Wikipedia) is that Purgatory is a place of “purification” through (active) suffering. Souls in Limbo don’t go through (physical?) torturous purification. But waiting and not knowing sure seem psychologically painful to me.